New Books in Higher Education

Though many Americans, Republicans especially, regard universities as heavily disposed to the political left, few people understand how much this matters, how it happened, how deeply ideologically siloed the academy is, or what can be done about it. In The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education (Encounter Books, 2018), Professor Warren Treadgold shows the crucial role of universities in American culture and politics, the causes of administrative bloat and inept academic hiring, the decline of teaching and research, and some possible ways of reversing the downward trend.In addition to recommending policies to address issues such as grade inflation and poor scholarship, Treadgold offers a specific proposal for the founding of a new, world-class university. He describes how to create a school which could seriously challenge the dominance of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley, attracting conservative and moderate faculty and students and providing a much-needed alternative to the failing status quo.Warren Treadgold is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor of Byzantine Studies and Professor of History at Saint Louis University. With a BA and PhD from Harvard, he has taught at UCLA, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Hillsdale College, and Florida International University and has held research fellowships at the University of Munich, the Free University of Berlin, All Souls College at Oxford, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. He has published ten books and many articles on Byzantine, medieval, and late ancient history and literature and published articles on higher education in Commentary, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and Academic Questions.Hoover Harris, editor of Degree Or Not Degree?, holds a PhD in English and writes and speaks about trends in higher education. He can be reached by email at hooverharris@icloud.com or on Twitter @degreenot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In what ways do middle class students obtain advantages in schools? In her new book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford University Press, 2018), Jessica McCrory Calarco uses ethnographic data to elaborate on what she calls “negotiated advantage.” By understanding students as active agents in their own everyday lives, Calarco discovers that middle class student negotiate particular advantages over their working class peers. These advantages include more attention from the teacher, more accommodations, and more assistance. Calarco explores each of these advantages in turn, finding that often classroom expectations are unclear and student fall back on coaching learned from parents in terms of how they should behave in school. It is in these behaviors that we see a divide between working class students and middle class students and their outcomes. Overall, this book presents clear examples from the data and lays out the main takeaway throughout the text.This book will be of interest to sociologists in general, but especially to those working in social stratification and education. Anyone involved in the education system, from elementary to higher education, should pick up this book. In terms of using the text in the classroom, this book would be easily accessed by undergraduates, but would also pair incredibly well with other stand-alone texts used in a graduate level course on stratification or focusing on education.Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do students become LGBT activists at Christian Universities and Colleges? And what is the impact on the school but also on the activists themselves? In his new book, Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Jonathan S. Coley uses interviews with LGBT activists on Christian campuses and other sources of data to answer these questions. LGBT activists in his study fall into three participant identities which tie to the “group ethos” he discovers. These typologies help to understand the ways in which students participate as activists but also how they come to know themselves. In addition, Coley situates his findings in the literature but also explains how his study differs and expands on previous findings. In general, he finds that “fit” is important to the activists and that only about a third of his participants fall into traditional definitions of activists. Coley also finds that denomination plays a key role in the development and reaction of activists groups on campus. Overall, this book gives a clear picture of LGBT activists on Christian university and college campuses.This book will be enjoyed by sociologists in general, but especially by those interested in social movements, religion, sexuality, and higher education. This book would be useful in a graduate level or higher level undergraduate social movements course given the clear organization of theory and examples used throughout the book and specifically in the tables.Sarah E. Patterson is a postdoc at the University of Western Ontario. You can tweet her at @spattersearch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Deondra Rose has written Citizens by Degree: Higher Education Policy and the Changing Gender Dynamics of American Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2018). She is an assistant professor of public policy and political science at Duke University.Citizens by Degree examines the development and impact of federal higher education policy, specifically the National Defense Education Act, the Higher Education Act, and Title IX. Rose argues that these policies have been an overlooked-factor driving the progress that women have made in the United States. By significantly expanding women’s access to college, they led to women to surpassing men as the recipients of bachelor’s degrees, while also empowering them to become more economically successful and politically engaged. The book focuses on how Southern Democrats shaped U.S. higher policy development during the mid-twentieth century, expanding opportunities for women, while maintaining discriminatory practices for African Americans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Andrea L. Turpin is an Associate Professor of History at Baylor University. Her book, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837-1917 (Cornell University Press, 2017), begins with the early institutions of higher learning and the contest over the idea of separate and unique education. She examines the gender history of both private and state colleges. Evangelical Protestant commitments to personal conversions and missions fuel women’s higher education beyond rudimentary instructions preparing them for domestic life. The objective was a godly social order based on the individual relationship with God. After the Civil War the influence of religious liberals, increased emphasis on research and growing demands for women’s education instigated a reevaluation of the university’s role in moral preparation. Separate men’s, women’s and co-education institutions multiplied and moved toward seeking the public good in sex-specific ways. Women trained for social service professions; men for government and institutional leadership. The shift away from personal piety to gendered character formation and service to nation created increasingly rigid notions of separate male and female cultures in the public life of the Progressive Era. Turpin’s examination highlights the role of higher education in constructing the moral and gender map of a nation.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lee Trepanier, Professor of Political Science at Saginaw Valley State University in Michigan, edited this important analysis of why the humanities matter, especially within higher education. Trepanier’s collection, Why the Humanities Matter Today: In Defense of Liberal Education (Lexington Books, 2017), brings together authors in a variety of fields within the humanities to reconsider the arguments that have been made in support of the humanities over the past decades, even as these disciplines have declined in terms of majors and faculty appointments across the United States. Kirk Fitzpatrick, James W. Harrison, Nozomi Irei, David Lunt, Kristopher G. Phillips and the collection editor, Lee Trepanier, represent perspectives from philosophy, literature, history, languages, political philosophy, while also engaging the question of what constitutes a liberal education in the 21st century, especially given the role of education within society. This text, which provides some thoughtful considerations beyond the often-given reasons for why the humanities are fundamentally important, is a kind of starting point for dialogue across disciplines, within colleges and university, but also among the public in considering the role of higher education in our contemporary democracy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s common for colleges in the U.S. to have service learning programs of one kind or another. These are sometimes criticized as being liberal or even radical endeavors — especially if “social justice” language is employed. But what if these are, in fact, conservative programs at their heart, ones that, in the context of the corporatized university, are furthering the neoliberal project and inhibiting the development of better social welfare policies? Listen to our interview with Randy Stoecker as he discusses his book, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement (Temple University Press, 2016), for a first-hand critique as well as some thoughts on how we might all better serve our students — and the communities they would engage with.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

