Morning, all.  The penultimate blog each year is about books.  This year, the penultimate blog in June was also about books, so you might want to go back here to see what I had to say about the crop I went through in the first half of the year.  In today’s effort, I’ll mostly stick to what I’ve read since mid-June.

(But first, if you’re interested in some non-Higher Ed reading recommendations before XMAS: Valley of the Birdtail: an Indian Reserve, a White Town and the Road to Reconciliation, by Andrew Strobo Sniderman and Douglas Sanderson, is a very high-quality and thought-provoking local history from north-western Manitoba; there are some aspects of the narrative I have difficulty with but boy is it a sharp way to get at the issue of settler-First Nations relations past and present.  Karl Schlögel’s monumental The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World is an amazing journey into a society that seems to have faded away entirely; the hefty price is worth it for the chapter on doorbells in communal apartments alone.  And if fiction is what you’re after, then try Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice.)

Ok, onwards.

A substantial chunk of the higher education literature is what I would describe as “how to” books.  The very sage How to Chair a Department, by Kevin Dettmar, for instance, would be a nice stocking stuffer any masochists in your life who happen to have taken on that job. Also from Johns Hopkins University Press is Dean O. Smith’s How University Budgets Work, which has some nice comparative illustrations of budget models along the centralization/de-centralization continuum.  Surviving to Thriving: a Planning Frameworks for Leaders of Private Colleges and Universities, by Joanne Soliday and Mary B. Marcy’s The Small College Imperative: Models for Sustainable Futures were two competent books on planning and strategy.  The former is sharper than the latter, though a caution that both books are American and probably have limited applicability anywhere else.

Another genre of is what I would call “geographical” books.  Tom Junes’ Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissentis kind of interesting, but is basically a work of political science about resistance to dictatorship  than it is about institutional adaptation (John Connelly’s Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech and Polish Higher Education, 1945-1956is a better book for that).  The Rise of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, by Yasheng Huang, is more about exams than it is universities.  The basic claim is that the system of imperial examinations adopted during the Sung dynasty (but which has roots going back to the Han period) has conditioned Chinese society to be subservient to the state, which increased its stability but decreased its innovative capacity.  It kind of feels plausible as a theory but it has elements of a “just so” story, but I’m not familiar enough with China to really judge.  The higher education research group at Tsinghua university has been busy publishing lately.  The Performance of Asian Higher Education: Understanding Productivity Across Institutions, a book of edited essays, has some interesting chapters looking at research output, but the diversity of its case studies can be confusing (Australia and Cambodia are probably too dissimilar higher education systems to belong in the same book).  A more interesting output is Global University President Leadership: Insights on Higher Education Futures, which is a series of informative interviews with leaders.  Finally, there are two very good collections of articles in book form, one from Springer (Higher Education in Taiwan: Global, Political and Social Challenges and Future Trends) and the other from Bloomsbury (Changing Higher Education in India).  More East Asian countries could do with the kind of overview that Angela Yung-Chi Hou and her co-editors have produced for Taiwan, and as for the India book, notwithstanding all the good work that N.V Varghese and his team at NIEPA do in putting out their annual reports on Indian Higher Education, this work (which Varghese co-edited with Simon Marginson and Saumen Chattopadhyay) is probably the best single-volume work on Indian universities since the Modi government came to power.  Two thumbs up.

Y’all know I like institutional histories, and as usual I read a few of those.  The Floating University: Experience, Empire and the Politics of Knowledge, by Tamson Pietsch, about a fascinating mid-1920s experiment in experiential learning/educational tourism was absolutely awesome, but since I interviewed Tamson about the book back here I won’t dwell on it here than to say it’s simply excellent. Cornell, A History: 1940-2015 by Glenn Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick is a decent “standard” institutional history though it is longer on student life in the 1950s and shorter on big innovative moves in the 21^st century (for example, the Cornell-Teknion tie-up in New York City) than I would have liked.  The Making of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine is not so much an institutional history as it is a memoir written by the folks who set it up, but is no less interesting for that (how often does a school – now a university – get set up from scratch?  And how cool is it to learn about the steps involved?)    And finally, there is The New Global Universities: Re-inventing Higher Education in the 21^st Century by Bryan Penprase and Noach Pickus which is not one but eight origin stories of new universities that have popped up in the last two decades.  It’s international in the sense that the action takes place in a lot of countries, but it’s also parochial really because with only one exception (India’s Ashoka university) the institutions are all either American or have founders who have spent time in and/or are deeply influenced by the US.  And the lessons are not widely applicable because it’s mainly focused on universities which were kick-started with hundreds of million of dollars from state or charitable sources.  It’s not that it’s a bad book, but if you’re looking for something a little more ecumenical on this topic, go with Accelerated Universities: Ideas and Money Combine to Build Academic Excellence (Altbach, Salmi, Reisberg and Froumin, eds).

