Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies is one of four colleges praised for embodying the future of higher education in America in the new book “Fixing College Education: A New Curriculum for the Twenty-First Century” by Professor Charles Muscatine of the University of California at Berkeley and published by the University of Virginia Press.

Muscatine predicts new roles for students and faculty, redefines educational breadth and depth, and calls for deeper assessment of learning and teaching. He points out that Fairhaven has pioneered the curricula and pedagogy he proposes and notes that its model of education anticipated by decades the list of “best practices” recently identified in the report of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, “College Learning for the new Global Century.”

This book...