New Books in Education

“Allying with a Hamas cell (on a Palestinian university campus) is not the same as joining the College Republicans at the University of Kansas...in the West Bank and Gaza, we are not in Kansas anymore” - Cary NelsonWhy is there no academic freedom on university campuses in the Palestinian territories? In Not in Kansas Anymore: Academic Freedom in Palestinian Universities (AEN, 2021), Cary Nelson examines this question in the first empirical study of campus life under the Palestinian Authority and Hamas governance.For years, anti-Zionist activists have accused Israel of undermining academic freedom and campus free speech in both Gaza and the West Bank. Not in Kansas Anymore demonstrates conclusively that the major threats to academic freedom come from Palestinians themselves, including from both the Palestinian Authority and from paramilitary and terrorist groups, Hamas most prominent among them.Renee Garfinkel, Ph.D. is a psychologist, writer, Middle East television commentator and host of The New Books Network’s Van Leer Jerusalem Series on Ideas. Write her at r.garfinkel@yahoo.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Sarah Drummond provides a master class for any higher education leader contemplating a strategic alliance or merger with another institution. She describes and draws lessons from the many earlier failed partnership efforts of Andover Newton Seminary as it sought ways to continue its mission and become financially viable. And then describes in detail the carefully crafted, three-stage process which ANS negotiated with Yale Divinity School to move the Seminary to New Haven. This is the first of three episodes with presidents who’ve led the successful integration of their institutions into larger universities.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 his highly influential book, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, Carleton College Professor of Economics, Nathan Grawe, alerted college and university leaders to the challenges they would be facing with the accelerating decline in the number of U.S. high school graduates that will come in the middle of this decade. In his new book, The Agile College: How Institutions Successfully Navigate Demographic Changes (Johns Hopkins UP, 2021), he updates the demographic trends through the mid-2030s and describes the variety of strategies different institutions are adopting to respond to the decline in their traditional student population. He shares what led him to become an economist and the rigorous training he received at the University of Chicago. We have an engaging discussion of the implications of his work for both university leaders and policymakers as they debate reforms for funding college students. He also shares some insights from his new project looking at the publishing and career paths of economists working in liberal arts 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

