Normally, I end the year with a “Higher Education Book of the Year” recommendation.  It’s not quite the end of the blogging year – that’ll be a week today –  but a) I’m barely reading anymore because of how busy things are at HESA Towers (we’re hiring new management positions, do check out the posting here) and b) I just finished what is evidently gong to be book of the year, so no reason to keep looking.  So here we are.

(Quick reminder that I read lots of stuff every year, not all of it published the year in which it was published.  These are reviews of what I read rather than what came out this year, though the winner is usually from the past 12 months.).

Just to recap all the runners-up: I read a lot of institutional histories this year, some of which I described back here.  None of them were particularly new.  Of the international ones, I enjoyed Betty Anderson’s The American University of Beirut: Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education because of the way it functions both as a campus history and as an encapsulation of fairly naïve American efforts to act as a “civilizing” power in the Middle East (this seemed less ludicrous a hundred and twenty years ago than it does today, since at the time America was the one emerging world power which had no obvious territorial designs on the region).  And Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision, edited by David Kaiser, may be the best short history of any university in North America.

Among the Canadian histories, Martin Friedland’s The University of Toronto: A History is and will probably remain the gold standard for single-volume histories in Canada for a long time to come (someone might one day write a better one for McGill, if they ever get around to replacing the 2-volume history Stanley Frost wrote 40 years ago, which is aging really poorly).  Of the others, the most intriguing was the late Ian McPherson’s Reaching Outward and Upward: The University of Victoria 1963-2013.  It does a better job than most Canadian campus histories at placing the university’s development in national and global academic context; it also – correctly in my view – foregrounds the hiring of a dozen or so specific faculty members around whom the growing university solidified its reputation. 

I also read a fair bit about campus built environments (previously discussed here), their relation to social history and current debates about innovation and equity.  The best of these were Paul Venable Turner’s Campus: An American Planning Tradition, William Whyte’s Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities,  LaDale C. Winling’s Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the 20^th Century, and In the shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering our Cities by Davarian L. Baldwin.  All of these are worth a read if architecture or urban planning is your bag, but I am particularly fond of the last of these because of the way – after a couple of hundred of papers excoriating the rapaciousness of high-prestige American urban universities – it ends with a 20-page paean to the University of Winnipeg and its community development efforts.  Great stuff.

I greatly enjoyed The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, which I wrote about in more detail back here. If I can be a book sommelier for a moment, I would say Grading the College: A History of Evaluating Teaching and Learning  by Scott M. Gelber is a very good complement. Bryan Alexander’s Academia Next is an intriguing examination of some potential long-term developments.  Andy Thomason’s Discredited: The UNC Scandal and the College Athletics’ Amateur Ideal is one of the better books about the interface between Big-Time Sports and Big Research Universities.  The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live, by Danielle Dreilinger,  is full of quite astonishing revelations about this semi-discipline and its evolution both within and (later) outside universities and the role it played in the women’s movement around the turn of the 20^th century, though like the discipline itself, the book runs out of gas after about 1960.

But look, I found the best higher education book of the year last month.  It’s Emily J Levine’s Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University andit may be the best history of higher education of any type in the last decade.  It is, quite simply, genius – not just because it tells an old story in a unique way, but also because it challenges certain well-worn parts of the legend and shows us how the trade-offs made in designing the research university more than a century ago remain relevant today.

The well-known part of the story is that Germany had the best universities in the world in the mid-1800s.  Americans went there, were amazed, came home, and started borrowing German ideas liberally. The most well-known and literal adoption of German ideas was the introduction of the Doctoral degree and the creation of universities devoted more to research than teaching (Johns Hopkins being the ur-institution here).

But there were other ideas which Americans took home with them too – the main ones being the notion of “academic freedom” both for teachers and students, ideas which turned out very different in practice in America than in Europe.  Academic freedom for students – which made a lot of sense for students in research universities who were essentially researchers-in-training – came eventually in America to mean smorgasbord curricula in which pretty much anything went (see Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University for more on this) – something that definitely never happened in Germany.   As for academic freedom for faculty – well, in Germany this was embedded in a set of social relations which had as much to with collective academic rights – what we in North America tend to refer to as institutional autonomy.  But in North America, it eventually became an individualized negative right – that is, the right of individual professors not to have anyone tell them what they could or couldn’t say.  The difference in large part was institutional structures: in Germany the state played a direct role not just in controlling universities but in naming individual professors as well.  In America, professors were responsible to Boards of Governors that were more corporate in origin, and the state had little direct role to play, even in the newly-developing state flagships and land-grant universities.

The exchange, however, was not all one-sided.  As Levine notes, one thing that definitely caught Germans’ attention in the late Wilhelmine era was the fact that American institutions were able to draw on huge amounts of funds from private philanthropic sources.  This led to various semi-successful efforts to build German equivalents, the most enduring of which was the Kaiser Wilhelm Society.  Unfortunately, World War I put a premature end to such efforts.

Maybe the most interesting part of this story is that the ascendancy of the research university is not taken as a given, and a lot of space is given to alternatives.  The fusion of research-intensive graduate education with teaching-oriented undergraduate education has always had critics from both sides: for some they are not democratic enough, while for others, they are insufficiently elite.  These criticisms led to institutional experiments on both sides of the Atlantic: the Goethe University in Frankfurt, the New School in New York, various liberal arts schools (among the most famous of which was Black Mountain College in North Carolina) all of which tried to bring a more working-class perspective to education.  But there were also experiments in the other direction, like the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.  In the long run, though, the Research University outlasted or co-opted them all and this big institute we all know so well is now so deeply entrenched that it seems practically eternal (this is probably deeply unhealthy, actually, though no one wishes to say so).

But perhaps Levine’s most important contribution in this highly original book is simply to remind us that Research Universities – in Germany as in America – were always a negotiated compromise between academics and society.  At the broadest level, institutions do cool stuff for the benefit of society, and in return they get money to do cool stuff and suffer minimal outside interference in so doing.  From a historical perspective, Levine’s great contribution is that she manages to see both sides of the bargain (most historians of higher education tend to only see the institutional side of the bargain) and to do so from a transatlantic, comparative perspective.  But more generally, this book is a welcome and timely reminder that the compact between universities and societies has never been “permanently settled”, but rather they are constantly being re-negotiated, and it is useful to think through how previous generations managed to navigate these shoals as we traverse them.

Have a good weekend.