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Category: Now Reading

Book of the Year

Normally, I end the year with a “Higher Education Book of the Year” recommendation.  It’s not quite the end of the blogging year – that’ll be a week today –  but a) I’m barely reading anymore because of how busy things are at HESA Towers (we’re hiring new management positions, do check out the posting here) and b) I just finished what is evidently gong to be book of the year, so no reason to keep looking.  So here we are. (Quick reminder

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December 2, 2021 2 Comments

Don’t Mention the Monsters

Lawrence Freedman’s Strategy: A History is a useful (if lengthy) book if for whatever reason you are thinking about going into a strategic planning process.  It traces the history of the concept of strategy through its initial application in the military, then through politics, and eventually – post World War II – into the world of business.  Along the way it continually asks the question “what is strategy, anyway”, before eventually landing on a definition which is basically around leveraging strengths to

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October 25, 2021 2 Comments

A Reading List

It’s the next-to-last blog of the academic year and that means it’s time for a quick review of books to read over the summer.  It’s a bit shorter than usual because I’ve been writing a fair bit about books these last few months, but we’ll give it a whirl. One book all higher education afficionados should read is The Low-Density University byEdward Maloney and Joshua Kim.  Not because it is particularly good or relevant, but because it perfectly captures the Spring of 2020 and

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June 16, 2021 No Comments

How to Write a Campus History

Among the many, many things I never thought I would do before getting into this line of work is reading a whole ton of campus histories.  Seriously, I will read almost anything like this.  It’s about the first thing I do when I get to a campus: head to the bookstore and try to find an institutional history.   And having thus become something of a connoisseur, I can give you an overview about the state of the art. Basically, there is a

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May 6, 2021 2 Comments

Amateur Hour

This week, in between negotiating computer crashes, dealing with angry university finance people and the usual grind, I managed to read a new book on the history of university teaching in the United States called The Amateur Hour by Jonathan Zimmerman.  It is pretty innovative in its way: there are histories of higher education in abundance, but most of them end up being histories of institutions (or institutional types), or sociological histories of the student body, or whatever: focussing on what was

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February 11, 2021 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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