Exams have started, it’s getting cold, so that means the blog is winding down soon and I have to tell you about all the higher education books I’ve read since summer. Books from January to mid-June can be reviewed here. Buckle up.
(Digression: if you want some good non-fiction, I can recommend Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future and Jacques Menard’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, which is a bit of a tour de force on “western” culture – mostly but not exclusively New York and Paris – from the mid-40s to the mid-60s. If you’re looking for something lighter, Cue the Sun, a history of reality televisionis pretty fun. On the fiction side, my two faves this half-year were definitely McEwan’s latest, What We Can Know, which should definitely come with a trigger warning for historians,and Nathan Hill’s Wellness, which if you happen to be in your 50s, I guarantee will land with a gut punch. Karel Capek’s forgotten 1936 Classic War With the Newts is deranged but thought-provoking, in the best sci-fi tradition. End digression.)
Let’s start with books about the history of higher education. Curiosity about Quebec student loans led me to Le Pret d’honneur, and a mid-90s UQAM Master’s thesis about Canada’s most notable foray into non-profit privately-managed student loan funds (I wrote about it here). The Market for Skills: Apprenticeship and Economic Growth in Early Modern England, by Patrick Wallis, is a pretty interesting and data-rich account of how apprenticeships functioned in the 15th through 17th centuries (who offered them, who took them, why, etc.) and the results suggest some interesting parallels with modern higher education with respect to branding efforts and dropouts (admittedly my interpretation not the author’s). Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of WWII is, well, oversold. Yes, a couple of American academics played a leading role in the development of the OSS (now CIA) in World War II, but the portraits of these folks contained in this book just aren’t that interesting.
There were three books specifically about American higher education history. The first was The Dream is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education, by Simon Marginson, and as with all of Simon’s stuff, it’s wide-ranging (in this case, tracing the spread of the California idea across the globe) and generally fantastic. There was also Judith Friedlander’s A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and its University in Exile, a fascinating tale about a fascinating institution. Despite operating on what was effectively a shoestring because it was founded as an adult education school, the new School effectively re-made the social sciences in the US because of the role it played as a gateway for German scholars fleeing the Nazis. It wasn’t always easy, of course, because the German research experts were a bit miffed about having to teach night school, but it all worked out in the end. Finally, there was Martin Duberman’s Black Mountain: an Exploration in Community, about a short-lived semi-accredited residential art school in backwoods North Carolina. If you want to know what higher education looks like in extremis – no money, no calendar, no students, but almost bottomless pits of personal and professional jealousies – this is a great book. It’s a fascinating tale, best read in conjunction with Menard’s Free World (see above), with whom it has overlapping characters.
There are a lot of books out there which one way or another are about higher education and identity. Sociologists, I assume, love this stuff, otherwise why would there be so much of it about? I am getting pretty tired of the genre, though. And so, while Elite Universities and the Making of: Exploring Race and Class in Global Educational Economies by Kalwant Bhopal and Martin Myers and Polished: College, Class and the Burdens of Social Mobility by Melissa Osborne are both reasonably competent executions on the important theme of “look at all the backdoor ways class impacts the higher education experience”, I am pretty sure that we passed the point of diminishing marginal returns on this type of work several years ago and there’s just not that much more to be said on the subject. I felt similarly about a UK work by Richard Nelson entitled Academic Identity in the Age of AI: Higher Education in the Age of Digital Revolution. Incorrect? Not at all. But not that absorbing either.
