Category: Now Reading

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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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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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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Best Higher Ed Books of 2020

Around this time of year, I always do a “Higher Ed Books of the Year” (usual caveat: these are books I happened to read in a year, not books which appeared in a year, though obviously there is some overlap).  This year, I did a mid-year “Best Books” in June, so today’s post will focus on my reading over the last six months but end with a books of the year countdown including all twelve months.  (If you’re interested, I have my

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Studying Higher Education Decision-Making

One of the things that I find most interesting about higher education studies is how there are all these completely different regional/national literatures that pay almost no attention to one another.  For instance, in North America, higher education studies mostly come out of sociology and mostly deal with how institutions and institutional policies affect students.  In Latin America, there is a quite immense literature on things like pedagogy (seriously – go into any decent bookshop and there will be an

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