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Category: Now Reading

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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December 9, 2025 No Comments

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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June 9, 2025 1 Comment

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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December 9, 2024 No Comments

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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November 6, 2024 No Comments

Early 2024 Book Reviews

Morning all. You know the drill: twice a year I report on the books I’ve read in the past six months. Today is my summer 2024 edition. Here goes. Let’s start with the non-higher ed stuff, because let’s face it, that’s what you’re all really going to read in the summer. On the fiction side, do read Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, which won the international Booker prize last month. And if you like Francis Spufford (Golden Hill, Light Perpetual and above all, Red Plenty, the

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June 11, 2024 No Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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