Based on extensive research, this book questions the benefits assumed to accrue from enlarging American colleges. The application of the industrial economies-of-scale model to academic institutions is challenged, since the purpose of academic institutions is not production but learning. Evidence is cited of hidden "diseconomies" of scale on large…

It is argued that in an age of decelerated expansion, cultural values must replace consumption; that the local, small, and organic must replace the international, large, and synthetic. One radical college is proposed as a center for this kind of change. Its inspiration is seen in the past: stable primitive communities, classical treatises,…