Category: Now Reading

It’s been awhile since I updated the reading list, so, without further ado: Science in the 20th Century and Beyond by Jon Agar. Less a history of scientific discovery as it is a history of contexts and manners in which science was practiced over the past century. In this interpretation, what gave American science the edge in the 20th century was less the massive inflow of talent from Europe than it was (a) the closer integration of scientists and engineers (the

Frequently, I’m asked how I manage to write these blog posts every day. Well, a lot of it is planning – if you use the summer months to build up a stock of articles, the day-to-day is less onerous. And then there are days like today, when I blatantly cheat on the format by ditching reasoned argument and just belch up of a bevy of hotlinks accompanied by vaguely pithy commentary. Reason Number One Why Universities Aren’t Rushing To Online. www.wetakeyourclass.com.

We’re coming up on summer, so it’s time to think about what to read at the cottage. Here’s some advice on higher ed books: Good campus novels are kind of thin on the grounds these days. My all-time favourite is David Lodge’s Small World  (which has survived a little bit better than his other two campus novels, Nice Work and Changing Places), though Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim is still probably the genre-defining work. One that came out last year to some

If you’re interested in reading about the major events that shaped the evolution of universities in the twentieth century, then you could do a lot worse than invest a few hours in reading Elizabeth Popp Berman’s Creating the Market University: How Academic Science Became an Economic Engine. Most histories of science rightly point to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “Science: the Endless Frontier” as the point at which the U.S. government definitively committed itself to funding university science in a big