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 secondary school through to university.  Because it is a work of ethnography, it contains more than its fair share of irritating narrative techniques – basically, i) recount an observed anecdote, ii) break down the anecdote to illuminate subtext which might have been unclear in he first recounting and iii) re-stating the anecdote in some kind of explanatory sociological rule for this group of Chinese youth.  But irritating as this expository strategy might seem, it’s redeemed by the fact that Chang is an excellent observer, and what she is observing is freaking dynamite.

For the most part, what Chang exposes is the social pecking order of the 1% of Chinese student body.  The way “Study Gods,” that is, those who can achieve top grades without appearing to work too hard at it (effectively demonstrating the quality Italians call sprezzatura) are considered to be the top of the heap, followed by those who work hard and get above-average grades.  Then there are those looked down upon – the ones who give up on the heavy studying or, worse, keep studying but can’t get the grades.  These are the “losers.”

What’s astonishing is the extent to which students at the top of this complicated heap seem to believe not just that they belong at the top, but that their presence there is, to some degree, pre-ordained.  Whatever the Chinese version of sprezzatura is, those who have it believe that it is partially innate – not the outcome of privilege (and believe me, there is a substantial amount of cultural and economic capital behind each and every one of these successes), but the result of luck, or perhaps genetics.  In many ways, this is the purest, ugliest form of Michael Young’s meritocracy: the kids at the top of the heap actually believe that they deserve to be top of a heap which is heavily tilted in their favor.

Perhaps simply out of my own idiosyncratic interest, I was most interested by what these Study Gods did after the all the gaokao, Olympiads and so forth – how they chose a university.  And even if teen ethnographies aren’t your thing, the book is worth your time for these stories and in particular how these students absorb information about institutional prestige (and, for instance, how even at this very high-level achievement, UBC is seen as a destination for “losers”).  I guarantee you will learn something.  So read the book.

Then, there is William Kirby’s Empire of Ideas, a book which is both somewhat peculiar and completely excellent.  One the one hand, this book is meant to be a kind of genealogy of great universities: from Germany (the center of global higher education in the 19^th century), the United States (ditto, the 20^th) and China (conceivably, the 21^st).  And it is delivered by an author almost uniquely attuned to those three countries (a Sinologist, Kirby did a graduate degree in Berlin and later became an academic administrator and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard). 

The bulk of the book is a set of eight institutional portraits: Humboldt University and Freie Univesiteit Berlin in Germany, Harvard, Berkeley and Duke in the United States, and Tsinghua, Nanjing and the University of Hong Kong in China.  Not all these institutions are equally worthy of the in-depth biography Kirby gives them: the Harvard story has been done better elsewhere and UHK actually isn’t that interesting.  The standout chapters are on Freie Universitieit (how to succeed on a limited budget through iron budgeting), Berkeley (which turns out to be the American McGill, massively under-resourced relative to its reputation) and Duke (how to succeed through superior Strategic Planning efforts). Frankly, those three chapters alone make the book worth the purchase price.

But the book also tries to provide a sense of the changing purpose of the university as the centre of global academia has drifted west across the Atlantic and then now – perhaps – across the Pacific.  Here the author has to hit a delicate balance: global leadership in science and research definitely did shift from Germany to America over the three decades on either side of 1900 (a tale well told in last year’s Allies and Rivals).  But while there are some recent clear signs of American decline– a subject to which I’ll return next week – it’s not exactly clear yet that the hands which will pick up the failing torch will be Chinese.  And so, while the book is excellent on the decline of Germany (basically: too much state control) there’s not a lot of symmetry between in the Germany-US and US-China transitions.  China might be a big deal and own the twenty-first century the way the Americans owned the twentieth.  But it’s not clear, and from the tone of the three Chinese chapters, one suspects that it has prematurely “gone German” and been taken over by the tate, to the detriment of science. Anyways, despite small drawbacks, they are both vital and unique contributions to our understanding of the state of global academia.   I recommend both wholeheartedly.