Best thing that happened to him in school.

And as parents, it was good for us; we formed a much closer bond in school life and cohesive voice in school politics.

Both instances indicate, to me, that the relationships of education are undervalued.

So, I agree with you salient, about that, and will follow up the references. I think that in context it is a rather small criticism of the book; something you’d want to pay a good deal of attention to in forging a reform agenda, but what the book does for students is explains to them why their experience is the way that it is. I guess I need to do a full post on the book (which I’ve been intending to do since I read it 3 years ago). I was surprised by some of the effects on the students (which I shouldn’t have been). For example, most of them have already fulfilled their ethnic studies requirement, and most have been irritated by it: reading OUC explained the point of the ethnic studies requirement to them (nobody had done that before) and made them less irritated by that part of their experience because they thought it was well motivated.
Anyway, more on that later.

Good for you for finding a way around it, at least for some people.

I guess I can afford to be a little less cryptic/guarded about the specific fault: Bok demonstrates a suboptimal grasp of the roles numeracy¹ and scientific inquiry can play in developing one’s critical mind. Let me humbly recommend following up his book with a reading on numeracy—or at least the essay “Quantitative Literacy: Everybody’s Orphan” by Bernie Madison or maybe the interview “Numeracy, Mathematics, and General Education” with Peter Ewell²—to provide a meaningful counterbalance. The MAA publications are good reads and many of their books are available as free PDF downloads (at that link). I may require my math education students to read this next semester, but extending beyond that, it seems to me that someone majoring in “psych, elementary ed, human development and family studies, communication, [or] nursing” would benefit greatly from some attentive consideration of numeracy/innumeracy (ok, maybe not nursing). I don’t know how well it would fit in with “Contemporary Moral Issues” if Bok’s Underachieving Colleges wasn’t part of the reading, but given that inclusion, numeracy seems on-topic. I mean, most numeracy folks seem to talk about, and treat in the literature, quantitative literacy quite explicitly as a topic in social justice (unless they’re talking about pedagogical best-practices nuts and bolts, of course).

Bok’s Universities in the Marketplace was a good read, and is exactly the sort of book I would have wanted to read as a college freshman to whom the workings of university are opaque; it would be topical at UW given the Reebok / WRC Codes of Conduct controversy of a few years ago, but I don’t know if it fits into the course topics. Still, mentioned as a casual aside…

¹To a first approximation, QL is equivalent to numeracy; to be unnecessarily more subtle in distinguishing, people who use the term QL tend to more explicitly sweep up statistical literacy as a component; some people who use the term numeracy place more emphasis on concrete measurement and tool use. I use the terms completely interchangeably and have never been called on it in conversation, for whatever that’s worth.

²Wild unsubstantiated conjecture: students aren’t assigned to read enough interviews or respond critically to interviews (both interviewee and interviewer).