I know every single one of you blog readers brings higher ed literature to the beach, and so – since we are approaching the end of the blog season – it’s time for a reading round-up to help you fill out your summer reading list.

I’ve been reading fewer institutional histories than usual.  There was The University of New Zealand by Hugh Parton, a history of higher education in New Zealand up to about 1960, when the country had four campuses but only one examining university board between them.  That went about as well as you’d imagine (Canada isn’t the only country where stultifying levels of regional boosterism and self-interest makes inter-campus co-operation nearly impossible), and this book relays every detail of the university’s eventual break-up.  Kenkoku University and the History of Pan-Asianism, by Yuka Hiruma Kishida, is an intriguing history of a multi-ethnic Japanese university in Manchuria which – in very imperfect terms – tried to live the ideals of pan-Asianism in the 1930s only to (inevitably) succumb to Japanese chauvinism once the war against the United States started in 1941.  A final institutional history that’s well worth your time is Judith Goodstein’s Millikan’s School, a history of the first few decades of Caltech.  Lest you be in any doubt of what the combination of strategic hiring and high-level engagement with top national science bureaucrats can achieve – read this one!

The subject of race and universities is salient right now.  In the US, these books are usually about the history of higher education and the imperfect integration and institutional stratification.  The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom looks at this from the perspective of a number of different university heads who had to make difficult decisions about de-segregations from the 1940s to the 1960s, while Adam Harris’ The State Must Provide: the Definitive History of racial Inequality on American Higher Education  traces the history of mixed racial education from before the Civil War, through Jim Crow and on to the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision, when the 14^th Amendment somehow became a tool for white people to resist affirmative action.  Both are interesting, but if you must pick one, go with the latter.  From our side of the border, I read The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities which was solid, but a) reported on data which now feels a bit dated and b) suffers from being overly focussed on faculty rather than students.

The Lost Promise: American Universities in the 1960s, as I recounted back here, is a broad and interesting history of campus radicalism in America that ultimately does not really make the case it sets out to prove – namely that campus radicalism created a fiscal backlash from politicians, which eventually made the expansion of higher education unsupportable.  Is the Library Burning, a contemporary account of campus radicalism by then-20-somethings Roger Rapoport and Laurence Kirshbaum, is not anywhere near as comprehensive but there is something attractive about the immediacy of their writing. 

On the subject of money and its corrosive effects on American higher education, there was Bankers in the Ivory Tower: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in Higher Education by Charlie Eaton, which links a plethora of American higher education ills to the financialization (and which I found pretty contrived).  Much better was Josh Mitchell’s The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe which does an excellent job tracing the history of student aid in America from the 1950s to the present (trust me, it’s more interesting than it sounds), even if the final chapters recounting some fairly extreme stories of individuals falling into student debt leaves the book feeling less than entirely balanced.

Two of the most worthwhile reads of this spring were Presidential memoirs.  The first, Winnebagos on Wednesdays (sorry, you’re going to need to read the book to understand the reference) by former Tulane President Scott Cowen is a very down-to-earth set of stories distilling the wisdom of a couple of decades of leading a university through good times and bad (Tulane, like the rest of New Orleans, had a near-death experience in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina came to town).  The second, The Empowered University, is by Freeman Hrabowski who was President of the University of Maryland (Baltimore County) for nearly three decades.  It is a more triumphal book than Winnebagos, but in fairness Hrabowski and UMBC have a lot to boast about in terms of making itself more accessible to minority students and ensuring they succeed, while at the same time growing the institution, making it more research intensive and community-focused as well.   The key, Hrabowski notes, is institutional culture, and this is one of those rare books that shows how a determined leader can change culture. If you are a University President or Provost, you’ll want to make time for both these books this summer.

There are a lot of books out there looking at “new” direction of universities, university management and higher education generally.  The best of these, Pivot, by Joanne Soliday and Mark Lombardi, I discussed back here.  Other included James Coe’s The New University: Local Solutions to a Global Crisis , Jonathan Grant’s The New Power University: The Social Purpose of Higher Education in the 21^st Century (a less-than-totally convincing Blairite take on how UK universities are learning to serve their students and communities better), Elizabeth Holcombe et al.’s Shared Leadership in Higher Education (some interesting ideas and essays, but the definition of what constitutes “shared leadership” is so broad as to make the book conceptually a bit limited).  Also, two books of essays on this subject, published a decade apart, were The Future University: Ideas and Possibilities edited by Ronald Barnett (avoid: a high percentage of the articles are just dreary op eds with academic references in order to make it look scholarly) and the very strong Higher Education in the Next Decade: Global Challenges, Future Prospects, (Eggins et al, eds) whose global cast of authors generally delivering some very useful observations on the state of higher education around the planet in the early 2020s.

Some tough to categorize books included Larry Moneta’s The Business of Student Affairs, which is really a how-to guide for running a US student affairs office.  I wouldn’t say much of the advice is all that exciting, but I found it interesting to understand how this portfolio runs differently in the US than in Canada.  The main difference seems to be that while some US student affairs departments have responsibilities Canadian ones would never dream of, particularly with respect to big-time sports and property management, they are at the same time less invested in issues management on behalf of the university as a whole.  The US Power in International Higher Education, edited by Jenny Lee, has a few interesting insights into aspects of the conduct of US international offices, but too many articles are infused with a tiresome po-faced approach (OMG powerful institutions engage in unequal partnerships!  Who’da thunk?), which makes the book a bit of a slog.  Finally, the University of Calgary’s Loren Falkenburg and Elizabeth Cannon recently published Strategic University Management: Future-Proofing Your Institution. It is an interesting and useful contribution to the literature; I agree completely with the chapters on expectations-setting, engagement and linking strategic plans to operational ones, but found the chapter dealing with the heart of the issue – turning insights from consultations into actual strategy –a bit thin.

Okay, now down to three books that really made me think.  The first was Reforms, Organizational Change and Performance in Higher Education: A Comparative Account from the Nordic Countries (Pinheiro et al, eds), which I mentioned here.  It provides top-notch mixed-methods comparative research into how educational institutions are actually managed, a field which in North America often relies too much on discussion about “neoliberalism.”  Elizabeth Buckner’s Degrees of Dignity: Arab Higher Education in the Global Era was also excellent.  I didn’t agree with everything in there, but it contains some excellent insights and I think Dr. Buckner found an appealing way to write about “regional” higher education and hope her style gets copied far and wide.  Finally, there is Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (Stevens, Miller-Idriss and Shami).  This intriguing book is ostensibly about area studies and how geographically-based knowledge gets systematically devalued in big traditional disciplines like Political Science and Economics in favour of universal “placeless” knowledge.  That in itself is interesting, but perhaps more intriguing is the way they document how this fight plays out bureaucratically inside universities, when well-funded and secure disciplinary “departments” can behave imperiously towards more precarious cross-disciplinary “centres”.  Clocking in at around 140 pages, this one is well worth the time of anyone seeking to better understand the politics of knowledge inside social science and humanities disciplines.

Anyways, there’s your beach reads for 2022.  Enjoy as many of them as you can.