It’s the next-to-last blog of the academic year and that means it’s time for a quick review of books to read over the summer.  It’s a bit shorter than usual because I’ve been writing a fair bit about books these last few months, but we’ll give it a whirl.

One book all higher education afficionados should read is The Low-Density University byEdward Maloney and Joshua Kim.  Not because it is particularly good or relevant, but because it perfectly captures the Spring of 2020 and the kind of options that people were imagining in that fevered time for the 20-21 academic year.  Remember the term “hyflex” and how people were convinced it was the wave of the future (or the wave of 20-21 anyway?  No?  Me neither.  But this book explains it all and 14 other potential delivery alternatives.  A true period piece.

Another interesting read is Academia Next by Bryan Alexander, a rather perspicacious American commentator.  As a futurist, he has a writing style which can take some getting used to: there are a lot of fact-tsunamis that need to be weathered to get to the good bits.  But I think his approach is nicely complementary to my own: I tend to focus on the dollars and cents and refuse to look at technology because it’s not clear to me that this can really be predicted, while Alexander feels the opposite.  And I appreciate the way he uses alternative scenarios to provoke independent thought and reflection rather than try to fashion a “there-is-no-alternative” narrative.  Recommended if you’re in a speculative mindset.

You’ll recall a few weeks ago that I was really into histories of campus development.  I followed that up recently with two other related books:  LabOratory: Speaking of Science and its Architecture by Sandra Kaji-O’Grady and Chris Smith, and Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality and the Making of the Modern University by Reinhold Martin.  Both of them, to some degree, suffer from the defects of all architectural writing: the use of deliberately obscure jargon (not as bad as philosophy or lit-crit, but a solid hold on third place) and a love for rhetorical/expository strategies which are appear highly idiosyncratic to anyone with training in history or the social science (“here are two unrelated facts about Jefferson’s Monticello, one of which is about horizontality and the other about verticality…QED.”).  But LabOratory is good when it comes to drawing together threads across a number of major new scientific facilities (I am a big fan of X in Barcelona) while Knowledge Worlds, which bills itself as a “media-technical” history of universities, ends up as a fairly idiosyncratic history of American universities as told through the development of different techniques for communicating scientific knowledge.  If I had to pick one, I’d go with LabOratory even though it is less concerned specifically with universities (much of the book covers US commercial laboratories), particularly for the lush photography.

Another architectural book to mention is Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities, which is quite brilliant.  The genius of the approach is that it’s a national history of higher education, only with Oxford and Cambridge removed.  Once you get rid of those two, you can actually write a relatively straightforward coherent history (very tough to do with those two included because they are both so important and such huge outliers): the politics, the sociology and the architecture can all be dealt with clearly, if perhaps in an overly dramatic fashion (personally I think including a description of the University of East Anglia student residences as “Auschwitz with carpets” might be pushing British puckishness past the bounds of good taste).  But look if you want to understand UK universities, this book is a good place to start.

 A final book worth mentioning is Meritocracy and its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China by Zachary M. Howlett.  This is simply an excellent dissection not just of how Chinese secondary school works but more broadly of how the gaokao underpins social harmony in China as a whole.  To cut a long story short, while the test’s monstrous inequalities are relatively well understood in China, in a country still ruled by guanxi, it remains the least unfair method of organizing social competition.  If you work with or teach international students, you need to read this book.

On the fiction side, there hasn’t been a lot recently, excepting Brandon Taylor’s Real Life about the travails of a gay Black graduate student in biology at an unnamed university which is transparently Wisconsin-Madison.  It’s fine: notable maybe for how aggressively science-y it is (campus novels normally focus on Arts students + profs and it’s notably jarring to read so much about laboratory techniques in a novel). 

Happy reading!