Hi all.  You know the drill.  Every six months I tell you about the higher education books I’ve read this year so you can go to the beach armed with the best in higher education reading.

But first, I hear you are interested in some non-higher-ed reading?  That sounds a bit weird to me, but I’ll oblige: My fiction pics for this last few months are The Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous, and The Stolen Bicycle by Wu Ming-YI.  The Hopkins Manuscript, a recently re-published apocalyptic sci-fi book from the 1930s by R.C. Sherriff is in its way extremely amusing – worth spending a couple of hours.  On the non-fiction side, I highly recommend Adeeb Khalid’s ’s Central Asia, possibly paired with Erika Fatland’s Sovietistan: Travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. Together, they are a very good introduction to a part of the world that deserves a lot more attention than it gets.  On the Canadian side, I recommend Robert Wardhaugh and Barry Ferguson’s The Rowell-Sirois Commission and the Remaking of Canadian Federalism, from UBC Press, which I found very useful background reading while the Health Accords negotiations were underway; but it is also an interesting look into the dynamics of federal-provincial relations of the late 1930s.

One of the best books I read in the last few months was University Reform, which I wrote a bit about back in February.   It’s a compilation of essays describing changes in higher education policy from different corners of the globe from exactly fifty years ago and is a delightful reminder that most of what you need to know about higher education is contained in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”  See if you can find it in the library or in a used bookshop – it’s worth it.

As far as history books go, The University of Oxford: A Brief History by Laurence Brockliss was not particularly informative (I suspect the longer version is better and I may have to give that one a go).   Two institutional histories which bear a surprising relation to each other are Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford by Rebecca S. Lowen, and McMaster University volume 3: 1957-1987 A Chance for Greatness by James G. Greenlee.   McMaster and Stanford were similar in the sense that neither were obviously future research powerhouses going into the 1950s, but both benefitted from leadership (Fred Ternan in the case of Stanford and Harry Thode in the case of McMaster) that believed deeply in a system of “steeples of excellence”.  The main thing I learned from these two books is that the “steeples” terminology did not originally refer to institutions choosing to be excellent in a few specific fields, but rather to departments choosing specific areas of research in which to specialize.  In any event, the similarity between the two institutional stories is striking.  Though, if you have to pick one, pick the Stanford one, because it’s significantly livelier prose.

Two American higher education finance books of note included Wealth, Cost and Price in American Higher Education by Bruce Kimball (with Sarah M Iler), and Campus Economics: How Economic Thinking Can Help Improve College and University Decisions by Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson.  The latter is by a pair of authors I have enjoyed over the years, but I felt a bit disappointed by this book in the sense that I felt it delivered less than it promised (though it’s possible I was over-reading the promise).  The Kimball book is most interesting when it acts as a history of philanthropy at American colleges, less so when talking about present-day endowments.  William Massy’s Resource Management for Colleges and Universities is a good if very nerdy read about universities can and should be more numerate and margin-conscious in making resource decisions, and that only by doing so can the academic mission be truly prioritized.  It’s an important argument, and one I will be returning to in tomorrow’s blog.

I read two campus novels, both involving women instructors facing precarious employment, both very good.  The first was Korean Teachers by Seo Su-Jin, which looks at the lives of a quartet of teachers at a Korean language school located at an unnamed “prestige” institution (I am pretty it’s either Korea or Yonsei University).  The second was Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture, which tells the tale of an economist who has just failed a tenure review spending the night before a guest lecture tossing and turning and talking to John Maynard Keynes (it makes more sense in context).  No hesitation in recommending either of these.

Just a random sample of other books include Yves Gingras’ Bibliometrics and Research Evaluation: Uses and Abuses which is both a very quick read and an excellent primer/history on the Science of Science.  John Smyth’s The Toxic University: Zombie Leadership, Academic Rock Stars and Neoliberal Ideology  is one of those UK academic whines that leads nowhere…it’s like Stefan Collini but without the style.  L’universita per tutti: riforma e crisi del sistema universitario italiano by Andrea Graziosa is a decent thumbnail history of Italian higher education in the twentieth and early twenty-first century, but like Smyth, all change is bad change.  The difference is that Graziosa’s analysis of Italian disfunction leads him to the conclusion that Italian universities need a big dose of America, but one doesn’t get the impression that he’s so interested in the policies of American higher education as much as he is the big gobs of cash their top universities swim in (at least compared to Italian universities).  The Dean of Shandong, by Canadian-academic-come-Chinese-academic-manager Daniel Bell, is a weird mix of personal memoir, general cultural analysis, and exposition of internal Chinese university politics, but definitely worth the read. 

I know we’re not allowed to say nice things about Russia these days, but there really has been quite the spate of interesting books about Russia and its surrounding region lately.  Higher Education in Russia by Yaroslav Kuzminov and Maria Yudkevich is flat-out one of the best books on a national higher education system ever written.  It expertly mixes historical analysis – and there is a lot of history in Russian higher education, given how many times the system has been made over – with good statistical analysis to give a nuanced picture of how the system there works (or at least worked until Putin blew it all up again by leaving the Bologna system not long after the invasion of Ukraine last year).  Every country should have this good a higher education book about their system.  Of similar quality – if covering a broader set of countries in slightly less detail – is Maia Chankseliani’s What Happened to the Soviet University?, which looks at how higher education systems across the old Soviet Union have slowly diverged over time.  Chankseliani is also co-editor (along with Isak Frumin and Igor Fedyukin) of Building Research Capacity at Universities: Insights from post-Soviet countries, which covers a similar range of countries and provides a bit more of a deep dive on the research aspect of institutions and the on-going wrangling between universities and national academies.  Both are excellent.  Finally, David Mandel’s “Optimizing” Higher Education in Russia: University Teachers  and their Union Universitetskaya solidarnost  is a decent short recounting of the evolution of academic freedom and academic working conditions during Vladimir Putin’s second mandate. 

And finally, I can’t finish this list without reminding readers about the two books we covered in podcasts earlier this year.  One was Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis, Bryan Alexander’s perfectly-timed take on how higher education institutions around the world are responding to the climate crisis (podcast here).  The other was Corrupted: A Study of Chronic Dysfunction in South African Universities by Jonathan Jansen.  It’s an incredibly powerful story of how some institutions in South Africa have been debased both academically and financially over the past decade.  If you don’t buy the book (which, you know, you definitely should) then do listen to the podcast.  It’s a doozy.

So now you’re up to date with new lit for the summer.  Bonne lecture!