Around this time of year, I always do a “Higher Ed Books of the Year” (usual caveat: these are books I happened to read in a year, not books which appeared in a year, though obviously there is some overlap).  This year, I did a mid-year “Best Books” in June, so today’s post will focus on my reading over the last six months but end with a books of the year countdown including all twelve months. 

(If you’re interested, I have my fiction review for the year over here – tl;dr: read lots of Juan Gabriel Vasquez and Alvaro Enrigue.  My non-fiction end-of year summaries will be up on the same site hopefully next week).

Are you sitting comfortably?  Then I’ll begin.

Obviously, I could not go through 2020 without reading some books on higher education and race.  One of the best-written books I read this year was Undermining Racial Justice: How One University Embraced Inclusion and Inequality, a history of the University of Michigan’s efforts (or lack thereof) to expand opportunity to Black students.  It’s an interesting tale both of protest and of bureaucratic game-playing, backed by a tremendous amount of documentary evidence from the UM archives produced by what the author, Matthew Johnson, calls the university’s “inclusion bureaucracy” – that is, the staff devoted solely to serving racial equity goals.  Maybe the most interesting notions in here is how university protest and university bureaucracy feed on one another: a line of research that would be worth following elsewhere.

Interestingly, what might have been an equivalent Canadian offering – Black Racialization and Resistance at an Elite University (re: McGill University) was hobbled by the lack of such a bureaucracy.  This book, by rosalind hampton, is very good on some aspects of the history of McGill – particularly on the nasty racism of some of its most famous professors (especially Hugh MacLennan, holy moly), and on the role the university’s official historian, Stanley Frost, played in bigging up and whitewashing the reputation of the institution’s slaveholding founding benefactor, James McGill (reading it, I finally understood why my grandfather, himself an amateur McGill historian, disliked Frost so much).  The problem is that the documentary history on race at McGill is slight because there has never been an “inclusion bureaucracy”; such Black protest as has occurred at McGill has tended to focus on curricular offerings rather than increasing the number of black students at the institution.  In the absence of much documentary evidence, hampton goes the route of interviews with a relatively small number of Black alumni whose representativeness we kind of have to take on faith.  This leads to the book having a more personalistic feel than Undermining Racial Equality, exploring personal experiences and feelings of exclusion more than institutional dynamics.  To me, it showed what a different community size makes in the dynamics of diversity and inclusion.  Matters play out very differently in a setting where the minority in question is 15-20% of the population as it is in Michigan than it does where it is 3-4% as it is in Montreal: one gets a bureaucracy (a mixed blessing) and the other does not.  And that changes the way history gets written.

But the best book on race and university this year was not a history book.  It was a memoir by a young Canadian journalist of Jamaican and South Asian heritage, Eternity Martis, about her four years at Western University.  The result, They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus Life and Growing Up is…revealing (and I am sure the Western comms folks had conniptions when it came out).  It’s written somewhat in the form of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick – a mix of observation and serious sociology.  Martis doesn’t reach McMillan Cottom’s heights, but that’s hardly a criticism because Tressie is actually a certified genius.  But read it anyway, because what Martis is talking about is going on at your campus too.

A lot of my work this past few months has been with Queen’s University and since I collect Canadian University histories, I figured it was probably time to plow through all three volumes of the institution’s official history (Queen’s history is the best-documented of any Canadian university, at least if sheer pages are anything to go by.). The first two, saddled with the extraordinarily clunky titles And Not To Yield and To Serve and Yet Be Free – were written in the 1970s and cover the period up to 1960, while the final installment, which covers the period to 2004, is Duncan McDowall’s Testing Tradition.  The first volume is not an easy read – 400 pages of Presbyterians doing Presbyterian things to each other.  The second volume is a bit more interesting because it really gets into how Queen’s – originally a rather poor school in an economic periphery – came to gain a truly national reputation.  The third, cover aside, is actually a very good and insightful history of the institution’s recent past and in particular the way it goes through cycles of reinvention while at the same time hanging on to attenuated versions of older traditions.  As Queen’s is on the cusp of another one of those reinvention cycles right now, this last volume is well worth a look.

Scholarship Money and Prose: Behind the Scenes at an Academic Journal is a great short book by Michael Chibnik, recounting his time as editor of American Anthropologist. It’s an approachable and well-organized explanation of how a big academic journal works, the kind of practical guide we need more of in higher education.  Similarly, Sarah Babb’s Regulating Human Research: IRBs From Peer Review to Compliance Bureaucracy is a short, sharp piece of scholarship which sheds light on how federal rule-making in the US bureaucratized what was originally meant to be a relatively light-touch form of self-regulation.  When you hear about administration taking over the university, it’s worth keeping this kind of story in mind.

I read several fairly forgettable books on various national/regional issues in higher education around the world, most of which need not be mentioned.  The only one to highlight is Global Regionalisms and Higher Education: Projects, Processes and Politics (Robertson, Olds, Dale & Dang , eds).  It’s very much a geography book about higher education rather than a higher education book about geography, but it contains lots of interesting insights into how and why institutions and governments choose to organize themselves at supra-national levels.

I read more US higher education, for obvious reasons, in this election year.  My friend Jamie Merisotis released Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines. It is only partially about higher education, and it’s aimed at more of a mass market than the nerd market (my home and native land), but I was particularly fond of the bits excoriating academic snobbery about “mere” skills acquisition.  Because so much of the debate about campus re-opening in the summer centred around football, I ended up reading a little bit of college football history including David Whitford’s A Payroll to Meet (recruiting scandals at Southern Methodist University in the 1970s and 1980, which, even for the time, were egregious) and Creating the Big Ten: Courage Corruption and Commercialization, a look at the first 50 years of inter-collegiate ball in the Midwest which will disabuse anyone of the notion that the divorce between sports and academics is a recent one.  And finally  was Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz’s Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Makings of the College Admissions Scandal, which is the wholly nauseating story of the Varsity Blues story which has Aunt Becky in jail this Christmas and which I reviewed in more detail back here.

Now to the big prize: my book of the year. I had trouble this year.  My inner higher ed research nerd wanted to go with Managing Universities: Policy and Organizational Change From a Western European Comparative Perspective. (Bleikle, Enders, Lepori, eds), which I discussed a bit back here.  I loved it, but I thought putting it top might be too nerdy, even for me.  I also considered Eternity Martis’ They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus Life and Growing Up not because it’s especially good on higher education but because I am excited to see this kind of work in Canada. 

And so I settled on…(drumroll)…Jeff Selingo’s Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions.  For the long take on the book check out my review from a few months ago, but the short take is: admissions in the top quartile of American universities is deeply warped in ways that make all of US higher education deeply unlike that of pretty much any other country in the world.  It’s also insanely complicated.  But Selingo found a way to make it all understandable and accessible not just to the nerd crowd like me but also to a popular audience, which is no mean feat.  Buy it.