Cathy Davidson’s new book is a manifesto on teaching students -- and institutions -- how to survive

“The American people are fighting the wilderness, physical and moral, on the one hand, and on the other are struggling to work out the awful problem of self-government,” Charles W. Eliot wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1869. “For this fight they must be trained and armed.” Calling for a “new education” for the sons of the industrial age, Eliot wrote that American colleges were too “inflexible” for so rapidly changing a world. Moreover, he said, “A large number of professors trained in...