I read four books specifically about current US higher education, all of which were very worthwhile. Our Higher Calling: Rebuilding the Partnership between America and its Colleges and Universities by Holden Thorp and Buck Goldstein is a clearly-written and thought-out argument about how to address the gap in understanding between universities and their states/communities. It’s very much a worthy late-10s document, absolutely nothing to disagree with whatsoever, and yet the book seems totally inadequate to the world in 2025. University Unfettered, by Ian McNeely, is the story of how an unnamed state flagship university (quite clearly the University of Oregon) chose to behave in the wake of being given a larger measure of independence from state control. And it’s a pretty good apologia for how universities, largely left to their own devices, choose to balance their various missions and different stakeholders. Then there was Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education by Joshua Kim and Edward Maloney. Most will read it for the instances of learning innovation; fewer, I suspect, will be persuaded that what is preventing such innovations from spreading more is the lack of a separate academic disciplinary field to measure data consistently and create social networks for change. Finally, there was America’s Hidden Economic Engines: How Community Colleges Can Driver Shared Prosperity, by Robert B. Schwartz and Rachel Lipsoin, about a new breed of successful American community colleges. I think the best way to describe these colleges is that they are pretty similar to the community colleges we have had in Canada all along, but operating with much better labour market data and with employer associations that are much more effective than ours. In any event, a good book with lots of case studies.
On Canada, I read a book from the 2011-12 period in Quebec called Universités inc: Des mythes sur la hausse de frais de scolarité et l’économie du savoir by Maxime Ouellet and Eric Martin. I won’t call this book intellectually dishonest, but it is intellectually incurious. It’s not so much that the issues the book raises are wrong, per se, or that the positions it critiques aren’t worth critiquing, but this book is just strawman argument after strawman argument, all intended to advance the proposition that any higher education system which is not fully government-funded is only two steps away from Sodom and Gomorrah. From the UK, I read two books: Peter Scott’s Retreat or Resolution: Tackling the Crisis of Mass Higher Education which argues that the problem with mass higher education is that there is not enough of it about, and Michael Shattock’s Making Policy in British Higher Education 1945-2011, which is a dizzying tour through the underbelly of government decision-making over the past sixty years. They are both good, but the latter, in particular, requires some detailed foreknowledge in order to be a worthwhile investment.
From China, there was The Highest-Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China by Ruixue Jia, Hongbin Li and Claire Cousineau (podcast with Ruixue Jia available here). In this book, two academics born and raised in China but working in the United States explainthe history, benefits, and drawbacks of China’s 1500 year-old obsession with high-stakes academic exams as a means of defining and identifying talent. Of particular interest is the contrast between the Chinese and American notions of ultra-selectivity, and how Chinese parents in America are starting to influence policy on the other side of the Pacific. And, from Germany, there was Authentic Universities: Effective University Identities in Times of Transition (available free at the link)by Frank Ziegele and Ulrich Müller. This excellent book shows how institutions can respond to a world of rapidly changing public priorities by organizing themselves around “Grand Challenge” logics without giving up their core principles and surrendering to consultant-speak. It’s a great read.
Finally, there were works of global scale or of international comparison. Advances and Challenges in International Education is not actually a book but a special issue of the journal Daedalus, which you can access for free if you click the link. It’s hard to think of a better global primer on the state of higher education than this; the problem is that as a journal issue made up of individual articles, it’s high on local details and perhaps a little short on global synthesis. Universities in the Knowledge Society: The Nexus of National Systems of Innovation of Hgher Education, edited by Timo Aarrevaara, Martin Finkelstein, Glen Jones and Jisun Jung, is the first of a projected 10 volumes from Springer on the global project known as the Academic Profession in the Knowledge-based Society study. It’s a decent series of national articles, which are however on the whole a lot more on point with respect to the academic profession than they are on national innovation systems. And, of course, as podcast listeners know, I also read A World of Private Higher Education by Dan Levy, which is a kind of tour de force covering the many different forms of private higher education institution all around the world (podcast here).
So, which one of these ends up as my pick of the year? Well, this was a hard year. I’m not sure there were any truly outstanding books but there are nevertheless four I would probably put at the top of my list for this year. In no particular order:
- Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went From Mission-Driven to Margin Obsessed, by Joshua Travis Brown, which I reviewed back in my June round-up. Podcast with the author is here.
- The Highest Exam, by Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li.
- Authentic Universities: Effective University Identities in Times of Transition byFrank Ziegele and Ulrich Müller
- A World of Private Higher Education by Dan Levy
Happy reading to all!
