Category: Now Reading

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

Unless you’re an Atlantic subscriber and read the January issue, you probably haven’t heard about David Weinberger’s new book Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now that Facts Aren’t Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room because it hasn’t yet attracted a lot of reviews. But forget that: go to your bookstore or Internet bookseller. Buy it, download it, whatever: this is an important book which deftly outlines the real challenges faced by

Remember the nineties, when books like Tenured Radicals and Illiberal Education appeared? All that formulaic bad journalism masquerading as social critique? Cookie-cutter stuff, really: just find a couple of examples of people in group X doing something ludicrous/criminal, and then use this as a justification to vilify all people in group X, preferably while inventing a string of belittling nicknames for them. And of course you thought to yourself: this is Ezra Levant/Fox News stuff, not something a serious academic would