Hi everyone. Summer’s almost here, so this is the final week before the blog goes on hiatus. And that means, of course, that it’s time for the summer higher education book report!
Before getting started on the higher education stuff, y’all seem to like my fiction/non-fiction picks, too. As far as non-fiction goes, I found Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao to be both excellent and timely. For those needing background reading for the Men’s World Cup, I found Simon Kuper’s World Cup Fever: A Soccer Journey in Nine Tournaments to be somewhat more readable than Jonathan Wilson’s: The Power and the Glory: The History of the World Cup. And I know the book is over 25 years old now, but I found Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer’s recounting of the 1996 Everest disaster, to be utterly compelling. As for fiction…I haven’t had a lot of luck with fiction recently, but I can recommend both last year’s Booker Winner Flesh by David Szalay was not bad and Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico as solid reads for any summer afternoon.
Anyways, to higher education. Let’s start with the easy stuff; namely the seven books I have already covered on the podcast, or on the blog. There was Bryan Alexander’s Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis (podcast here), Simon Marginson’s Global Education in Times of Upheaval: On Common Goods, Geopolitics and Decolonization, (free online copy here and podcast here), Nicholas Dirks’ City of Intellect: The Uses and Abuses of the University (podcast here), and Volume 1 of Dhoombak Goobghoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, edited by Ross L. Jones, James Waghorne, and Marcia Langton (podcast with James Waghorne here). These books are absolutely all worth your time. If you end up deciding to read Dhoombak Goobghoowana, I recommend pairing with a new book by the late Elaine Dewar, Oblivion: Residential Schools, Segregated Hospitals, and the use of Indigenous Peoples as Slaves of Race Science, which is an odd book for a number of reasons, but it does touch on a lot of the same kinds of issues in Canada.
I also took in two books by colleagues at the University of Hong Kong, Higher Education, State and Society: Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches by Lili Yang (podcast here) and Gerald Postiglione’s Higher Education in China: Domestic Demands and Global Aspirations (podcast here) which I think will be the standard on the subject for a few years at least. And finally, I did an entire blog post on my new colleague Dara Melnyk’s book Success Factors of Innovative Universities, which I hope will be widely read.
I have only managed one book of campus fiction this year, namely The University of Bliss by Julian Stannard. This is dreadful. Literally the worst work of fiction I’ve read since the pandemic. It is the kind of book that thinks it sparkles with droll wit and insight when in fact it is about as subtle as a Joe Rogan podcast. The head of the university’s branding office is named “Saffron Fraud”, the head librarian “Fred Clueless” and the head of HR “Derek Nobody”. Among the author’s attempts at hilarity are bon mots like “Mary Beard has her own beard these days” and an observation that the university is working on its inclusive LGBTQIAYK[-INK -]Z±ur program. If you wanted to create a caricature of the kind of thing that 60 year-old conservative critics of universities who believe everything went to hell sometime in the 1970s would find amusing, this is the book you would write. I can’t imagine what other purpose it serves. It doesn’t even end coherently for a campus novel, it just sort of trails off into an even less funny satire of organized religion (The Church of the Aubergine, in case you were wondering). Dreadful. Avoid.
(There is however, a recent addition to the higher education literature which is probably worse that The University of Bliss and that is a trilogy of what are allegedly serious looks at academic culture through the lens of Warhammer 40,000 – yes, really – which I have not read, but colleague Jim Wilkinson has and his review is definitely worth a look.)
I managed to read four books with titles involving a definite article, an adjective, and the noun University. Of these, The Synthetic University: How Higher Education can Benefit from Shared Solutions and Save Itself was the best of these mainly because the text isn’t as messianic as the title (the author, James L. Shulman, worked for a company that delivered shared solutions in art history…and mainly he shows how unbelievably hard it is to convince institutions and particularly faculty to embrace shared solutions). Michael D. Smith’s The Abundant University: Remaking Higher Education for a Digital World was much less interesting. Its conceit is that online education means that everything that we used to tackle from a point of view of scarcity can now be tackled from a place of abundance, which is true to an extent. It is, unfortunately, desperately incurious with respect to whether or not people actually want to get their education online (some do, most don’t, or at least not always) and how that might actually be achieved. Doogab Yi’s The Recombinant University: Genetic Engineering and the Emergence of Stanford Biotechnology is the story of the Stanford biotechnology department from the 1950s to 1980s, which began with an amazing esprit de corps and did amazing things together before falling apart amongst mutual bickering and lawsuits as greediness and intellectual property law began to set one researcher against another. From my perspective it; was way too heavy on the actual science of biotech and too light on the internal university politics, but YMMV. Finally, there was The Indian University: A Critical History by Debaditya Bhattacharya, which is barely about universities, more a sort of longform rant about colonialism and Indian public policy with respect to formal education. Not wrong or anything, but not very interesting either.
One book which was both intriguing and irritating was The Pivot: One Pandemic, One University, by Robert J Bliwise, which was about Duke University’s experience in the pandemic. Why Duke, you ask? Why not, I guess. No reason other than that the author teaches there and thought it would be interesting to write about. Which it is, but maybe not for the reason he thinks. Turns out it was possible to maintain something at least somewhat like an in-person experience during COVID if i) most students live on campus, and ii) you had billions of dollars and could get staff to test every single day. A useful reminder that not everyone experienced COVID equally.
Two books with similar titles but quite differing messages were Who Needs College Anymore: Imagining a Future Where Degrees Don’t Matter by Kathleen Delaski and Ne faites plus d’etudes!: pourquoi l’éducation de nos enfants est devenue totalement obsolete à l’heure deo l’IA by Laurent Alexandre and Olivier Babeau. The first book, by an American author, basically says the United States needs more vocational education pathways. In effect, although she does not say it (and is possibly unaware of it), she is advocating for the US to develop a more Canadian system of education. Possibly interesting for Americans; Canadians can skip. The second, from France, is a both deeply irritating and at the same time rewarding. Irritating because the authors take literally everything that techbros say about the short-term impact of AI at face value, which is absurd for any number of reasons. Rewarding because despite this they also take seriously the issue of cognitive surrender and the very real possibility that regular use of AI makes human a lot stupider even as it puts enormous amounts of human knowledge at their fingertips. The question then is: how does the purpose of education change when everyone has such powerful tools available to them? The authors view is that universities – which focus on expertise – are not going to be very good at adapting to a future if expertise itself is devalued through ubiquitousness. I personally don’t buy the notion that formal studies won’t be able to adapt to an AI future, but I do agree that the purpose and practice of teaching is going to have to change a lot – and quickly.
Finally, and probably my favourite higher ed-related book this year so far, is Richard White’s Who Killed Jane Stanford: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a Universitywhich is a completely mesmerizing history of the early years of Stanford University, before family matriarch Jane Stanford died of strychnine poisoning. The book doesn’t, unfortunately, go quite so far as to implicate the university’s first President, David Starr Jordan, but he certainly was an important beneficiary of her death, as it freed him to build Stanford University in the model of an eastern research university (with some unhealthy amounts of eugenics thrown in).
Happy Summer Reading!