Marc Brackett is a professor in Yale University's Child Study Center and founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. In his 25 years as an emotion scientist, he has developed a remarkably effective plan to improve the lives of children and adults - a blueprint for understanding our emotions and using them wisely so that they help, rather than hinder, our success and well-being. The core of his approach is a legacy from his childhood, from an astute uncle who gave him permission to feel. He was the first adult who managed to see Marc, listen to him, and recognize the suffering, bullying, and abuse he'd endured. And that was the beginning of Marc's awareness that what he was going through was temporary. He wasn't alone, he wasn't stuck on a timeline, and he wasn't "wrong" to feel scared, isolated, and angry. Now, best of all, he could do something about it.In the decades since, Marc has led large research teams and raised tens of millions of dollars to investigate the roots of emotional well-being. His prescription for healthy children (and their parents, teachers, and schools) is a system called RULER, a high-impact and fast-effect approach to understanding and mastering emotions that has already transformed the thousands of schools that have adopted it. RULER has been proven to reduce stress and burnout, improve school climate, and enhance academic achievement. This book is the culmination of Marc's development of RULER and his way to share the strategies and skills with readers around the world. It is tested, and it works.Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves, and Our Society Thrive (Celadon, 2019) combines rigor, science, passion and inspiration in equal parts. Too many children and adults are suffering; they are ashamed of their feelings and emotionally unskilled, but they don't have to be. Marc Brackett's life mission is to reverse this course, and this book can show you how.Debbie Sorenson is a psychologist in Denver and the host of the excellent podcast Psychologists Off the Clock. 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 Ken Hyland, Professor of Applied Linguistics in Education at the University of East Anglia, UK. We talked about his book Second Language Writing (Cambridge UP, 2019), the importance of reflection to teaching, and about the importance of teaching to research, and about the importance of research to reflection.Interviewer : "I wonder whether second language writing isn't sometimes identifying itself too closely with language learning, and not–––well, it should be writing in a second language, shouldn't it? You know, put something up front which is what this is really about."Ken Hyland : "Yeah, I think that one thing that an emphasis on second language writing has given us is the recognition that writing is important. I don't think that there is a university anywhere now that doesn't have a writing center or at least an office where students can go and get consultation about their texts. Writing has been recognized as important, and also in native-English-speaking contexts as well, and in UK universities. And in fact, when we look at writing at advanced levels, like PhDs and writing for publication, language doesn't really come into it anymore. It's a rhetorical issue. And this crude native/nonnative polarization I think breaks down entirely. You know, it's counterproductive, because it demoralizes second-language writers who are trying to get their PhD or publish in journals, and it ignores the very real writing problems experienced by native English speakers, by L1s, you know. So, the L1s get ignored, in favor of the L2s, who get the courses, but everyone's unhappy because it's seen as a language issue rather than as a writing issue." 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. 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: how Sarah dealt with loneliness, worked as a teaching assistant from a tent her own backyard, and what the pandemic means for her dissertation, her timeline, and her funding.Our guest is: Sarah Paschal Gerenday is a PhD student in Earth Science at University of California Santa Barbara researching the use of recycled water for groundwater replenishment. She lives with a few friends and a dog in Santa Barbara.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. 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. 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 dr.danamalone@gmail.com or cgessler@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear about: the three realms of college belonging, why “finding your place” is bad advice for first-gen students, how financial aid packages affect students’ experiences of belonging, “nice” and “not-so-nice” diversity, and the hypocrisy of white niceness on college campuses.Our guest is: Lisa M. Nunn, Ph.D., author of College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life and Professor of Sociology at the University of San Diego. She is the Director of her campus' Center for Educational Excellence. She is also the author of 33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students as well as a book on high school students, Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture. She didn't grow up knowing that she would become a sociologist and she graduated college as a literature and theater major, still not knowing that she would become a sociologist. It was during her years with the Peace Corps in Limbaži, Latvia in her early twenties when she started to recognize how fascinating cultural ideas and social structures are. How they shape who we are, who we want to become, and how they also constrain the paths available to us to get there. She hasn't stopped thinking about or talking about these dynamics since.Your host is: Dr. Dana Malone, a higher education scholar and practitioner. She specializes in college student relationships, gender, sexuality, and religious identities as well as assessment planning. Dana enjoys engaging conversations, delicious food, practicing yoga, and wandering the Jersey shore.Listeners to this episode might be interested in: 33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students by Lisa M. Nunn Defining Student Success: The Role of School and Culture by Lisa Nunn The Cost of Inclusion: How Student Conformity Leads to Inequality on College Campuses by Blake R. Silver The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students by Anthony Abraham Jack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Whether and how to reform, indeed to transform graduate education has been a matter for debate, discussion and experimentation over the past 30 years – at least. In The New PhD: How to Build a Better Graduate Education (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), Leonard Cassuto and Robert Weisbuch look back at the many attempts, successes and failures to do so since the 1990s. They argue that graduate school has been preparing PhD students for jobs that don’t exist and encouraging students to want those jobs to the detriment of their career success and personal wellbeing. Cassuto and Weisbuch propose what they call a more humane and socially dynamic PhD experience that reconceives of graduate education as a public good. In The New PhD, Cassuto and Weisbuch provide recommendations from admissions to advising to curriculum to the dissertation, as well as suggestions for how to begin conversations at the departmental and graduate school level to make changes.Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University. He is the author of The Graduate Adviser column for The Chronicle of Higher Education, which inspired his book The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It.Robert Weisbuch, formerly a professor of English, department chair, and dean at the University of Michigan, served as the president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the eleventh president of Drew University.Amanda Jeanne Swain is executive director of the Humanities Center at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a PhD in Russian & East European European History from the University of Washington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

In Becoming Rwandan: Education, Reconciliation and the Making of a Post-Genocide Citizen (Rutgers UP, 2020), S. Garnett Russell argues that although the Rwandan government makes use of global discourses in national policy documents, the way in which teachers and students engage with these global models distorts the curricular intentions of the government, resulting in unintended consequences and an undermining of sustainable peace. She is assistant professor of international and comparative education and the director of the George Clement Bond Center for African Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University.Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of producing academic knowledge about African places and people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/education

Mary Marcy discusses her influential new book, The Small College Imperative: Models for Sustainable Futures (Stylus, 2020) which lays out five different models that small colleges and universities can use to succeed in today’s highly competitive marketplace. This begins with the “Traditional” liberal arts model that is increasingly limited to the most highly selective and well-endowed colleges. Most tuition-dependent institutions have made the move toward a more “Integrated” Model that retains a liberal arts core, but has added pre-professional and graduate programs. This model is perhaps best exemplified by the 25 members of the New American Colleges & Universities (NACU). “The Distinctive Model” adopted by institutions like Agnes Scott and Furman, and implemented with great success by Marcy at Dominican University, builds off the literature on High-Impact Practices to create a common set of experiences for all undergraduates. The models that entail the greatest transformation are “Growth” and “Distributed” that entail substantial expansion beyond the liberal arts core to include satellite campuses and online offerings. In the Distributed model, exemplified by institutions like Southern New Hampshire University, the original campus is no longer central to the strategy.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