New Books in Higher Education

NYU President Emeritus John Sexton provides a detailed history of the evolution of NYU into the world’s first, global network university. This began with the recognition that New York itself was home to immigrants and neighborhoods representing most of the world’s cultures. Version 2.0 involved foreign-language focused study away sites in Generalisimo Franco’s Madrid and Paris. Under Version 3.0 NYU added a large number of study abroad sites, each taking advantage of the distinctive strengths of its location (e.g. London for finance and theater). Version 4.0 featured transformational partnerships first with Abu Dhabi and then Shanghai to create comprehensive universities to develop global leaders and citizens that quickly became among the most selective and successful in the world. The COVID pandemic has accelerated the development of Version 5.0 by connecting all of these campuses more closely into a virtual network where students across the locations are taking shared courses.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We continue the discussion with NYU President Emeritus John Sexton who shares how it took an intervention from his close friends to get him to give up his career as a professor of theology at St. Francis College and champion high school debate to go to law school and how it took a special recommendation from his friend and Constitutional Law Professor Lawrence Tribe to get Harvard Law to reconsider his initial rejection. He would go on to become one of the most successful law school deans in American history, lifting NYU into the upper echelon of legal education by systematically recruiting stars from the leading schools to join its faculty. It took several years for his close friend and eventual NYU Board chair to overcome his initial reluctance to become NYU President.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

New York University (NYU) President Emeritus and consummate story-teller John Sexton describes how his childhood experiences as a young entrepreneur growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Brooklyn prepared him to lead the world’s largest private university. He shares the profound impact that his teacher and mentor, Charlie, had on his lifelong passion for teaching, and the role that high-school forensics, first as a national champion debater, then as a volunteer coach of the debate at the local Catholic girls high school had on his vision of the modern, ecumenical university.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the major debates surrounding higher education is whether to make college – whether 2- or 4-year public colleges and universities – free for all qualified applicants.Dr. David Finegold, President of Chatham University, discusses why this is bad public policy, based on comparisons with the experience in the UK and Germany and an analysis of the policy proposal in the US context. He shows that the two key elements of a more equitable and effective approach already exist and simply need to be expanded – doubling the resources available for Pell grants to increase the level of grant and the income thresholds for those families who qualify for it, and converting all Federal Student Loans to income-contingent repayment so individuals only begin repaying the investment in their education once they are earning enough to afford it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. David Finegold, the President of Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA and international expert on education and training systems and how they relate to changes underway in the global economy and workplace, provides an introduction to this new podcast which will focus on the forces that are shaping The Future of Higher Education and leaders that have found ways to help their institutions thrive in this challenging environment. He discusses the long-term trends that are disrupting the higher education marketplace – demographic decline in number of high school graduates, rising price competition, declining public funding, growth in large, higher quality online providers – that have been compounded by the pandemic. And he outlines the different types of episodes to come: interview with university leaders who have transformed the fortunes of their colleges and universities for the better, who have pioneered new models of higher education, or have created strategic partnerships or mergers that have enabled their institutions to continue to pursue their mission in a new way. He’ll also be speaking with leading experts on higher education, like Nathan Grawe and Mary Marcy, about their new books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke UP, 2020), Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.Matt Brim is Associate Professor of Queer Studies in the English Department at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York; author of James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination; and coeditor of Imagining Queer Methods.John Marszalek III is author of Coming Out of the Magnolia Closet: Same-Sex Couples in Mississippi (2020, University Press of Mississippi). He is clinical faculty of the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Program at Southern New Hampshire University. Website: Johnmarszalek3.com Twitter: @marsjf3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shelter in A Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism (University of North Carolina Press, 2020) by Dr. Jelani Favors fills the “missing pages” of history by highighting the enduring role that Black colleges have played in African American freedom movements in the long-twentieth century. Favors shows that Black colleges created freedom fighters whose organizing, dedication, and fearlessness made the Black Freedom Struggle’s most pivotal moments possible. Favors also argues that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were fortified interstitial spaces for consciousness-raising and solidarity-building among race women and race men. HBCU students, faculty, and administrators were vital players in fashioning blueprints for Black liberation and ensuring the inter-generational transmission of resistance wisdom. Taking the long view and moving through a tour of Black higher education, Favors theorizes that a hidden second curriculum and a Black college communitas thrived on each campus, making them both seedbeds of racial justice and shelter in a time of storm.Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the global movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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