What's gone wrong at our colleges and universities and how to get American higher education back on track A quarter of a million dollars. It's the going tab for four years at ... The New York Times - Steven Knapp Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have written a lucid, passionate and wide-ranging book on the state of American higher education and what they perceive as its increasing betrayal of its primary missionfor them, the teaching of undergraduates. That both are academicsone a well-known professor (Mr. Hacker) and the other consigned to the adjunct, or what they call "contingent," faculty…provides them with memorable, often acerbic anecdotes…These anecdotes take the edge off the polemical intensity a reader might expect from the book's title…