Morning everyone. Y’all know the drill: every December I come along and tell you what I’ve read in the world of higher education, let you know the stars and dogs, as well as give out a “book of the year prize”. Two reminders: first, that I did a summary of my (considerable) reading from the first half of the year back here, and not everything I read is something that came out this year, so “books of the year” aren’t
There is a new intellectual fashion in the United States called Supply-Side Liberalism. Basically, the idea is that government’s main role is less about managing aggregate demand and more ensuring the cheapest possible supply of goods and services. In the US, this approach is rapidly emerging as the new centrist consensus, mainly because the sudden return of inflation as a major economic phenomenon means that all the left bromides about the need to use government funding to stimulate aggregate demand
A few thoughts on serving the community, prompted by the book What’s Public About Public Higher Education by Stephen Gavazzi and Gordon Gee (which is not as good as their 2018 work Land-Grant Universities of the Future but it still contains interesting material). The notion of having a “community” mission is not entirely accepted within higher education. Certainly, the “land-grant” institutions, which trace their histories back to a moment in time when the American government decided to throw science and
Morning all. There are two recent books of note I want to highlight: Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition by Yi-Lin Chiang, and Empire of Ideas: Creating the Modern University System from Germany to American to China by William C. Kirby. Study Gods is basically an ethnography of students at a couple of “top” high schools in the Beijing area. It follows a number of students – both successful and unsuccessful – from early in
If you’ve been in any senior university administrator’s offices in the last few weeks, there’s a good chance you’ll have seen a paperback with vaguely constructivist art cover entitled University Governance in Canada: Navigating Complexity by the scholarly quartet of Julia Eastman, Glen Jones, Claude Trottier and Olivier Bégin-Caouette. Within administrative circles, it’s getting a lot of buzz and praise for being an accurate portrait of the state of Canadian higher education in the early 2020s. On balance, I think
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.
