Yesterday morning I wrote a brief entry anticipating (and dreading) overgeneralization from the Arum and Roksa book, but I never expected Kevin Carey would be the quickest example out of the chute, complete with a straw-man caricature of administrators (which may well be true of some private college/university administrators, but I think Carey has a foot-wide brush he's been painting with). I've got as much of an incentive as Carey to cater to confirmation bias here: undergraduates at USF are much like undergraduates elsewhere in their preferences, and I'm a liberal-arts-trained faculty member in a professional school. But to pick up the Arum and Roksa study and use it as a battering ram? It's one study, for goodness' sake. For another thing, even a cloth-bound book has relatively little compressive strength.* And I'd be a bit hypocritical in using even one good study to justify my own existence in the vocational/liberal-arts Grudge Match XIV; yep, that's critical thinking for you. And as Mary Crane pointed out, that division is somewhat artificial; there's the small matter that if you're a grad student in liberal arts wanting to be a faculty member, isn't your doctoral program also vocational education?
But at least I understand where Carey is coming from, and I'm quite sure he's read the book. On the other hand, I fully expect some self-anointed pundits will loudly use the press release or New York Times blog entry to decry the weak standards of higher education and proclaim that, damnit, students should be required to read books. Ah, yes, but for the pundit class, press releases will do just fine. For more reasoned reaction, see Inside Higher Ed's report today of the (I assume Social Science Research Council) panel on the study.
* Obligatory STEM reference.