Columbia's grappling with a socially changing America is not just a story of Jewish quotas, a topic which has become a fad of late. Rather, it tackles larger questions of knowledge and power. Butler is not a singularly bad figure; however, he strove to make City College a better school so that immigrants wouldn't be denied a decent education, just denied a Columbia education.

Butler, who gave his name to Columbia's library, wanted to preserve a certain educational prestige in his University. He was one of the first administrators to recognize that a school would be judged by the networks it spawned--and thus it seemed natural that, with its prime New York City location, Columbia should be America's premier school.

Selective admissions--which made education off-limits to some people, even if they were financially qualified--is only one of the New York creations which radically altered the way knowledge is dispensed.

Instead of making education inaccessible, another New York bred intellectual technique made information available to the public, but strictly on the intellectuals' terms. The notion of the intellectual-as-expert is ultimately a cynical one, which seeks to mold popular thought. The scheme was first practiced by Walter Lippman for The New Republic, and his inheritors on that magazine remain true to Lippman's model of insider journalism by making frequent guest appearances on Washington-based talk shows.

Through it all, Bender's history is gripping because it is replete with good guys and bad guys, good universities and bad universities and, ultimately, good democrats and bad aristocrats.

Bender, a professor of American history at NYU, has a point to make about the way a class of intellectuals have monopolized ideas. In his view, New York is the only city in the globe that has had to grapple with issues like democratic culture. That is because other cities are either without culture, or too small to mount significant opposition to the intellectual factories known as universities. Bender shows that each New Yorker who rose to prominence had to reconcile abstract ideas with the events of world, had to make expertise and democracy walk hand in hand.

There are major gaps in Bender's discussion, however, notably on the Harlem Renaissance--covered in three pages--and jazz, which doesn't appear in a lengthy chapter on New York arts and music. Nevertheless, Bender generates enough confidence to be taken serious when he critiques modern academia or modern New York City--and in his conclusion he doesn't like the way either of these social institutions is evolving.

Because of fundraising successes like Harvard's own recent $350 million campaign, universities have the money to lure intellectuals to their campuses. And in the process, ideas about society are becoming less accessible to the layman. Metropolitan intellect, Bender argues, is at the same time growing more and more irrelevent.

"Political discourse in the city has been reduced to a mayoral monologue, while the emphasis in the city's cultural life has shifted away from the production of art and ideas to their consumption as fashion. Such an elevation of cultural consumption has profound implications for the meaning of a city as a center of intellectual and artistic life. It threatens to turn the metropolis into a museum of its own culture."

Putting aside his pessimism, one can admire Bender for trying to defy his own sociological categorization. In New York Intellect, Bender is a historian who is relevent today, and an academic whose writing is clear and accessible to a lay audience.