New Books in Higher Education

With free college in the national conversation, there’s been no better time for Daniel T. Kirsch’s new book Sold My Soul for a Student Loan: Higher Education and the Political Economy of the Future (Praeger, 2019). Kirsch teaches at California State University, Sacramento.American colleges and universities boasts an impressive legacy, but the price of admission for many is now endless debt. As Kirsch shows in the book, increasing educational indebtedness undermines the real value of higher education in US democracy. To help readers understand this dilemma, he examines how the student debt problem emerged and what the long-term effects of this might be. Sold My Soul for a Student Loan examines this vitally important issue from an unprecedented diversity of perspectives, focusing on the fact that student debt is hindering the ability of millions of people to enter the job market, the housing market, the consumer economy, and the political process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the New Books Network, Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric at SUNY Geneseo--interviews Dave Dillon of Grossmont College--on a valuable work for higher education: Blueprint for Success in College and Career, available under a Creative Commons License (open access) from the Rebus Community Press (2018). Although NBN does not typically review textbooks, this is a unique opportunity to share a cutting-edge resource for educators, students, and a general audience that is not only completely free but also a recipient of the 2019 Textbook Excellence Award from the Textbook and Academic Authors Association. In this interview, Lee and Dave discuss how the project came into being, the urgent need to teach “doing college” for the next generation of learners, and how publishing with a University Press compares and contrasts with OER publishing. Blueprint for Success is a student guide for classroom and career success, focusing on subjects ranging from study skills, time management, and career exploration to health and financial literacy. As one of the reviewers for Blueprint for Success puts it, the book is valuable for “making succeeding in college possible for a wide audience. It is a straightforward, useful, and accessible textbook that makes it easier to navigate college and develop skills for succeeding beyond the classroom." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jeff McMahan is White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. His research focuses broadly on moral and political philosophy, and is perhaps best known for his work on the moral issues surrounding killing and letting die.The "Why We Argue" podcast is produced by the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut as part of the Humility and Conviction in Public Life project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Many have read and debated “How Political Science became Irrelevant” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The author of that piece is Michael C. Desch and much it comes from his recent book Cult of the Irrelevant: The Waning Influence of Social Science on National Security (Princeton University Press, 2019). Desch is the Packey J. Dee Professor of International Relations at University of Notre Dame.In Cult of the Irrelevant, Desch traces the history of the relationship between the Washington and the academy across the 20th century. He shows that social science research became most oriented toward national security problem-solving during times of war and that scholars shifted to other topics during peacetime. This pattern has caused tension between national security planners and university-based researchers over independence, resources, and rewards. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pretty much everyone knows that the American healthcare system is, well, very inefficient. We don’t, so critics say, get as much healthcare bang for our buck as we should. According to Bryan Caplan, however, the American educational system–higher education in particular–is much, much worse. In The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton University Press, 2018), Caplan argues that we are quite literally paying a fortune and getting almost nothing of any collective value. Pretty much all the news in this book is bad. Students spend a ton on secondary ed, but they don’t learn many marketable skills. In fact, the don’t learn much at all: they forget almost everything they learn in college quite quickly. Taxpayers heavily subsidize this “learning” experience, but the social payoff is dramatically less than the investment. College is a good deal for good students, but it’s a very bad deal for the many poor students who don’t finish and have thus wasted their savings and several years of their lives–years they could have been working and accumulating money instead of throwing it away. College doesn’t make us culturally or ethically better people by almost any definition of “better.” Interestingly, despite what conservative pundits say, it doesn’t even change our political views: even though the vast majority of professors are liberal, and their courses perhaps have a liberal slant, students come out of college with the same political attitudes they brought to it. What does college do for students? According to Caplan’s compelling argument, it signals to employers that they are conscientious and hard working enough to (you guessed it) finish college and, by inference, work an ordinary job. That, he says, is a very costly signal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The eight elite institutions that comprise the Ivy League, sometimes known as the Ancient Eight—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell—are American stalwarts that have profoundly influenced history and culture by producing the nation’s and the world’s leaders. The few black students who attended Ivy League schools in the decades following WWII not only went on to greatly influence black America and the nation in general, but unquestionably awakened these most traditional and selective of American spaces. In the twentieth century, black youth were in the vanguard of the black freedom movement and educational reform.In Upending the Ivory Tower: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Ivy League (NYU Press, 2018), historian Stefan Bradley illuminates how the Black Power movement, which was borne out of an effort to edify the most disfranchised of the black masses, also took root in the hallowed halls of America’s most esteemed institutions of higher education. Between the close of WWII and 1975, the civil rights and Black Power movements transformed the demographics and operation of the Ivy League on and off campus. As desegregators and racial pioneers, black students, staff, and faculty used their status in the black intelligentsia to enhance their predominantly white institutions while advancing black freedom. Although they were often marginalized because of their race and class, the newcomers altered educational policies and inserted blackness into the curricula and culture of the unabashedly exclusive and starkly white schools.This book attempts to complete the narrative of higher education history, while adding a much needed nuance to the history of the Black Power movement. It tells the stories of those students, professors, staff, and administrators who pushed for change at the risk of losing what privilege they had. Putting their status, and sometimes even their lives, in jeopardy, black activists negotiated, protested, and demonstrated to create opportunities for the generations that followed. The enrichments these change agents made endure in the diversity initiatives and activism surrounding issues of race that exist in the modern Ivy League.Upending the Ivory Tower not only informs the civil rights and Black Power movements of the postwar era but also provides critical context for the Black Lives Matter movement that is growing in the streets and on campuses throughout the country today. As higher education continues to be a catalyst for change, there is no one better to inform today’s activists than those who transformed our country’s past and paved the way for its future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can educators ensure that young people who attain a postsecondary credential are adequately prepared for the future? Matthew T. Hora and his co-authors, Ross Benbow and Amanda Oleson, explain that the answer is not simply that students need more specialized technical training to meet narrowly defined employment opportunities. Beyond the Skills Gap: Preparing College Students for Life and Work (Harvard Education Press, 2016) challenges this conception of the “skills gap,” highlighting instead the value of broader twenty-first-century skills in postsecondary education. They advocate for a system in which employers share responsibility along with the education sector to serve the collective needs of the economy, society, and students.The study, set in Wisconsin, takes place against the backdrop of heated political debates over the role of public higher education. This thoughtful and nuanced account, enriched by keen observations of postsecondary instructional practice, promises to contribute new insights to the rich literature on workforce development and to provide valuable guidance for postsecondary faculty and administrators.Matthew T. Hora is an assistant professor of adult and higher education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a research scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Follow him on Twitter @matt_hora.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

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