It’s Friday, so it seems like a good day to write about one of the crazy books I have on my shelves (which, as any of my staff can tell you, is a theme that could last for quite some time). Here’s one that’s kind of relevant, given that it’s about an event that ended 50 years ago next week: Shut It Down! A College in Crisis, which is about the strike at San Francisco State (SFS) College in 1968-1969.
Maybe the most childish thing about Canadian higher education policy debates is the recurring insistence on the part of some English Canadians that higher education needs to be more of a federal responsibility (i.e. the central government needs to take a more active role). If you exclude the motivated reasoning of Ottawa-based higher ed groups who want more things to happen in Ottawa so that they themselves can have more interesting things to do, this position is mostly born of
If you follow UK higher education at all you’ve almost certainly come across the writing of Stefan Collini, most likely in the Guardian or the London Review of Books. He’s not a higher education specialist (as he frequently disclaims in his work); rather, he is a professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at Cambridge who happens to have developed a rather impressive sideline in writing wry, droll, heartfelt critiques of UK higher education policy. I find him as annoying as all hell. My
There is a small sub-genre of higher education books that I call “University Procedurals.” The are microscopically detailed accounts detailing how institution X accomplished Y in mind-numbing committee-meeting-by-committee-meeting detail. A good example of this genre is Mary Emison’s Degrees for a New Generation, which details the emergence of a new curriculum at the University of Melbourne in the mid-2000s, which I detailed back here. Alexandra Logue, the former Provost of the City University of New York, has now written what may be
I’ve been reading David Edgerton’s new book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, which presents a bracingly contrarian view of Britain’s 20th Century. It is, I think, particularly intriguing concerning whether the British left actually more nationalist than socialist (a question which I think might also be usefully asked of Canada’s own left). In the middle of the book, it presents some fascinating information on the mid-century role of science and innovation in the British economy and suggests
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