I read two books specifically on Canadian higher education.  One was a thirty-year-old collection of essays called Youth, University and Canadian Society, edited by Paul Axelrod and John Reid.  There is some good stuff in there (Axelrod’s chapter on student politics particularly), but some of the chapters are a bit picayune, IMHO.  The other was a very curious…not really a book, more of a pamphlet…called Rochdale College Myth and Reality by Brian J. Grieveson.  Briefly: there was a moment in the 1960s when the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation believed that handing over millions of dollars to student-run housing co-ops was a good idea.  Within a very short space of time, five of these (the Waterloo Co-operative Residence, Pestalozzi College in Ottawa, Elrond College – yes, really – in Kingston, and Neil Wycik and Rochdale in Toronto) were set up.  All but Neil Wycik (which still exists today at Toronto Metropolitan University), went bust very quickly and Rochdale College – now the Senator David A. Croll building on Bloor Street just west of St. George – did so in a particularly spectacular way by first becoming one of the city’s premier drug dens.  Grieveson’s work is not what you’d call great history – not even really great journalism – but the story is compelling enough to be worth a couple of hours of your time.

My most interesting line of reading this year was on academic cultures and their history.  Paul H. Mattingly’s American Academic Cultures: A History of Higher Education is essentially a history of American universities written through the lens of how academics conceived of their role and a pretty good alternative to standard histories by authors like Frederick Rudolph, John R. Thelin or Roger Geiger.  American Academic Cultures in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines (Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds) is a more precise look at how a handful of academic subjects – specifically, economics, political science, philosophy, and English – changed in the second half of the twentieth century.  It’s a bit dated now and as the title suggests very America-centric (I believe that the chapter on philosophy would make no sense anywhere else in the world), but it’s an interesting approach to thinking about Academic history.  John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study is even narrower – it’s just a look at the field which is now called “English” but it has some fascinating essays on the relationship between various humanities disciplines (and whether they anything more than what’s left over after you’ve defines the physical and social sciences), and the disappearance of rhetoric as a field of study.  Finally, I re-read Clark Kerr’s The Uses of the University and was mostly struck by how banal it all seems now, given how daring it was at the time it was written in 1963.

A few more which might best be categorized as “varia”:  There was a much-awaited higher education gag book out this year: The Faculty Lounge: A Cocktail Guide for Academics.  I know a lot of people liked it: I really didn’t.  Not only were the recipes overly fruity for my taste but boy do those gags get old quick.  A much better quirky book was Higher Education: Marijuana ay the Mansion by Constance Baumgarner Gee.  On the one hand, it’s a unique view of elite American higher education from the perspective of the trailing spouse of a superstar university president, E. Gordon Gee.  On the other, it’s a very specific story about a Presidential spouse who made a lot of enemies at a conservative-ish university (Vanderbilt, in Nashville) getting railroaded by the Board of Governors for using marijuana for medical purposes before that was legally a thing, which led to a divorce from said superstar President.  It’s a ride.

The edited volume Student Recruitment Agents in International Higher Education: A Multi-Stakeholder Perspective on Challenges and Best Practices – a compendium of a couple of dozen mostly very short articles is a bit of a mixed bag, but it’s still a timely read for people Canadians who (probably wrongly) have come to the conclusion that agents are the source of all evil in international recruitment.  Anna Mountford-Zimdars’ Meritocracy and the University: Selective Admissions in England and the United States is an interesting two-nation contrast in the way admissions are handled: I just wish someone would do the same for elite universities in other countries, notably Asia.  Laura T. Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen’s Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities, is one of those books which is not wrong per se, but at the same time not particularly insightful. By this I mean: there is hardly any aspect of American life which you can’t turn into a story of racial inequality if you want to.  And while it’s good to be reminded of this from time to time, that doesn’t make the work particularly groundbreaking.  Rebecca S. Natow’s Re-examining The Federal Role in Higher Education: Politics and Policymaking in the Postsecondary Sector was a thorough but not especially novel overview of the subject (some comparative international perspective would have been welcome to provide context, but you could say that about pretty much any US higher education book). 

Finally, there was Brian Rosenberg’s Whatever it is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.  I won’t say too much about it because Brian’s coming on the podcast early in January to talk about his book, but let’s just say that it is short, to the point and not at all optimistic about the ability of North American institutions to change.  Maybe I’ll say a bit more about that tomorrow.

And so, to the real question: what was the Higher Education Book of the Year?  It’s awfully close this year: so close I think I must split the prize between two books.  And they are:

• Corrupted: A Study of Chronic Dysfunction in South African UniversitiesbyJonathan Jansen, who also took this award in 2018 for an earlier book, As By Fire.  He is an amazing guide to the world of South African universities, which look so like our own but are burdened in so many ways by that country’s politics, past and present, and Corrupted is an eye-opening description of the looting that can sometimes beset rich institutions in a poor country.  You can hear my interview with Jonathan on the podcast here and read the transcript here.

• The Floating University: Experience, Empire and the Politics of Knowledgeby Tamson Pietsch (see above).  It’s a story set in the 1920s, but there is plenty in here which as relevant to the future of higher education today as it was 100 years ago.  Tamson also appeared on the podcast and it was a joy: audio here and transcript here.

Happy reading, everyone.