I read a few books over the summer. Below, a few quick summaries:

University of Nike: How Corporate Cash Bought American Higher Education by Melville House.

Every year, there’s a new book about how college sports corrupt American universities. They are all true. As a genre, however, they get old fast. This book does the usual, looking at the relationship between the University of Oregon and the sportswear company Nike. It’s not a bad book concerning the University of Oregon, but the attempts to widen the scope to the rest of higher education are less convincing. Read it if you’re a sports history junkie (I really enjoyed the sections about runner Steve Prefontaine), but otherwise there are better ways to spend your time.

 Land-Grant Colleges and the Reshaping of American Higher Education  by Nathan Sorber.

There are a bunch of good books about the origin and early development of land-grant universities: Scott Gelber’s The University and the People (about how the rise of populism affected state universities in the western states and in the South) and Roger Williams’ The Origins of Federal Support to Higher Education: George W. Atherton and the Land-Grant Movement.  You can add this book to that list. Sensibly limited to the Northeastern states (the western economy was quite different at this stage, and land-grants in those states took an extra 25 years to come into being because of the Civil War and Reconstruction), it reveals the interesting politics of land-grants, both  within institutions and between institutions and their surrounding communities. The work demonstrates that universities weren’t all that interested in pursuing “practical” education.  For instance, the University of Vermont was really interested in getting its hands on federal dollars to it could improve its Latin program, and thus kick Middlebury’s ass. The farmers, whom this money was intended to benefit, couldn’t see the point of “book learning” since they (rightly) suspected that students who benefitted from such education were never going to return to the farm. The modus vivendi that eventually emerged from this context was a recognizable forerunner of today’s land-grants, which are arguably among the most influential institutional models in the world (and, incidentally, the model for most of the big Western Canadian universities).

Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream by Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson.

This book was more about publicly-funded research than university-based research, although the authors – both are widely respect MIT professors – don’t seem to be all that fussy about the distinction between the two. The basic premise is that the USA underinvests in public research (as a percentage of GDP, it’s down about 60% on two decades ago, and is now slightly behind Canada), and that if the US wants to jump-start growth, then all it needs to do is boost that percentage way up, preferably by spending big money in places that aren’t already saturated with big research talent (ie. anywhere other than the coasts).  It’s probably true that more public R & D helps in a country like the US, and it’s also probably true that it equitable distribution of research would be better, if only to avoid all the gains from tech being eaten up by higher land values in the very few cities where tech is out of control. But it’s really not clear that you can, as Gruber and Johnson seem to believe, drop R&D money into any old place that happens to have a lot of university graduates and expect it to turn into a self-sustaining tech powerhouse (if that were true, Nova Scotia would be a northern Palo Alto).

I like some of the examinations of policy initiatives in places like Finland, Singapore and elsewhere, and if you really want a reason to read the book, this is it. But the parts reviewing the history of American policy are distressingly thin (the footnotes suggest that most of the Sputnik era – which takes up a dozen pages or so – were sourced from a single biography of President Eisenhower). And their “big solution” to the whole problem is basically a warmed-over version of Canada’s Supercluster initiative (which, intriguingly, the authors choose not to highlight or even mention though it’s impossible to believe they’re not aware of it since they make lots of encouraging noises about Toronto’s MaRS district). I recommend it to everyone at Universities Canada and U15, because it will provide fodder for their “fund university research and untold economic miracles will occur” refrain for federal dollars; everyone else might need to proceed with caution.  

High-Participation Systems of Higher Education edited by Brendan Cantwell, Simon Marginson and Anna Smolentseva.

Brilliant. This is the best book of comparative higher education ever put together. It’s stunning, and I say that even though I think the book suffers from a case-selection skew (two Nordic countries is one too many, France and Germany should have been included), and that a couple of the hypotheses around which the book is worded are somewhat too flexible to permit good comparative analysis. Also, some Canadian data is wrong, but it’s unreasonable to expect non-Canadians to know how to adjust for Statscan’s nonsense. Several of the opening chapters are simply magisterial, particularly those on stratification (horizontal and vertical) and equity, and need to be integrated into every higher education curriculum in the world… like, yesterday. As for the country chapters, the one on Russia is maybe the best thing about that country ever published in English.  I know comparative national policy isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but for my money this is almost certainly the Book of The Year. Expect me to refer to it liberally this year (there are at least a half-dozen blog posts in there). If you want to understand 21^st century higher education in anything like a global sense, this is the only book you need.