New Books in Higher Education

Avi Staiman, CEO of Academic Language Experts discusses advancements in AI in academic publishing. Topics include the impact of AI on research, risks and benefits of language models, AI tools for research, and development of SciRader AI.

In the library profession, and in the world as a whole, the experiences of trans and gender diverse people often go unnoticed, hidden, and ignored. Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries (Library Juice Press, 2021) is entirely written and edited by trans and gender diverse people involved in the field: its fifty-seven authors include workers from academic and public libraries, special collections and archives, and more; LIS students; and a few people who have left the library profession completely.Editors Kalani Adolpho, Stephen G. Krueger, and Krista McCracken share in this interview how this book is not intended to be the definitive guide to trans and gender diverse experiences in libraries, but instead to start the conversation. This project hopes to help trans and gender diverse people in libraries realize that they are not alone, and that their experiences are worth sharing.This book also demonstrates some of the reality in a field that loves to think of itself as inclusive. From physical spaces to policies to interpersonal ignorance and bigotry, the experiences recounted in this book demonstrate that the library profession continues to fail its trans and gender diverse members over and over again. You cannot read these chapters and claim that Safe Zone stickers and “libraries are for everyone” signs have done the job. You cannot assume that everything is fine in your workplace because nobody has spoken out. You can no longer pretend that trans and gender diverse people don’t exist.Find the table of contents for Trans and Gender Diverse Voices in Libraries as well as open access chapters online here. Learn about the Trans and Gender Diverse LIS network here.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Niko Pfund joins the podcast to discuss the value of scientific content for building out Large Language Models and some of the challenges around tracking the quality and ownership of aggregated content from unknown sources. We also discuss potential avenues for collaboration between Generative AI companies and scholarly publishers.Niko Pfund is Academic Publisher at Oxford University Press and President of Oxford’s US office. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carl Van Ness describes the remarkable formative years of higher education in Florida, including the impact of the Buckman Act of 1905. The podcast explores conflicts over university presidents, a student rebellion at Florida A&M University, the challenges faced by university administrators, and the budget battles impacting Florida universities.

Author Lauren S. Foley explores the contentious policy of affirmative action in higher education, discussing the strategies used by admissions officers to maintain diversity after its ban. The podcast delves into the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, the Texas top 10% plan, the impact of affirmative action bans in California, and the challenges faced by institutions in navigating these bans while striving for racial diversity.

Dr. Ethel Tungohan, host of the Academic Aunties podcast, discusses the hidden curriculum in academia, the need for community and open expression, challenges faced by non-tenured academics, recognizing and valuing caregiving roles, and the importance of prioritizing inner voices.

Landon Mascareñaz and Doannie Tran propose that, even as events of this decade have exposed stress points in existing top-down, closed systems within education and other public institutions, they have also created prime opportunities to rethink and redesign those systems in ways that encourage civic participation and invigorate local democracy.In The Open System: Redesigning Education and Reigniting Democracy (Harvard Education Press, 2023), Mascareñaz and Tran argue for a critical revitalization of public education centered in openness, an organization design concept in which an entity receives, considers, and acts on input from the community it serves. As they demonstrate, open education policy improves information flow, increasing opportunity, bolstering public trust, and making room for cocreation and coproduction driven by community partnerships and family engagement.Based on their groundbreaking work with educational coalitions such as the Kentucky Coalition for Advancing Education and Colorado's Homegrown Talent Initiative, Mascareñaz and Tran introduce six key liberatory moves that can bring about open system transformation. They highlight real-life examples of the types of incremental, specific, and discrete projects that leaders can use to create openness in educational systems at the school, district, and state levels, providing a blueprint for changemaking. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Rachael Cayley, Associate Professor in the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Toronto, Canada. Rachael also blogs. Her Explorations of Style is a wide-ranging discussion of topics associated with graduate writing. In our interview, we talk about mindset and drafting and revision and structure and writing, writing, writing — basically, all the great stuff in Thriving As a Graduate Writer: Principles, Strategies, and Practices for Effective Academic Writing (U Michigan Press, 2023) for you, the graduate writer!Rachael Cayley : "You should have an Introduction, and I believe strongly that you should write the Introduction first. But you shouldn't polish an Introduction first. A student of mine — after I'd explained this — said that it sounded like making an IKEA table. So, you don't want to tighten the first leg of the table too much before you've started tightening the other legs, because you need all the connections in place first before you can flip the thing over and have a stable structure. Well, it's the same with an Introduction: you tighten a little bit here, and you move to the next part and tighten there, and so on, gradually round and round that part of your text, until you've got something solid." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The vast majority of American college students attend two thousand or so private and public institutions that might be described as the Middle—reputable educational institutions, but not considered equal to the elite and entrenched upper echelon of the Ivy League and other prestigious schools. Richard DeMillo has a warning for these colleges and universities in the Middle: If you do not change, you are heading for irrelevance and marginalization. In Abelard to Apple, DeMillo argues that these institutions, clinging precariously to a centuries-old model of higher education, are ignoring the social, historical, and economic forces at work in today's world. In the age of iTunes, open source software, and for-profit online universities, there are new rules for higher education.DeMillo, who has spent years in both academia and in industry, explains how higher education arrived at its current parlous state and offers a road map for the twenty-first century. He describes the evolving model for higher education, from European universities based on a medieval model to American land-grant colleges to Apple's iTunes U and MIT's OpenCourseWare. He offers ten rules to help colleges reinvent themselves (including “Don't romanticize your weaknesses”) and argues for a focus on teaching undergraduates.DeMillo's message—for colleges and universities, students, alumni, parents, employers, and politicians—is that any college or university can change course if it defines a compelling value proposition (one not based in “institutional envy” of Harvard and Berkeley) and imagines an institution that delivers it.Richard A. DeMillo is Distinguished Professor of Computing and Professor of Management, former John P. Imlay Dean of Computing, and Director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Institute of Technology. Author of over 100 articles, books, and patents, he has held academic positions at Purdue University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Padua. He directed the Computer and Computation Research Division of the National Science Foundation and was Hewlett-Packard’s first Chief Technology Officer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Drilled to Write: Becoming a Cadet Writer at a Senior Military College (Utah State UP, 2022) offers a rich account of US Army cadets navigating the unique demands of Army writing at a senior military college. In this longitudinal case study, J. Michael Rifenburg follows one cadet, Logan Blackwell, for four years and traces how he conceptualizes Army writing and Army genres through immersion in military science classes, tactical exercises in the Appalachian Mountains, and specialized programs like Airborne School.Drawing from research on rhetorical genre studies, writing transfer, and materiality, Drilled to Write speaks to scholars in writing studies committed to capturing how students understand their own writing development. Collectively, these chapters articulate four ways Blackwell leveraged resources through ROTC to become a cadet writer at this military college. Each chapter is dedicated to one year of his undergraduate experience with focus on curricular writing for his business management major and military science classes as well as his extracurricular writing, like his Ballroom Dance Club bylaws and a three-thousand-word short story.In Drilled to Write, Rifenburg invites readers to see how cadets are positioned between civilian and military life--a curiously liminal space where they develop as writers. Using Army ROTC as an entry into genre theory and larger conversations about the role higher education plays in developing Army officers, he shows how writing students develop genre awareness and flexibility while forging a personal identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices