New Books in Higher Education

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear about: the role of community colleges in higher education and in their local communities, the Rural Community College Alliance, and being a first generation college student.Our guest is: Dr Penny Wills, the President of Rural Community College Alliance.Your host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Zimmerman’s The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) is the first full-length history of college teaching in the United States. It explores a paradox at the heart of American higher education: while the scholarly ideal is measured in research and objective output, the practice of teaching has remained outside the bureaucratic umbrella of college and university life.Zimmerman’s book demonstrates that the idea that college teaching is in a crisis state is a complaint that is as old as American college teaching itself. The Amateur Hour illuminates American college teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate learning communities, especially for America's least privileged students. Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to start here.Lane Davis is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Religious Studies at Southern Methodist University where he studies American religious history. Find him on Twitter @TheeLaneDavis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of America's most pressing civil rights issues--desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech--have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions. Although it is commonly known that college students and other activists, as well as politicians, actively participated in the fight for and against civil rights in the middle decades of the twentieth century, historical accounts have not adequately focused on the roles that the nation's college presidents played in the debates concerning racism. Based on archival research conducted at a range of colleges and universities across the United States, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom (Princeton UP, 2020) sheds light on the important place of college presidents in the struggle for racial parity.Focusing on the period between 1948 and 1968, Eddie Cole shows how college presidents, during a time of violence and unrest, strategically, yet often silently, initiated and shaped racial policies and practices inside and outside of the educational sphere. With courage and hope, as well as malice and cruelty, college presidents positioned themselves--sometimes precariously--amid conflicting interests and demands. Black college presidents challenged racist policies as their students demonstrated in the streets against segregation, while presidents of major universities lobbied for urban renewal programs that displaced Black communities near campus. Some presidents amended campus speech practices to accommodate white supremacist speakers, even as other academic leaders developed the nation's first affirmative action programs in higher education.The Campus Color Line illuminates how the legacy of academic leaders' actions continues to influence the unfinished struggle for Black freedom and racial equity in education and beyond.Marshall Poe is the founder and editor of the New Books Network. He can be reached at marshallpoe@newbooksnetwork.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite stereotypes of colleges and universities still stuck in the age of the blackboard and sage-on-stage lectures, a quiet revolution has been taking place on America’s campuses led by a diverse group of learning innovators. Digital technology is one catalyst for this “turn to learning,” but professionals leading the charge include instructional designers, media specialists, and experts in data analytics – as well as technologists - working in conjunction with faculty and administrators to transform higher education.Joshua Kim, Director of Online Programs and Strategies at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning, and Edward Maloney, Professor of English and Director of the Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship at Georgetown, document major transformations at colleges and universities that have been quietly taking place, even amidst noise about crisis and disruption, in their new book Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020), Kim and Maloney were also behind the influential Inside Higher Education series 15 Scenarios for Higher Education that describes the various ways colleges and universities might open in the face of the COVID-19 threat, a series that was just compiled into a new book (introduced on today’s podcast!) called The Low-Density University.Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.degreeoffreedom.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Christopher Newfield diagnoses what he sees as a crisis in American public higher education.He argues that since roughly the 1980s, American public universities have entered into a devolutionary cycle of defunding brought about by privatization. The influence of private sector practices on public higher education, Newfield argues, has fundamentally shifted the view of higher education in American society from a public good to a private good.Despite this bleak assessment, Newfield’s book provides a roadmap for how to fix this crisis in public higher education. A central component of his plan is recognizing the university as a public good by acknowledging its wide range of benefits to society and democracy more generally.Newfield’s book will interest scholars from many disciplines, including higher education, U.S. political history, and the history of inequality in America.Christopher Newfield is a professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Steven P. Rodriguez is a PhD candidate in history at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the history of Latin American student migration to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. You can reach him at steven.p.rodriguez@vanderbilt.edu and follow his twitter at @SPatrickRod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Universities have become state-like entities, possessing their own hospitals, police forces, and real estate companies. To become such behemoths, higher education institutions relied on the state for resources and authority. Through government largesse and shrewd legal maneuvering, university administrators became powerful interests in urban planning during the twentieth century.LaDale Winling's Building the Ivory Tower: Universities and Metropolitan Development in the Twentieth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press) casts higher education as the beneficiary and catalyst of the century's monumental state building projects--receiving millions in New Deal construction funds, even more from WWII-era military research, and directing the bulldozer's path during urban renewal schemes around the country.As state-funding for higher education decreased in the second half of the twentieth century and universities became more dependent on endowment investment and commercial research, their interests diverged even more sharply from the needs and desires of surrounding communities.Winling discusses challenges he faced while researching the book, obstacles to organizing against harmful higher education practices today, and his ongoing digital project on redlining called Mapping Inequality.LaDale C. Winling is Associate Professor of History at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.Patrick Reilly​ is a PhD student in US History at Vanderbilt University. He studies police, community organizations, and urban development. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The courageous and inspiring personal narratives and empirical studies in Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia (Utah State University Press, 2019) name formidable obstacles and systemic biases that all women faculty—from diverse intersectional and transnational identities and from tenure track, terminal contract, and administrative positions—encounter in their higher education careers. Edited by Yolanda Flores Niemann, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, and Carmen G. González, the book provides practical, specific, and insightful guidance to fight back, prevail, and thrive in challenging work environments. This new volume comes at a crucial historical moment as the United States grapples with a resurgence of white supremacy and misogyny at the forefront of our social and political dialogues that continue to permeate the academic world.Today I talked to two of the editors: Yolanda Flores Niemann (PhD, Psychology, University of Houston, 1992), a professor of psychology at the University of North Texas and Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs (MA and PhD Stanford University, 2000), a professor of modern languages and women studies at Seattle University.Dr. Christina Gessler’s background is in anthropology, women’s history, and literature. She works as a historian, poet, and photographer. In seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, Gessler writes the histories of largely unknown women, poems about small relatable moments, and takes many, many photos in nature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Remember when Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were going to shake higher education to its foundations by giving courses from the world’s most prestigious colleges and universities away free to the world?Today’s guest, Jeffrey Young – Senior Editor at the online educational publication EdSurge and host of the Edsurge podcast – talks about his time on the front lines of MOOCs and other technology advances in higher education. Jeffrey covered the rise and alleged fall of MOOCs extensively at the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as exploring the MOOC story beyond the headlines during a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University. The insights he developed can all be found in his book Beyond the MOOC Hype. (Chronicle of Higher Eduction, 2013)Over a million new people have signed up to take MOOC courses since the COVID-19 crisis hit. Does this represent a MOOC renaissance, or something else? Listen to our wide-ranging discussion to learn more about what MOOCs might mean today.Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.degreeoffreedom.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if everything we tell each other – and ourselves – about why we choose college isn’t true? Is higher education an ideal, a personal goal, or might it be a “job-to-be-done?”In Choosing College: How to Make Better Learning Decisions Throughout Your Life (Jossey-Bass, 2019), author Michael Horn and his co-author Bob Moesta look at how people make decisions regarding higher education through “Jobs-to-be-Done” theory which interrogates and exposes the real reasons people make personal choices, from buying a milk shake to make life-changing decisions.Based on this theory, students are not applying to colleges, being selected by them, and choosing where to go, but are rather looking to “hire” higher education as a way to achieve a goal. This analysis provides important insights, both for college-bound students and their families, but also institutions of higher education, many of which might be tooling themselves to perform the wrong job.Join us for a conversation that looks at disruption in K-12 and higher education, including what might happen to schools during and post pandemic.Michael B. Horn is a Distinguished Fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Education, a Senior Strategist at Guild Education and author of books on education including Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools and his latest book Choosing College. He hosts his latest podcast, Class Disrupted, with co-host Diane Tavenner of Summit Public Schools.Jonathan Haber is an educational researcher and consultant working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, and educational policy. His books include MOOCS and Critical Thinking from MIT Press and his LogicCheck project analyzes the reasoning behind the news of the day. You can read more about Jonathan’s work at http://www.degreeoffreedom.org. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Colleges fiercely defend America’s higher education system, arguing that it rewards bright kids who have worked hard. But it doesn’t actually work this way.As the recent bribery scandal demonstrates, social inequalities and colleges’ pursuit of wealth and prestige stack the deck in favor of the children of privilege. For education scholars and critics Anthony P. Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl, it’s clear that colleges are not the places of aspiration and equal opportunity they should (and claim to) be.The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America (The New Press) delves deeply into the rampant dysfunction of higher education today and critiques a system that pays lip service to social mobility and meritocracy, while offering little of either.Through policies that exacerbate inequality, including generously funding so-called merit-based aid rather than expanding opportunity for those who need it most, U.S. universities—the presumed pathway to a better financial future—are woefully (and in some cases criminally) complicit in reproducing racial and class privilege across generations.This timely and incisive book argues for unrigging the game by dramatically reducing the weight of the SAT/ACT; measuring colleges by their outcomes, not their inputs; designing affirmative action plans that honor the relationship between race and class; and making 14 the new 12—guaranteeing every American a public K–14 education.The Merit Myth shows the way to higher education becoming the beacon of opportunity it was intended to be.Anthony P. Carnevale, a chairman under President Clinton of the National Commission on Employment Policy, is the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. He lives in Washington, DC.Peter Schmidt, the author of Color and Money, is an award-winning writer and editor who has worked for Education Week and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He lives in Washington, DC.Jeff Strohl is the director of research at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. He lives in Washington, DC.Stephen Pimpare is Senior Lecturer in the Politics & Society Program and Faculty Fellow at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians (New Press, 2004), A People’s History of Poverty in America (New Press, 2008), winner of the Michael Harrington Award, and Ghettos, Tramps and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (Oxford, 2017). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices