It’s the next-to-last blog of the year, and so as usual it’s time to review the various higher ed-related books I have read over the course of 2019, just in case some of you are dying to spend the holidays boning up on higher ed history/policy.  I will spare you a potted description of all the 40-odd books, and just stick to the highlights.

(For all you weirdos who for some strange reason prefer to read something other than higher education stuff over the holidays, my fiction list for 2019 is here.  Top picks are Anna Burns’ Milkman and Wang Xiaofang’s The Civil Servant’s Notebook.  I haven’t got around to writing my non-fiction list yet, but the winner by a country-mile is Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick and Other Essays.  Read them all, thank me later.) 

A high proportion of my Canadian higher education reads were campus histories and I will mention just three of them here.  One is All True Things: A History of the university of Alberta 1908-2008 by Rod McLeod, which I thought was a terrific little institutional history that really brought out the level of ambition that the university’s founders had for the organization.  It was not a given in 1908 that Alberta – then quite a poor province – would let its provincial university emulate institutions like the University of Wisconsin (already emerging as one of the continent’s top research institutions).  It’s very good at debunking some myths (the stories about Aberhardt persecuting the university in response to the snub of not giving him an honorary degree), not as good at others (as far as I can tell, the author thinks the university was on the end of continual cuts from about 1972 through to the early 2000s, which is not really true).  I also have tremendous love for any institutional history with the guts to straight-out accuse a Presidential search consultant (Janet Wright) of gaming the 1994 Presidential search process in favour of one specific candidate.  I have no idea if it’s true or not, but I think more informed but scurrilous gossip of this type would be good for the genre.

I also spent a lot of time reading about York University, which is one of Canada’s more fascinating institutions.  Two pieces here of note: Michiel Horn’s coffee-table-sized history of York’s first 50 years entitled York University: The Way Must be Tried, and the recent volume, edited by Lorna Marsden, with essays by the five living York Presidents, called Leading The Modern University: York University’s Presidents on Continuity and Change, 1974-2014.  The latter is better if you’ve already read the former and have some sense of some of York’s chaotic beginnings (and their long-term consequences), and YMMV depending on whether you think Presidential reflections are a worthwhile form of literature.  I say generally no, but this one’s an exception partly because of the five quite different takes, but also for the glorious goofiness of Susan Mann’s contribution which, for quite obscure reasons, is written in the third person.

Of the other Canadian history works, I kind of enjoyed National Research in Canada: The NRC 1916-1966 by Wilfrid Eggleston, if for no other reason than that it really drives home the depth of Canadian government half-assedness about research and how it has been governed since Day One by regional equity considerations.  I also read former Victoria University President Paul Gooch’s Course Correction: A Map for the Distracted University.  I’ll be reviewing it for the Literary Review of Canada early in the new year, so I won’t get into it too much here, but if you can imagine Louis Rosovsky’s The University: An Owners Manual adapted for the CBC and stripped of pretty much anything controversial, you’ve got the general idea.

Y’all know that my shtick, to a large extent, is “the Canadian guy who knows what’s going on elsewhere”, and to keep up that shtick I spend quite a bit of time reading material on international higher ed.  A lot of my reading this year has been related to US higher education (and after about ten years diligently reading about US HE I finally feel I am getting a handle on it).  Five works were of particular note.  There were two new works out on Land-Grants: one by Nathan M. Sorber on their origins (Land-grants Colleges and Popular Revolt: The Origins of the Morrill Act and the Reform of Higher Education) and one by Stephen Gavazzi and Gordon Dee on their future (Land Grant Colleges of the Future: Higher Education for the Public Good), and I would recommend both of them to anyone interested in the subject. My favourite story in the former is the one about how the University of Vermont tried to repurpose its Morrill money during the 1860s to achieve its true aim: crushing Middlebury’s classics program). 

Still in the US, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality by Julie A. Reuben, is a very useful (if somewhat long) history of how the university as an institution made the transition from serving the Church to serving Science.  Alexandra Logue’s Pathways to Reform: Credits and Conflict at the City University of New York is definitely too long, but as a college procedural on illustrating the immense resistance some academics can display towards even a relatively small and sensible change in a system the size of CUNY, it holds a certain grim fascination.  Julie Posselt’s Inside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity and Faculty Gate-keeping is the perfect length, and very much in the tradition of other recent good books like Lauren Rivera’s Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs and Natasha Warikoo’s The Diversity Bargain and Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions and Meritocracy at Elite Universities.  Two thumbs way up for this account of faculty groupthink.

One country I spent a lot of time on this year was India (because it’s complicated, and I often feel ignorant when trying to comprehend it).  There aren’t a lot of very good one-volume syntheses because it’s way too large and diverse for that, though the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration in Delhi, under the leadership of respected education expert NV Varghese, puts out a useful annual review with a rotating thematic focus (for instance: India Higher Education Report 2017: Teaching Learning and Quality in Higher Education; the 2018 version is on Financing.)  Raisaheb Kale’s Indian Higher Education: A Perspective From the Margin, for instance, is one of only dozens of books out there that focuses specifically on issues around equity in universities, which in India is discussed in almost tedious detail with respect to religion and caste. Rakesh Batabyal’s JNU: The Making of a University, is an institutional history of a rather idiosyncratic elite post-independence institution in North Delhi which nevertheless offers some significant insight into how academia as a whole has developed in the country.  The University as a Site of Resistance: Identity and Student Politics, by Gaurav Pathania is a quite case study of a single institution (Osmania University in Hyderabad) to look at how students – and in particular student politicians, who are deeply implicated in clientelistic party political networks to a degree almost unimaginable in western countries – contribute to broader political movements (in this case, the movement to carve out a new Telangana state from the existing state of Andhra Pradesh). 

Whistling through the rest of the world, Rebels and Rage: Reflecting on #feesmustfall by Adam Habib is a good historical account of how Wits survived being the epicentre of the 2015-6 South African free tuition demonstrations.  I also went on a kick of reading about communist higher education and its aftermath, notably Ruth Hayhoe’s China’s Universities 1895-1995: A Century of Cultural Conflict (long overdue, I know) and the excellent Loren Graham’s Science in Russia and the Soviet Union; A Short History, both of which I endorse unreservedly.  International Status Anxiety and Higher Education: The Soviet Legacy in China and Russia (Anataly Aleksiyenko, Qiang Zha, Igor Chirikov, Jun Li, eds) is a little more uneven than those two, but still an interesting work to help people think through how systems transition on a large scale.  The Good University by Raewyn Connell was interesting but not, ultimately, very convincing unless you genuinely think universities exist for the convenience of academic staff rather than the improvement of students.  Higher Education in Federal Countries: A Comparative Study (Lori Poloni-Staudinger, Martin Carnot, Isak Froumin & Oleg Lushkov, eds) is, as I recounted back here, a really stellar work of comparative higher education education which – bonus! – has maybe the best chapter on Canada of any major comparative book of the last decade or so.  It was, I think, my third favourite higher ed book this year.

My second favourite higher ed this book was The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes Us or Breaks Us Paul Tough.  I was really prepared to dislike this book; I was not, for instance, a fan of Tough’s last book on “grit” in education.  But it’s a very thoughtful and nuanced book about social class and higher education and how the American system has failed the people it should have helped the most.  He takes a lot of time to explain other people’s ideas and data in detail; every data nerd should be so lucky as to have this kind of journalist writing up their ideas.  The organization isn’t what I would call flawless and it’s stronger when discussing admissions than it is for retention/success, but still overall very good and worthy of your reading attention.

And now, finally, to number one, and I admit my choice is an idiosyncratic one that most people would not agree with.  But High Participation Systems of Higher Education (Brendan Cantwell, Simon Marginson and Anna Smolentseva, eds) is just genius.  To my mind, this is probably the best comparative higher education book ever written.  I know comparative higher education systems can be pretty dry, but somehow, the editors and authors managed to fit in just about every important topic in global higher education, and they did so in a thoroughly rigorous and appropriately data-heavy manner.  So, so good.

Anyways, there you go.  Happy reading to one and all.