A Potemkin Village is an impressive facade designed to hide an adverse condition.

Similarly, today’s campuses could be considered Potemkin Institutions. In the American Conservative, Alan Jacobs reviews a book on the current state of higher education that is written by Jeffrey Selingo, the editor-at-large of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jeffrey Selingo, who has written a book about American colleges and universities, says: “One of the fears, and one of my fears, is that we might become a country where the next generation is less educated than the generation that preceded it.”

A major part of the problem is that colleges and universities have invested more strenuously in amenities than in education, with the assumption that students absorbed in the delights of their dining halls and climbing walls won’t notice that their teachers are largely underpaid adjuncts who have to jump from course to course and college to college to try to get something close to minimum-wage levels of pay. (Consider this: “About 70 percent of the instructional faculty at all colleges is off the tenure track, whether as part-timers or full-timers, a proportion that has crept higher over the past decade.”)

You want to think some about amenities? Then read Freddie DeBoer’s account of his visit to the France A Cordova Recreational Sports Center at Purdue University.