Morning all. You know the drill: twice a year I report on the books I’ve read in the past six months. Today is my summer 2024 edition. Here goes.

Let’s start with the non-higher ed stuff, because let’s face it, that’s what you’re all really going to read in the summer. On the fiction side, do read Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, which won the international Booker prize last month. And if you like Francis Spufford (Golden Hill, Light Perpetual and above all, Red Plenty, the greatest novel about economics ever written), then definitely pick up a copy of Cahokia Jazz, a piece of 1920s noir set in a fictional Cahokia which has only just acceded to the United States and in which whites are trying to push out the Indigenous population. And on the non-fiction side, everyone who does not read Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia is missing out. Quite apart from the story itself, which is fantastic, it’s maybe the best portrait of how middle-class Russians dealt with the transition away from socialism in the early 1990s apart from Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time. In light of how Russian revanchism is driving world events, it’s a timely read.

Anyways, on to the actual reading. Much of my reading is about issues in international higher education, which I suspect is of marginal interest to most of you (although my podcast interview with NV Varghese about the points he raised in his book, co-edited with Jinusha Panigrahi, Indian Higher Education Report 2021 Private Higher Education was pretty well received). But just for the sake of completeness: Vania Markarian’s Uruguay, 1968: Student Activism from Global Counterculture to Molotov Cocktailswas a little bit disappointing. It’s not a bad book or anything, but the lens here is much more about “youth culture” than it is about students and the academic environment from which they sprang (which just tells you that contestation of academia was less central to youth revolt in this corner of Latin America than it was in places like, say, Paris in the same year.

And speaking of France, I was impressed by Les Universités en France (Frédéric Forest, ed.), which is hard to beat as in its coverage of contemporary issues in French higher education. Précairité Générale: Témoignage d’un rescapé de l’Université by Charles Bosvieux-Onyekwelu probably does not break new ground in talking about the general phenomenon of precarity in higher education but, as I noted back here, it is always useful to remember that the hierarchical and cliquish nature of universities are pretty universal and not a function of some kind of Anglo-Saxon “neo-liberalism.”

With respect to the history of higher education in the United States, I highly recommend An Accidental Triumph: The Improbable History of American Higher Education by Sol Gittleman. If you haven’t got time to read John Thelin’s A History of Higher Education in America, let alone consume Roger Geiger’s entire oeuvre, this is an excellent alternative. Short, snappy and with some non-standard takes on what the sector’s key turning points actually were, this is well worth it.

Unfortunately I can’t say the same thing about The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education by Arizona State University (ASU) President Michael Crow and co-author William Dabars. Partly, it’s because this book retraces a lot of the same territory as their previous book Designing the New American University and partly because it’s an overly long and sadly turgid way of saying “ASU is a university doing tons of interesting things that may possibly be an emerging model for other universities” Nothing in the book persuades me that the second part of that sentence is true, so avoid this one.

A much less sweeping historical book on US higher education is The Tuskegee Student Uprising, which is both a history of Tuskegee University from its foundation in 1881 by Booker T. Washington to the civil rights era and a very specific history of the events of the late 1960s, which included student occupations designed to force cautious university administrators to be much more politically active in the wake of the King assassination (it’s not just a good campus history, it’s a pretty good treatise on the balancing act that middle-class blacks in the south—and there were some—faced in the civil rights era). 

And finally from the US was The Career Arts: Making the Most of College, Credentials and Connections, by my friend Ben Wildavsky. It’s a bit of an odd book, in terms of audience and marketing: I don’t think there are that many teens buying books from Princeton University Press. Instead, it’s really a book for parents looking to advise their teens on the big decisions they need to make about going to university. Overall, it’s an excellent guide to the literature on the benefits of an undergraduate degree, and specifically debunks many of the irritating “higher education is no longer worth it” screeds that are (inaccurately) popping up everywhere. But it also is smart enough to suggest that in fact degrees are only a start: there is a lot of co-curricular work that students need to put in so as to gain maximum value from their degrees. 

So now to Canadian higher education, and specifically to Hope Circuits: Rewiring Universities and Other Organizations for Human Flourishing by Jessica Riddell. This book has received a fair bit of attention over the past few months, mainly because it taps into many academics’ frustration with their working lives. To its credit, the book asks a fair number of good questions about why life in universities is so frustrating. However, when it comes to solutions, the book is about 50% handwaving and 45% name-dropping appeals to authority (e.g. “as Martin Luther King once said…”). Apparently, a Hope Circuits Part Deux is in the works, so possibly the author is saving her ammo for the second volume. But one thing I found deeply peculiar about the book is the insistence that the problem is universities as institutions that are the problem when, frankly, most of the instances she raises are actually about the behaviour of academics: which is to say that the problem might academia rather than universities. This might be a little on the chicken-and-egg side for some people (are institutions reflections of culture or vice-versa?), but it kind of matters. If the problem is not institutions poisoning academics but academics poisoning institutions (as I suggested might be the case back here) then institutionally-focused solutions might not actually have much effect.

NOSM U (formerly the Northern Ontario School of Medicine) might be the youngest ever to have two books written about it. The first was the 2009 book The Making of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine: A Case Study in the History of Medical Education, which was largely written and edited by the gang responsible for the school’s creation and focuses to a surprisingly detailed extent on the development of its innovative curriculum. The second is Nothing Ordinary: The Story of the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, by Larry Krotz, which focuses much more on the impact NOSM U has had on the communities it serves (and there are a lot of them), as told through the stories of its graduates. By design not a scholarly work, it’s still a good way for a new institution to tell its stories and help imagine its potential.

Which brings me to For The Public Good: Reimagining Arts Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities by Loleen Berdahl, Jonathan Malloy and Lisa Young. It is the kind of quietly good book we need to see more of. I mean, it’s not a page turner (it’s about curriculum, for God’s sake). And I don’t even entirely agree with the book’s central premise, that Graduate Arts programs have three central contributions to make to the public good with respect to “wicked problems,” EDI and a rather specific definition of talent (they aren’t wrong, exactly, but they aren’t unique to Arts and I can think of a few other ways to formulate the notion of “Public Good”). But you know what? Who cares? This book provides a very solid description of the process of defining and developing excellent, sustainable arts programs that serve students rather than academics. And not only is it dead-on in terms of its recommendations about how to design and evaluate programs, it has a lot of helpful matrices and worksheets to help those who are put in positions requiring them to do exactly that (because Lord knows universities don’t give a lot of thought to training individuals in curriculum/program design, which at least in theory is their raison d’etre). More like this, please.

Before I go, I do need to recommend one last book: it’s a (mostly) campus novel called How I Won a Nobel Prize, by Julius Taranto. I am not going to say too much about this because it is absolutely delicious, and I do not want to spoil it for anyone. But basically, it’s the story of a grad student who gets dragged by her advisor to a billionaire-funded advanced research institute reserved exclusively for academics who have been cancelled elsewhere (think CalTech or Rockefeller University crossed with University of Austin (not UT Austin) and you’ll get the idea). It’s good for all sorts of reasons—not least of which is the depth to which the author has bothered to understand the life of physicists and the extent to which really advanced work depends on modelling and coding—and there are one or two absolutely fantastic twists. But it stays reasonably light and fast, so it’s basically made for summer. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Happy summer reading!