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Category: Now Reading

Innovation Literature Fail

So, I’ve been reading Mariana Mazzucato’s, The Entrepreneurial State.  It’s brilliant and irritating, in equal measures.  Brilliant because of the way it skewers certain free-market riffs about the role of risk and entrepreneurialism in the innovation process, and irritating because it’s maddeningly cavalier about applying business terms to government processes (in particular, the term “risk”, which Mazzucato doesn’t seem to understand means something entirely different in government, if losses can be made whole through taxation). Anyways, one thing that occurred to me

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October 17, 2013 1 Comment

Why Public Higher Education Should be Free…

… is the unfortunate title of a new book by Robert Samuels, a professor at the University of California, and president of the University Council – American Federation of Teachers.  The title is unfortunate because the book’s not really about free tuition; the subject doesn’t really get a look-in until about three-quarters of the way through.  Rather, Samuels’ book is mostly about (as he puts it in the title of his first chapter) why tuition goes up and quality goes down. 

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September 17, 2013 No Comments

Higher Education Management, Hermit Kingdom-Style

Frabjous day!  I have just read one of the great higher education management tracts of all time. I’m of course speaking about, On Improving Higher Education, by Kim Il Sung.  (Pyongyang Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1974). Don’t let Kim’s “communist” label fool you – what this guy cared most about was the concept of Juche  (self-reliance), which continues to be the underlying ideology of the north’s nationalist, quasi-fascist state.  As you can imagine, this meant a lot of belt-tightening.  As such, Kim’s thoughts have

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May 27, 2013 2 Comments

Inventing Academic Freedom

If you’re a devotee of campus histories (and yes, I realize that’s a big “if”) you’ll know that they tend not to deal with many events in great detail.   Sadly, monograph-length treatments of specific events, or turning points, that define an institution are few and far between. This is why a recent book by Peter C. Kent called Inventing Academic Freedom: The 1968 Strax Affair at the University of New Brunswick is such a refreshing read.  Sure, it’s a parochial story

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April 9, 2013 1 Comment

Measuring the Effects of Student Loans

Measuring the effects of student loans is brutally difficult.  It sounds simple, but it’s not. Take a recent article called “Gender, Debt, and Dropping out of College“, published in Gender and Society, which made a small wave in access-conscious circles a couple of weeks ago.  Using data form the 1997 US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this article made two claims: first, that debt was positively correlated to completion up until a certain level of debt, after which the relationship reverses itself

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March 12, 2013 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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