New Books in Higher Education

With a new focus on vocational and work ready education, the notion of a liberal education is becoming less valued in American society. Though, there are still defenders of this well-rounded and classic form of education. One staunch defender is Dr. Michael S. Roth, current President of Wesleyan University and author of Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters (Yale University Press, 2014). As the title suggests, Dr. Roth contends that liberal education is still important in higher education and how it can be molded onto modern advancements, such as aligning liberal education with MOOCs.To illustrate liberal education’s impact on American society, Dr. Roth’s book casts an expansive list of intellectuals, politicians, and writers who all espouse “enlightened” principles of education. From Thomas Jefferson’s belief that better education was needed so that the elites would not unfairly run society, to W. E. B. DuBois’ and Jane Addams’ inspiration from their German experiences, and Benjamin Franklin’s lampooning of Harvard elitism, this book includes a diverse, yet connected, plethora of figures throughout history. Dr. Roth helps to relate these historical narratives to contemporary educational conversations by interjecting his personal experiences in various areas of the book. Old ideals of “specialization” and the current vocational craze especially bond to provide relevance to today’s conversations. The book closes with Thomas Dewey, the influential American educator, and with a moment from the author’s lecture in China, where liberal education is just beginning to take hold. Dr. Roth joins the New Books in Education to discuss his book, his interesting education career, and to tell us what “pragmatic education” means. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thomas A. Bryer joins the podcast to discuss his book Higher Education Beyond Job Creation: Universities, Citizenship, and Community (Lexington Books 2014). Dr. Bryer is the director of the Center for Public and Nonprofit Management University of Central Florida (UCF) and associate professor in the university’s School of Public Administration.Should the goal of higher education simply be about job creation? In Higher Education Beyond Job Creation, Dr. Bryer argues that job creation and economic factors should not be the only higher education policy consideration for policymakers, administrators, and alumni, and that community engagement, civic training, and other areas of interests should also be concerns for institutions. The book introduces the concept of SEE DEMOS (Student Empowered Education/ Democratizing Education for Members of Society), which is how students can become “active ethical citizens” through experiential learning and social engagement (p. 46). Dr. Bryer provides pedagogical examples of service learning throughout the book, focusing on a “joined up” service-learning course at UCF, where students are embedded with a local low-performing high school and tasked with mentoring students. The course has had wonderful results from both the school and the university perspectives. Dr. Bryer joins New Books in Education for the interview. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From 1945 to the mid-1970s, the rate at which Americans went to and graduate from college rose steadily. Then, however, the rate of college going and completion stagnated. In 1980, a quarter of adult Americans had college degrees; today the figure is roughly the same. What happened?In her book Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (Basic Books, 2014), Suzanne Mettler argues that American students–and particularly those from the lower and lower-middle class–have been priced out of good higher education. Over the past several decades, college tuition has risen far faster than inflation and, of course, the ability of disadvantaged parents and students to pay for it. Mettler points out that the colleges themselves are usually blamed for the spike in tuition, and she agrees that they are to some degree at fault. But she argues that the Federal and State governments are the primary culprits: in the era of growth, they generously supported higher education; today, through neglect or wilful action, they have allowed government support for higher education to dwindle. Federal Pell grants, for example, used to pay for a good chunk of tuition at a four-year state university; now they pay for only a fraction of that cost. States used to give their universities generous support; now these universities are expected to pay much of their own way, usually through increases in tuition.Mettler points out that for-profit universities have stepped into the breach. They are, she says, innovative, and that’s good. But, according to Mettler, they offer an inferior product at inflated prices, effectively taking tuition dollars away from better and in some cases comparably priced state institutions. And, because they receive a very large proportion of their income from Federal and State tuition grants and loans, they are effectively subsidized by the taxpayer.Listen into our fascinating discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Amy Stambach is the author of Confucius and Crisis in American Universities: Culture, Capital, and Diplomacy in U.S. Public Higher Education (Routledge, 2014). Dr. Stambach is a lecturer in Comparative and International Education at University of Oxford.Dr. Stambach’s book, a part of the Education in Global Context series, offers an ethnographic look at the partnership between American universities and the Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government funded language and cultural teaching centers. Drawing on student, faculty, and administrator interviews, personal experience, and institutional document review, the author provides an in-depth insight and analysis of the often-maligned relationship between these institutions.In the book, it is argued that American universities turn to ventures such as the Confucius Institutes on the grounds that US congressional cuts to higher education can be offset by funding from China. Dr. Stambach also introduces the term “eduplomacy” in this book, which she defines as “diplomatic uses of education to advance the political and economic interests of competing… groups” (p. 3).  