How might we account for the rapid rise of for-profit educational institutions over the past few decades, who are the students who attend them, how can we evaluate what those schools do and why, and are there actually lessons that traditional higher ed institutions can learn from them? Join us as we speak with Tressie McMillan Cottom about her new book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press, 2017).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 Peoples 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

Ellen Hazelkorn, Policy Advisor to the Higher Education Authority (HEA), and Director, Higher Education Policy Research Unit (HEPRU), Dublin Institute of Technology, joins the New Books Network to discuss her recently published book, entitled The Civic University: The Policy and Leadership Challenges (Edward Elgar Pub 2016). She is the co-editor of the book, along with John Goddard, Louise Kempton, and Paul Vallance.The book explores the new challenges that universities face in this era defined by globalization and internationalization, but also by the consequences of funding shortages and slashed budgets. The authors of the book look at ways institutions can better embed themselves into their surrounding cities or environments to have greater meaning and connection, instead of becoming separate Ivory Tower islands. While the focus is on the management of solutions to these issues and challenges, the target audience for this book is anyone interested in education, civics, or policy.Ellen Hazelkorn previously joined the New Books Network to discuss Rankings and the Reshaping of Higher Education.For any questions, comments, or recommendations for the New Books in Education podcast, you can connect with the host, Ryan M. Allen, at @PoliticsAndEd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Within the context of the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, elite institutions of higher education began to feel pressure to open their doors to women. In ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton University Press, 2015), an expansive study in institutional decision making, Nancy Weiss Malkiel analyzes how institutions ultimately decided to approach coeducation and what their institutions would ultimately look like following this radical change. By using examples from both the United States and the United Kingdom, one gets a sense of how men at these institutions viewed coeducation, how women who ended up attending these schools reacted, and how traditionally women-only institutions handled the change. Finally, Nancy Weiss Malkiel answers the important set of questions within this move toward coeducation: what did coeducation do and what did it not do? Nancy Weiss Malkiel is emerita professor of history at Princeton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices