In 2008 when Jonathan Zimmerman received a teaching award, his dean introduced him by telling the assembled audience what he books and scholarly articles he had written. He writes, “I don’t begrudge her for that, at all. What else could she go on, really? She had never been to one of my classes. And even if she had, how would a single visit—or two—help her say anything meaningful or important about my instruction? What other evidence could she invoke? What did she know about me as a teacher, really? What do any of us know about that?”

The answer provided by his new book is…not very much, at all. In The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, he chronicles the ups and downs of teaching in American colleges: the great teachers; the lazy teachers; the complaints by students; the attempts at reform; the denial that such a things as mysterious as teaching are capable of reform; and then the recurrence of the entire cycle, until for the battered reader it seems that time has become a flat circle. Warning: reading the book might be for you like drinking one or three good dry martinis, stimulation and wit, soon followed by haze and depression.