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert A. Rhoads, Xiaoyang Wang, Xiaoguang Shi, Yongcai Chang are the authors of China’s Rising Research Universities: A New Era of Global Ambition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Dr. Rhoads is the Director, Globalization and Higher Education Research Center at UCLA. Dr. Wang is Director of the Higher Education Institute at Tsinghua University. Dr. Shi is Director of the Center for International Higher Education Research in the Graduate School of Education at Peking University. Dr. Chang is Professor of Comparative Education and Cultural Anthropology and Psychology in the School of Education at Minzu University.In this book, the authors explore the Chinese universities system, keying on research institutions and professor experience in this rapidly changing higher education environment. While the book provides an overview and history of the entire Chinese higher education sector, the research focuses on four universities–Tsinghua University, Peking University, Renmin University, and Minzu University. Beginning in the late 90s, the Chinese government began a concerted effort to create “world-class” universities by pumping funding into a select group of universities, through Project 211 and Project 985. All of the listed institutions were included in the funding projects, which have led to wide reform and transformations. Extensive faculty interviews were conducted at the four universities, providing an insight into the change, pressures, and culture at each institution. Dr. Rhoads joins the podcast to talk about this collaborative project. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Dougherty and Vikash Reddy are the authors of Performance Funding for Higher Education: What Are the Mechanisms What Are the Impacts (Jossey-Bass, 2013). Dr. Dougherty is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Education Policy at Teachers College-Columbia University and Mr. Reddy is a Senior Research Assistant at the Community College Research Center.In their book, the authors explore past research on performance funding in higher education, a practice where state governments tie university or college budget allocation to certain indictors–like graduation rates, remedial education, or drop out rates. This kind of funding has been around since the late 70s, but has not really taken off in the national discussion, even as around 25 states have some kind of performance funding for their higher education system. Dougherty and Reddy chronicle an expansive of past research on performance funding, dating back to 1979. The book provides a sprawling landscape, yet a concise explanation, of the discourse in the higher education sector for this type of budgetary reform policy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most people think that professors are more liberal, and some much more liberal, than ordinary folk. As Neil Gross shows in his eye-opening Why are Professors Liberal and Why do Conservatives Care? (Harvard UP, 2013), “most people” are right: academia is much more left-leaning than any other major profession in the U.S . But why is this so? As Gross points out, there are a lot of “folk” explanations out there, but none of them holds much water. Gross looks the data (a lot of which he collected himself) and searches for a more compelling explanation. It’s surprising: the fact that most college students think professors are liberal (which is true) makes those among them who are conservative think they will not be welcomed in the profession (which, as it turns out, may not be true). By analogy, men don’t generally become nurses because they think of nursing as a “female” profession. Just so, conservatives don’t become professors because they think of academia as a “liberal” profession. But does it matter that academia is liberal? Listen in and find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

According to the Marriam-Webster dictionary, an “enigma” can be defined as “something hard to understand or explain.” What is it that is so enigmatic about education? Aren’t schools there to teach information, and expand people’s minds? What’s so mysterious about that?In Christian J. Churchill and Gerald E. Levy’s new book, The Enigmatic Academy: Class, Bureaucracy, and Religion in American Education (Temple University Press, 2012) the authors, both educators, describe a tremendous paradox within the educational system in the United States. Despite the secular redemption that people search in educational institutions, and the free spirit associated with the liberal arts, schools actually reinforce the status quo, by training upper-class students for positions of authority while leading lower-class students in a direction which serve the purposes of higher social classes. Most people view education as the way to achieve social mobility, and while this is not entirely false on an individual level, the educational system concomitantly teaches students to develop a bureaucratic character, reinforcing existing social and ideological structures instead of challenging them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During this week of the 4th of July, it’s appropriate to mark America’s national holiday with a podcast about that most American of sports: college football. As past guests on the podcast have explained, widely followed, revenue-generating sports teams affiliated with universities are a distinctive feature of American sports culture,... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Colleges and universities have a reputation for being radical places where tenured radicals teach radical ideas. Don’t believe it. Consider this: the set of academic departments that one finds in most “colleges of liberal arts and sciences”–history, chemistry, sociology, physics, and so on–has remained remarkably stable for many decades. How, exactly, is that “radical?”Yet as Mikaila Lemonik Arthur shows in her enlightening book Student Activism and Curricular Change in Higher Education (Ashgate, 2011), some curricular changes have occurred, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. When I went to college in the 1980s, interdisciplinary minors and majors such as Women’s’ Studies, Asian-American Studies, and Queer Studies (the three cases Lemonik Arthur analyses) were in their infancy. Now the first is nearly ubiquitous, the second is growing rapidly, and the third is gaining steam.How did these new “identity studies” disciplines succeed in finding a place at the already-full academic table despite the residence of many stakeholders? Lemonik Arthur’s answer is complicated, but suggests that the deans are more nimble that we–or rather I–thought. Beginning in the late 1960s, they saw rising demand for courses in these emerging disciplines, some of which was signaled by waves of student activism. They responded by increasing the supply, albeit slowly. The first institutions to do so were of lessor status. Once they showed that the “identity studies” courses were viable in terms of enrollment and didn’t harm (and in fact helped) recruitment and fund-raising efforts, the more prestigious schools followed. Their status rose and the money began to flow. These two developments, in turn, allowed the “identity studies” disciplines to institutionalize, that is, to secure places among (actually, between) departments and in course catalogue.This is a fascinating study of how even authoritarian institutions (like most colleges and universities!) can sometimes prove responsive to their clients. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices