New Books in Education

Do we really need universities and colleges anymore? Have they become too politicized? Many conservatives have started to write off American academia. They contend that it is so irremediably, irretrievably woke that the best that those on the right can hope for is to try to advance their ideas and live according to their principles outside it.Other conservatives still in academe just keep their heads down and try to maintain some kind of conservative presence within it, get their work done and do their best for their students.What does the increasing dominance of the left/liberal worldview in academe have on the intellectual development of college students and what are the consequences for conservative academics and for American society at large?Or are things really that bad for academics who do not swear fealty to left-liberal values? Is there still a healthy respect on college campuses for fundamentals such as the cultivation of reason and respect for the notion of “reasonableness?” Is “reasonableness” even something worth salvaging?In his 2021 book Let's Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education (Princeton UP, 2021), Jonathan Marks examines the deleterious effects of the left-leaning sociocultural homogenization of American higher education. He calls upon college instructors to renew their commitment to inculcating in their students the ability to reason for themselves and to reason with others. He argues that a healthy democracy requires a strong base of liberally-educated people given that reason is the best way to solve economic and political problems and simply to lead fulfilling lives.Marks identifies as a conservative and yet he takes issue with conservatives and populists who are giving up on American higher education as nothing more than a vast leftist indoctrination mill. He disputes this despairing, defeatist position of the right when it comes to academia while presenting a clear-eyed view of how the left does indeed frequently politicize scholarship.Marks provides a case study of this trend in the shape of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against the state of Israel.Jonathan Marks makes a passionate case for the value of liberal education—and lays out clearly what that consists of and its importance for those who consider themselves liberal and those who very much don’t.This book should be read by academics, college students, parents about to send their children off to college and anyone who cares about where society-shaping new ideas are developed and timeless ones are passed along to new generations. And for millions of Americans, colleges are still where much of this occurs.Give a listen.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Academia has a big problem. For many parents—especially mothers—the idea of "work-life balance" is a work-life myth. Parents and caregivers work harder than ever to grow and thrive in their careers while juggling the additional responsibilities that accompany parenthood. Sudden disruptions and daily constraints such as breastfeeding, sick days that keep children home from school, and the sleep deprivation that plagues the early years of parenting threaten to derail careers. Some experience bias and harassment related to pregnancy or parental leave. The result is an academic Chutes and Ladders, where career advancement is nearly impossible for parents who lack access to formal or informal support systems.In The PhD Parenthood Trap: Gender, Bias, and the Elusive Work-Family Balance in Academia (Georgetown UP, 2021), Kerry F. Crawford and Leah C. Windsor reveal the realities of raising kids, on or off the tenure track, and suggest reforms to help support parents throughout their careers. Insights from their original survey data and poignant vignettes from scholars across disciplines make it clear that universities lack understanding, uniform policies, and flexibility for family formation, hurting the career development of parent-scholars. Each chapter includes recommendations for best practices and policy changes that will help make academia an exemplar of progressive family-leave policies. Topics covered include pregnancy, adoption, miscarriage and infant loss, postpartum depression, family leave, breastfeeding, daily parenting challenges, the tenure clock, and more. The book concludes with advice to new or soon-to-be parents to help them better navigate parenthood in academia.The PhD Parenthood Trap provides scholars, academic mentors, and university administrators with empirical evidence and steps to break down personal and structural barriers between parenthood and scholarly careers. Galina Limorenko is a doctoral candidate in Neuroscience with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology of neurodegenerative diseases at EPFL in Switzerland. To discuss and propose the book for an interview you can reach her at galina.limorenko@epfl.ch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: the importance of normalizing failure in college the emotional work involved with coming back from a failure the role institutions have in resilience work the power of reflection for student success Our guest is: Dr. Anna Sharpe, Associate Dean for Student Success at Berry College. Dr. Sharpe has spent the last six years reimagining academic success and support programming at Berry College. She has the privilege of leading an incredible team of five professional staff and over a hundred student employees working in the areas of academic success, first-year experience, accessibility, and retention. Holding a PhD in Geography from University of Kentucky, Dr. Sharpe also researches the interplay of race, politics, law, and land use, focusing on the southeastern coast, where she was born and raised. When she is not on Berry’s beautiful campus, you can find her with her husband and son--cooking, hiking, and making frequent trips to the coast.Our host is:Dr. Dana M. Malone, the co-producer of the Academic Life podcasts. She is a higher education scholar and practitioner. Dana met Anna at the University of Kentucky, where they worked together with students in academic jeopardy and assisted them in reimagining and refocusing their college trajectories.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: The Stanford Resilience Project: Stanford Resilience Project videos Carol Dweck’s work: Carol Dweck’s TED Talk on the Power of Believing You Can Improve Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth From the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, Promoting Belonging, Growth Mindset, and Resilience to Foster Student Success (Baldwin, A., et al.) NBN Podcasts with Lisa Nunn on College Belonging NBN Podcast with Lisa Nunn on Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students:  Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, Joshua Preiss' book Just Work for All: The American Dream in the 21st Century (Taylor & Francis, 2020) calls for renewed political and policy commitment to "just work."Such a commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair.Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy.A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world.Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Listen to this interview of Jonathan Zimmerman, Professor of History of Education at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education and author of The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020). We talk about yesterday today.Jonathan Zimmerman : "Look, I don't think anyone questions that some of the best teaching they do is in their responses to student drafts and student papers. And, I think this restates the obvious, but: That is highly individuated, right? I mean, unlike a collective exercise, this is targeted directly at the student, and at what she or he has to say, and at different strengths or weaknesses in the way they're presenting what they have to say. But look, here's the important context, teaching through writing takes a great deal of time and effort. There's no way to do it on the cheap. And the bigger the university gets, the more costly everything becomes and the less likely it is that we're going to engage in the practices I'm describing—they're too expensive—they're too labor-intensive. You've probably heard the name Richard Arum. Well, he wrote, together with Josipa Roksa, the book Academically Adrift, the first sociological study of how much people are learning at college, and what they found, unsurprisingly, is that a lot of people are not learning very much. Now, there are many reasons for that, but one of them actually has to do exactly with this point of teaching through writing. One of the reasons is how little writing is actually assigned or evaluated. So again, what does this tell you? I think it tells you how little we value a process such as learning through writing. Would it cost more to teach like this? Of course it would! Things of value exert costs. And if you're not willing to pay the costs, you don't value it." Daniel hosts Scholarly Communication, the podcast about how knowledge gets known. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

What is the purpose of education? Folks outside the field are likely to think of a relatively clear or concrete answer—learning, citizenship, preparation for life, which for the vast majority encompasses work and skills. Upon probing, however, most are likely to realize that these explanations are deceptively simple. Learning what, how, and according to which or whose values? Citizenship within what communities, through which policies and enacted with how much equity, not to mention care? Why are we preparing certain kids for certain kinds of work, especially if laboring in certain ways will not necessarily earn material dignity or social capital?Consensus on the purpose of education has perhaps always been elusive, and maybe it is now most of all. So I appreciate when authors in the education space disclose their perspectives on this perennial and critical question. In Breaking Barriers: How P-TECH Schools Create a Pathway from High School to College to Career, Stanley S. Litow and Tina Kelley are quite forthright on this matter: “Public education is the lifeblood of our democracy. If our schools fail, our economy fails. Our students’ achievement is eventually connected to every issue of consequence our country will face, including racial justice, public health, closing the digital divide, income inequality, and economic empowerment” (p. 170). The authors position P-TECH schools as more than a scalable model working towards “fairer” public schools; they argue for P-TECH as a reform movement that centers students within a coalition of education stakeholders. Ultimately, they show that “education stakeholders” is a category encompassing literally everyone.Christina Anderson Bosch is faculty at the California State University, Fresno. She is curious about + committed to public, inclusive education in pluralistic societies where critical perspectives on questions of social and ecological justice are valued enough to enact material dignity and metaphysical wellbeing on massive scales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Aviva Legatt’s journey into and through college Why she became an Ivy League college admissions officer What that job taught her about common application missteps How to determine which school is right for you and show them you’re right for it Month-by-month application checklist for high school seniors. Our guest is:Dr. Aviva Legatt, who has been in the higher education field for over fifteen years. She is a faculty member in Organizational Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania and at The Wharton School, teaching in-person and online through Coursera. She has a column in Forbes about issues affecting higher education, and is the author of Get Real and Get In: How to Get Into the College of Your Dreams by Being Your Authentic Self (St. Martin's Griffin, 2021).Our host is:Dr. Christina Gessler, co-producer of the Academic Life, who attended college on a writing scholarship. She chose the school for its pet policy, relationship with the natural environment, and faculty-student ratio. She is a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: The Enlightened College Applicant: A New Approach to the Search and Admissions Process by Andrew Belasco and Dave Bergman Fiske Guide to Colleges College Admission Essentials: A Step-by-Step Guide to Showing Colleges Who You Are and What Matters to You by Ethan Sawyer How To College :What To Know Before You Go (and When You’re There) by Andrea Malkin Brenner and Laura Hope Schwartz Show Them You're Good: A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year Before College by Jeff Hobbs The Merit Myth: How our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America by Anthony Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl A Discussion of the book How To College: What To Know Before You Go (and When You’re There)  A Discussion of the book Show Them You’re Good You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach 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 on an expert about something? DM us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Part II of our discussion with Ben Nelson, he shares information on the outcomes for the first Minerva graduates and how Minerva has diversified its business model with new partners for its platform and an extension to high school. He also provides his perspective on the changes likely to unfold in higher education over the coming decade and lessons for other entrepreneurs contemplating the launch of a higher ed start-up.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In the first of two parts, we meet Ben Nelson, the charismatic founder of the Minerva Project and Minerva University. Ben shares the fascinating story of how he was able to convince one of the leading venture capital firms in Silicon Valley to back him as a young entrepreneur with no background in education to take on the Ivy League and create the world’s most selective university. Minerva attracts some of the most talented students from around the world who spend their 4 undergraduate years in 7 different leading global cities. Years before the higher education world was forced to move to Zoom by the pandemic, Minerva had figured out how to deliver high quality, live video classes globally delivering a radically different curriculum and educational experience than most colleges.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Saving the World at Business School (Part 2) is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Andy Hoffman, Holcim Professor of Sustainable Enterprise at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and School of Environment and Sustainability. This extensive conversation starts with inspiring insights into how Andy Hoffman became interested in environmental issues when he declined acceptances from graduate school at Harvard and Berkeley and instead worked as a carpenter for several years in Nantucket. Topics include the notions of ‘environmental sustainability’ and ‘big business’ which sometimes seem as incompatible as oil and water and ways to make a synthesis a reality by seriously reconsidering the way we currently conduct public policy and even some deep aspects of our current societal values.Howard Burton is the founder of the Ideas Roadshow, Ideas on Film and host of the Ideas Roadshow Podcast. He can be reached at howard@ideasroadshow.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education