American higher education faces an array of major problems, including skyrocketing tuition, mania over college rankings, the crass commercialiam of big-time sports, controversial admissions preference for certain groups, a basic liberal arts curriculum that fails to do its job and increasingly shifts the responsibility to high schools, to name only some. Yet the powers in control -- colleges nationwide, along with U.S. NEWS magazine, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and the College Board -- fail to make essential changes. Instead they present a facade of rationalizations and...