Morning everyone. Y’all know the drill: every December I come along and tell you what I’ve read in the world of higher education, let you know the stars and dogs, as well as give out a “book of the year prize”. Two reminders: first, that I did a summary of my (considerable) reading from the first half of the year back here, and not everything I read is something that came out this year, so “books of the year” aren’t necessarily new.
Ready? Here we go.
Let’s start with fiction. A Hero of Our Time by Naben Ruthnum is a reasonably engaging tale of the son of a University of Toronto professor working for an EdTech company which wants to put professors out of business and has a line manager who deeply resembles Elizabeth Holmes. It’s not really a campus novel, but close enough to pass. Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation is a more straightforward 2000s campus novel, dealing with issues of ethnicity and equity on campus, only with the twist that the Asian graduate student struggling with a dissertation topic she hates makes an odd and controversial discovery about the poet at the centre of her studies. It’s…ok. If you’re looking for a campus novel, it’s worth a read, but not sure I would put it ahead of any other decent work of fiction you may have on your shelf. And finally, there’s Richard Russo’s Straight Man, about a hapless English Department Chair at a regional university in Pennsylvania during a time of deep budget cuts (there’s some added poignance here if you’ve been following the stories about the campus amalgamations in PA lately). It’s fun and worth your time – the main character has more than whiff of Wilt about him, albeit an Amercanized version without the sex farce – but if novels aren’t your thing, AMC is developing a series based on the book with Bob Odenkirk (!) in the lead role and it’s due for release next year, so maybe just wait for that.
For nonfiction, one book I was happy to read this year was Universities and Colleges, written by David Palfreyman and Paul Temple as part of Oxford University Press’ “A Very Short introduction” series. It’s a truly excellent 150-page description of the origins of universities and how higher education institutions work – maybe the best short introduction to the field ever written. Now, mind you, I am not entirely sure who inside the system needs a book like this –new employees who need on-boarding perhaps? – but it’s a brilliant short overview the field.
There are a lot of books out in the last 12 months on how – one way or another – American higher education is being destroyed by the underfunding of higher education and student loan-backed higher tuition fees (and, to a lesser extent, how this can be reversed). You can avoid most of them: I would argue that the only one which is a must-read is Wrecked: Deinstitutionalization and Partial Defenses in State Higher Education Policy by Barrett J. Taylor. As I wrote back here, I am not entirely convinced by parts of his thesis, but at the very least it’s a good example on how to do case studies in higher education. Two good books on how families have coped with ever-higher fees are Josh Mitchell’s The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe and Caitlin Zaloom’s Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. Both suffer a bit from the journalistic tendency to look at edge cases rather than medians and so on the whole both over-dramatize the affordability problem to some extent. However, I found the latter book interesting because of the way it zeroes in on a peculiarly American notion of parenting in which an inability to meet a child’s desire with respect to college choice is seen as a moral failing. The result: parents don’t have hard conversations about cost and affordability with their children, which in the long run means a lot more debt both for families and children. Excellent insights all around.
In terms of books which focused on the questions of how to deal with some of the current dilemmas in North American higher education, there was Design for Change in Higher Education by Jeffrey Grabill, Sarah Gretter and Erik Skogsberg which on the whole was pretty forgettable. The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present and Uncertain Future by Arthur Levine and Scott van Pelt is a less-interesting remake of Kevin Carey’s 2015 book The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere – though like Carey’s book it has some good historical sketches, particularly with respect to change at leading institutions in the latter half of the 19th century. The Great Upheaval is overly credulous about imminent change in higher education mainly because the employer perspective is almost completely absent (trust me on this one: employers are the main barrier to change, because they find the idea of having to navigate a radically decentralized higher education market with tons of new and badly-defined competency-based credentials to be incredibly annoying). My two top picks in this area would be Pivot: A Vision for the New University by Mark Lombardi and Joanne Soliday (longer review back here) which looks at distinctive survival turn-around strategies of small institutions, and The Empowered University, by the University of Maryland’s Freeman A. Hrabowski, which is one of this decade’s most interesting discussions of institutional cultures and how to change them.
There were a flood of books from the US about race and the academy in North America over the past few years, mainly (I suspect) because a lot of university publishers wanted to demonstrate relevance in the era of #BlackLivesMatter. These include books like,The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom, The State Must Provide: the Definitive History of Racial Inequality on American Higher Education, and To Drink from the Well: The Struggle for Racial Equality at the Nation’s Oldest Public University (i.e. University of North Carolina). On the Canadian side, there was The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities by several authors. It was solid, but notably tended to be overly focussed on faculty rather than students (which is easy to understand when you look at census data and see how visible minority out-attain non visible minority students in this country). I wouldn’t call any one of these a must-read; on the other hand, if you aren’t reading anything on this subject, you’re not really keeping up with the times.
Partially because I find the American scene a little dull and unimaginative, some of the best books I read this year were about higher education and how it is viewed outside North America. The best two were Reforms, Organizational Change and Performance in Higher Education: A Comparative Account from the Nordic Countries (Pinheiro et al, eds.), which is a top-notch mixed-methods piece comparative research into how educational institutions are actually managed. Highly recommended. Elizabeth Buckner’s Degrees of Dignity: Arab Higher Education in the Global Era was a standout piece about a region that gets all too little attention in English. To these I would add Secret Cults in Nigerian Tertiary Institutions by Daniel Offing, which is the definitive history of gang violence in Nigerian universities from the 1960s to the 1990s (an admittedly niche subject which I wrote about back here) and Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition by Yu-Lin Chiang, an excellent ethnographic study of elite Chinese high school graduates which I described in more detail back here.
My runner-up for book of the year was Canadian (which I think might be a first): University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity byJulia Eastman, Glen Jones, Claude Trottier and Olivier Bégin-Caouette. It is probably the best book about Canadian higher education since David Cameron’s More Than an Academic Question, and in some ways more impressive because it gets into the guts of how an institution is actually run. As I noted in my full review back here, I think it is let down a bit in the drafting, so it is more a book which contains a lot of great stuff than a great book in and of itself, but still, I recommend it highly.
And now, for book of the year…I am going to wimp out a bit and divide this one in two. The best higher education book of 2022 has to go to Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University from Germany to American to China by William C. Kirby, which I reviewed back here. This is a highly nuanced book about eight universities in three countries and why they have succeeded over time. If there is a criticism to be made here, it is that the title teases the idea that Chinese universities might play a role in the 21st century equivalent to those played by American ones in the 20th Century and German ones in the 19th, a proposition I don’t think stands up to much scrutiny. But overall, it is a great book mixing analyses of national traditions with some useful institutional case studies.
The other book that deserves recognition is a book by Ethan Shrum which came out – rather unheralded, which is why I only read it this year – in 2019, called The Instrumental University: Education in the Service of the National Agenda After World War II. This is a wonderful book on American universities in the 1950s and 1960s which challenges the notion – widely spread by people who like to use the term “academic capitalism” as an epithet – that the notion of universities being “useful to society” is somehow a product of post-1970s neo-liberalism. In fact, as the book points out, it has its origins in the social sciences and their relation to progressive movements in the years before World War II, and came to fruition really under the Truman, Kennedy and Johnson administrations as institutions aspired to develop non-disciplinary “Organized Research Units” (ORUs) to play the role of handmaidens to technocratic high modernism then in fashion in government. As a work of history it is absolutely excellent – though I would argue it is worth reading with two other excellent books: Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (Stevens, Miller-Idriss and Shami) to give you a sense of how the balance of power between ORUs and departments has swung back in the latter’s favour over time, and Jenny Lee (ed) The US Power in International Higher Education, which is not a great book in an of itself, but represents a view of the intertwining of American institutional internationalization efforts and government use of higher education as a form of soft power which is much more understandable once you’ve read Shrum.
Happy reading!
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