Category: Now Reading

Higher Education Beyond the Public Good

The last decade or so has seen enormous changes in world politics. It’s also seen some major changes the way governments relate to higher education, particularly in the anglosphere. For many, it’s been a polycrisis on top of a polycrisis – a multi-directional series of attacks on and challenges to the public standing of higher education at the exact moment when the socio-political underpinnings of the entire post-war settlement seems to be crumbling. Sounds like a pretty good subject for a book,

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Books of the Year 2025

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

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Book Report Summer 2025

Morning everyone.  The days are getting long, so that means it’s getting close to the time when I need to wrap up this blog for the (northern hemisphere) summer.  And that, in turn, means book report time, where I round up everything I’ve read on higher education for the past six months. (If you’re looking for non-higher education recommendations: Terry David Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 will re-wire your thinking about what the early

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Late 2024 Book Reviews

Morning all. You know it’s getting towards XMAS when I start writing about the higher education books I’ve read recently. So, yes, those are Christmas bells ringing you can hear as you open this email and perusing my takes on the stuff I’ve read since Canada Day (I’ve already posted my January-June takes). Hopefully you can find a stocking stuffer or two in here for your own higher education nerd. To start with the non-higher ed stuff. On the fiction

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The Blight on the Ivy

A few weeks ago, when I was in New Orleans, I was browsing through the higher education section at Beckham’s, a large, uber-musty used book store on Decatur just inside the Quarter, when I found A Blight on the Ivy by Robert and Katherine (Dr & Mrs, according to the inside flap) Gordon. Published in 1962, it is a book about a “crisis” on the modern campus. What kind of crisis, you ask? Well, check out the subtitle: “The flunkouts,

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