New Books in Higher Education

We have an engaging discussion with Dr. Dan Greenstein, who in 2018 left the Gates Foundation, where he led the Post-Secondary program, to become the Chancellor for the PASSHE system. He knew he was taking on a great challenge with a system that had seen enrollment decline over the prior decade from a peak of 120,000 to fewer than 90,000 students. He was able to garner the necessary political support for a major transformation of the system, starting with financial stabilization by taking out $300 million in costs while freezing tuition for 4 consecutive years. This was followed by a system redesign, integrating sets of 3 independent institutions in the Western and Eastern parts of Pennsylvania into two new universities: West Penn and Commonwealth University. He shares lessons from this reform effort that will be part of a forthcoming book.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives-- sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same old hierarchies and inequities. The stories gathered in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship (SUNY Press, 2023) challenge our fundamental assumptions about mentorship, illuminating the obstacles that make it difficult to connect meaningfully and ethically while reimagining the possibilities for reciprocity. Does mentorship require sameness? Might we find more inventive, collaborative ways to bond than the traditional top-down model of mentoring? Drawing on their experiences in academia, creative writing, publishing, and journalism, the volume's editors, Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman, and their twenty-six contributors collectively strive for relationships that acknowledge differences alongside the importance of common bonds. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship will resonate across workspaces and arrives at a moment when the need to form feminist connections within and between generations couldn't feel more urgent.Host Annie Berke sits down with Drs. Miller and Oksman, as well as contributor Dr. Elizabeth Alsop, to discuss the origins of this anthology, the biggest myths behind mentorship, and what mentors and mentees owe to one another.Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her many books include My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism; Breathless: An American Girl in Paris; What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past; and But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives.Tahneer Oksman is Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College. She is the author of "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?" Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs and coeditor (with Seamus O'Malley) of The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself. She reviews memoirs, graphic novels, and comics for NPR and The Washington Post.Elizabeth Alsop is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, and affiliated faculty in the M.A. in Liberal Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2019) and a number of scholarly essays on 20th-century fiction, film and television aesthetics, and contemporary TV storytelling. Her cultural criticism has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and The New York Times Magazine. She is currently writing a book on the films of Elaine May.Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why is education so important in a democracy? Are democracies capable of producing the citizens they need? What do John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville have to teach us about education in a liberal democracy? Jeffrey Sikkenga, Executive Director of the Ashbrook Center, joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton UP, 2020) offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy. Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices.Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the editor of several other books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Gita Manaktala, Editorial Director at the MIT Press, and Ellen Finnie, Co-Interim Associate Director for Collections at MIT Libraries, discuss the Ideas series: a hybrid print and open access book series for general readers, that provides fresh, strongly argued, and provocative views of the effects of digital technology on culture, business, government, education, and our lives.Learn more about the full series here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is postmodernism? Does the Biden Administration support Critical Race Theory? How might a recommitment to classical liberal principles help fight "Woke-ism"? James Lindsay joins the show to answer these questions and more and discuss his book (co-written with Helen Pluckrose), Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. About the "Grievance Studies Affair," here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom.Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, Of Black Study (Pluto Press, 2023) focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers, and Cedric Robinson contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge.Of Black Study is especially geared toward understanding the contemporary evolution of Black Studies in the neoliberal university and allows us to consider the stakes of intellectual freedom and the path toward a new world.Omari Averette-Phillips is a graduate student in the department of History at UC Davis. He can be reached at omariaverette@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s book is: Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities (UNC Press, 2018), by Jonathan Coley. Although the LGBT movement has made rapid gains in the United States, LGBT people continue to face discrimination in faith communities. In this book, sociologist Jonathan S. Coley documents why and how student activists mobilize for greater inclusion at Christian colleges and universities. Drawing on interviews with student activists at a range of Christian institutions of higher learning, Dr. Coley shows that students, initially drawn to activism because of their own political, religious, or LGBT identities, are forming direct action groups that transform university policies, educational groups that open up campus dialogue, and solidarity groups that facilitate their members’ personal growth. He also shows how these LGBT activists apply their skills and values after graduation in subsequent political campaigns, careers, and family lives, potentially serving as change agents in their faith communities for years to come. Dr. Coley’s findings shed light on a new frontier of LGBT activism and challenge prevailing wisdom about the characteristics of activists, the purpose of activist groups, and ultimately the nature of activism itself. Gay on God’s Campus won the 2018 Stanford M. Lyman Distinguished Book Award, from the Mid-South Sociological Association. For more information about this project’s research methodology and theoretical grounding, please visit http://jonathancoley.com/bookOur guest is: Dr. Jonathan Coley, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Oklahoma State University and Deputy Editor of The Sociological Quarterly. His research focuses on social movements, politics, religion, education, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. His current research projects examine LGBTQ activism at Christian colleges and universities; the presence of political, religious, and social activist groups at U.S. colleges and universities (with Dhruba Das, Gabby Gomez, Jericho McElroy, and Jessica Schachle); local-level church-state relations in the United States (with Gary Adler, Damon Mayrl, and Rebecca Sager); and LGBTQ faith leaders in the United States (with Joseph Anthony). His research has been published in American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Forum, Mobilization, Sociology of Religion, and Sociology of Education. He is the author of Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Progressive Evangelicals and the Pursuit of Social Justice, by Brantley Gasaway From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses, by Dana Malone Queer Faith: Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition, by Melissa Sanchez Reforming Sodom: Protestants and the Rise of Gay Rights, by Heather WhiteThe Queer Faith page at Union Theological SeminaryThis podcast on feminism and fierceness in the BibleWelcome to The Academic Life! Join us each week, where we learn directly from experts. We embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are informed and inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What are the "great books"? What makes them great? Is the cultivation of an intellectual life especially important to citizens of a democratic republic? Zena Hitz, Tutor at St. John's College, joins the show to discuss all this and more!You can buy Hitz's book Lost in Thought here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can a PhD program pivot from a professoriate-apprenticeship system, to one that is mindful of students’ post-grad career goals? This episode completes our three-part series on The Connected PhD, and explores: The positive effect on professors when their graduate students can prepare for multiple career options. How speaking one-on-one with students helped one program reexamine what “support” is, and what it needs to be. The importance of restructuring PhD timelines. Why the future of humanities PhD programs matters. Our guest is: Dr. Ulka Anjaria, who teaches and researches South Asian literature and film. She is the author many articles and books, including Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture (Temple University Press, 2019); and Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema, First Edition (Routledge, 2021). She is a professor of English, and the director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis University.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD: A Survival Guide, by Zoe Ayers Being Well in Academia: Ways to Feel Stronger, Safer and More Connected, by Petra Boynton The Field Guide to Grad School, by Jessica McCrory Calarco Degrees of Difference: Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School, by Kimberly McKee and Denise Delgado, eds. Your PhD Survival Guide: Planning, Writing, and Succeeding in Your Final Year, by Katherine Firth. Liam Connell, and Peta Freestone Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom, by Katina Rogers The Field Guide to Grad School podcast This podcast on protecting your wellbeing in graduate school This podcast on finding good alt-ac jobs The Connected PhD Part One The Connected PhD Part Two Welcome to the Academic Life, where we are inspired and informed by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Missed any episodes? You’ll find over 150 of the Academic Life podcast episodes archived and freely available to you on the New Books Network website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices