All right, it’s nearly summer and even if going to the beach seems like a forlorn hope this year, I know you are all desperate for my higher education book picks.  So, here goes.

Among the 35 higher education books I have read so far this year, there are a lot to forget.  I bought a ton of higher education books from Palgrave in December when they were running a ludicrous 90% off sale, and…let’s just say that a lot of these aren’t actually what you would call particularly good.  Many are not-particularly-strong PhD theses or one-dimensional summations of UNESCO data, or single-author rants about this or that country’s policies.  It’s a bit dispiriting to see what is considered publishable in this industry, to be honest.

But let’s focus in the positive. Considering the great doctoral-theses-becoming monographs, an honourable mention goes to Measuring University Internationalization by Catherine Yuan Gao.  It’s a little nerdy, but useful in terms of understanding different national approaches to measuring institutional inputs and outputs related to internationalization (and consequently provides an interesting general lens on the incompatibility of institutional data across national borders.  Runner-up in this category goes to Post-Secondary Education in British Columbia: Public Policy and Structural Development, 1960-2010 by Robert Cowin.  It suffers a bit from being too obviously based on a thesis (the theoretical sections are unnecessary for most readers), but every province deserves a policy history this good.  I appreciated it enormously.

But first place, without a doubt, goes to Ogechi Anwanyu’s The Politics of Access: University Education and Nation-Building in Nigeria, 1948-2000 (published by University of Calgary Press, which seems like an odd pairing, but whatever). This may be the best national history of higher education I have ever read on any country in the developing world.  What is especially impressive about it is the way it intertwines the history of the development of higher education institutions with that of the country itself.  Too often these issues are treated in isolation, so a work which nicely blends educational history with political history is very welcome.  I wish there were a book like this for every country.  Really excellent stuff.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time looking at issues in American higher education.  That includes some really intriguing regional histories of American history, the best of which is Higher Education in the American West: Regional History and State Contexts, (with a whole bunch of editors, including David Longanecker).  I genuinely think that the historical approach to US higher education is less useful for outsiders than a regional approach.  By and large region gets dealt with as “there’s the Northeast and everyone else”, but I think there is a pretty good case for at least five and maybe six regions in American higher education (depending on whether you count Texas as a separate region), and from an international perspective it would be a lot more accurate to think of the US as six different sets of system-types than it is as one single country.  In any case, this one is the best of the regional bunch.

Among other US higher education books, I recommend Redesigning American Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success by Thomas Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars and Davis Jenkins, if only because this was the book that made me realize that when Americans talk about “the community college of the future”, they are, knowingly or not, making the case for Canadian community colleges.  I am also a big fan of Vida Avery’s Philanthropy in Black Higher Education: A Fateful Hour Creating the Atlanta University System, which tells the very strange story of how this merger of several struggling denominational schools became combined, thanks to Rockefeller money, to become a jewel in America’s system of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (see here for more on the AUS, a campus some of you will recognize from Spike Lee’s School Daze).

(if you’re clicking through on these books and gasping at price tags, well…this is why I only buy Palgrave at 90% off).

There was one big new release this spring which I really wanted to like but just couldn’t: Markets, Minds and Money: Why America Leads in University Research, by Columbia University economist Miguel Urquiola.  His thesis is that American universities outperform European ones because they operate more as a “free market”: that they have “self-rule” (i.e. autonomy), “free scope” to offer different types of products (i.e. differentiation) and operate in a free market with easy entry and exit.  This is a reasonable thesis.  He then goes on to do write a couple of hundred pages of good comparative history of American and European universities to the early 1800s, showing how these three things evolved in the US but didn’t really in Europe.  Great first half of a book, right?  But then it just stops.  The entire last 150 years?  Not considered.  The idea that American research might be great because of massive government subsidies through things like the National Institute of Health?  Not considered.  Absolutely bizarre.   

The question of comparative performance across America and Europe is a fraught one generally, mainly because the whole idea of higher education studies is so different on the two sides of the Atlantic.  In Europe, higher education studies are largely an outgrowth of management studies where institutions are the focus; in the US it’s mainly a branch of sociology with students as the focus.  When Americans do write about institutional management, it tends to be in a how-to format, like Managing the Research University by Dean O. Smith, which is the absolute perfect gift for someone you know who has just become a VP Research or maybe an Assistant Dean with research responsibilities.

But this approach lacks the sheer analytical brilliance of the best European books on University Management, including Managing Reform in Universities: The Dynamics of Culture, Identity and Organization (Stensaker, Valimaa and Sarrico, eds) and Managing Universities: Policy and Organizational Change from a West European Comparative Perspective (Beliklie, Enders, Leppoli eds), the latter of which is flat-out excellent: a tour de force of multi-dimensional quantitative analysis of both governance and management in a comparative perspective.  There is nothing even close to this in North America where analysis barely goes beyond otiose notions of “academic capitalism” or – god forbid – neoliberalism, which are as much terms of abuse as of analysis.  If you want to understand the nuances of academic and institutional culture across Europe and you can only read one book, Managing Universities is it.  Highly recommended.

But enough of the academic stuff: I’ll leave you with one great, trashy fun read: The Professor and the Parson by Adam Sisman. This is the tale of Robert Parkin Peters, a seven-times married (with some bigamist overlapping) academic and clerical fraud who from the 1950s to 1990s kept finding ways to get hired for jobs in  religious studies all the way across the Commonwealth and South Africa (in Canada, he managed to get hired at Trinity and the University of Ottawa).  It is a fantastic and entertaining tale of how an imposter could prosper in academia in the pre-internet era.  Definitely something to read at the beach – if beaches were still a thing in 2020.