I happened to notice this review of four new books relating to universities. I also happen to have in the bin, a bibliography relating to universities. Oddly enough, books about them are not easy to gather.
Given the pandemic and the generally difficult times on campuses everywhere, there is much written about higher education. Some of the news is bad; for example, Laurentian’s bankruptcy and the absence of students in actual classrooms (see my earlier post: Campuses, Creative Destruction and the Coronavirus.) On the other hand, some academics who are dissatisfied with what is going on have decided to start a brand new one in Austin, Texas!
A summary of the review is presented and followed by the bibliography. Merry Christmas to those of you interested in higher education. Here is the source and the beginning paragraph along with portions of the reviews
for each book.
"Power at the University: Books That Explore Higher Education as the Rehearsal
Room for Democracy'" Simona Chiose, The Globe and Mail, Dec. 21, 2021.
"After 20 months of intermittent online learning, where the value of a university education can be easy to question as the experience is reduced to a checkerboard of names and faces, encountering a quartet of books that takes universities seriously is cause for optimism. Across these four books, the promise of universities burns bright, from improving democracy to accelerating incomes to life-changing discoveries.
Nothing Less than Great: Reforming Canada’s Universities, Harvey Weingarten,
"For Harvey Weingarten, the quality of undergraduate education is the first task. In Nothing Less than Great: Reforming Canada’s Universities, Weingarten – a former university president and higher education administrator – sets out his case that while Canadian universities are poised on the cusp of greatness, they are at risk of stagnation."
“Is it so preposterous to contemplate an undergraduate curriculum structured around solutions to problems – a Department of Poverty Reduction or Climate Change Solutions – instead of the traditional departments that often operate in silos and create impediments to students who wish to learn in multi- and interdisciplinary ways?” he asks....
Governments and institutions must attend to improving their most important product: the human capital created in undergraduate education, he argues."
What Universities Owe Democracy, Ron Daniels
"The university as a place of promise and peril emerges clearly in Ron Daniels’ What Universities Owe Democracy. Alarmed by the attempted January 6, 2021 coup in the United States and armed with international surveys showing declines in democracies’ political health, Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins University (and a Canadian), advances the most forceful argument for universities as change-makers.
In spite of Daniels’ hopes, the university emerges as an imperfect vessel for democracy. Seized with the university’s role on the national stage, Daniels misses the opportunity to reckon with how demands for internal change and representation can advance democracy. And significantly, for a book published after the first peak of the pandemic, he does not address remote learning, which offered a glimpse at how access can be truly expanded even as it underlined how there is no replacement for humans sharing physical space."
Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University, Emily Levine
"Levine begins her story with the founding of the University of Berlin in 1809, the prototype of an institution that “would authenticate and legitimize knowledge” in order to educate a “professional civil service and competitive military.” (The University of Berlin, now the Humboldt University of Berlin, would go on to be home for 57 Nobel laureates.) From this origin story, she travels back and forth across the Atlantic to trace how German and American men leveraged professional education and their respective countries’ hunger for expertise and science as the foundation for their own ascent."
Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First, Indira Samarasekera and Martha Piper.
"Closer in time and geography, Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First, reinforces the message that universities are slow-moving beasts. Written by Indira Samarasekera, a former president of the University of Alberta, and Martha Piper, a former president of the University of British Columbia, the book provides advice to accompany every professional phase in women’s careers, from reaching for leadership to retirement."
The Bibliography
This bibliography is a good one, but it is almost a decade old. The essay accompanying it is still worth reading.
"The University, the Market, and Professors: A Bibliographic Essay," Ethan Schrum
The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture
Spring 2012 / Volume 14 / No. 1 - The Entire Issue is Devoted to “The Corporate Professor.”
The headings are supplied by Schrum. Those books that are highlighted are available in the libraries at Western. That some of them are not available is explained by the fact that the subject of higher education did not fall under the purview of a particular collections librarian. Before heading to campus, you should double-check.
The History of Universities since World War II
Bender, Thomas, and Carl E. Schorske, eds. American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Chomsky, Noam, et al. The Cold War & the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years. New York, NY: New, 1997.
Freeland, Richard M. Academia’s Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945–1970. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992. Online
Geiger, Roger L. Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1993. Storage
Kerr, Clark. The Uses of the University. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Several Copies
Leslie, Stuart W. The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993. Several Copies & Online
Loss, Christopher P. Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the 20th Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Online
Lowen, Rebecca S. Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.
Nisbet, Robert. The Degradation of the Academic Dogma: The University in America, 1945–1970. New York, NY: Basic, 1971. Storage
O’Mara, Margaret Pugh. Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Storage & Online
Simpson, Christopher, ed., Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War. New York, NY: New, 1998. Weldon
Markets
Bok, Derek. Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Storage & King’s
Geiger, Roger. Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Storage
Kirp, David L. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Business & King’s
Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Slaughter, Sheila, and Larry L. Leslie. Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Storage
Corporatization and the Fate of the Professor
Donoghue, Frank. The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008. Online
Ginsberg, Benjamin. The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Gould, Eric. The University in a Corporate Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. King’s & Storage
Somerville, C. John. Religious Ideas for Secular Universities. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009. King’s
The Bonus:
Nerve... is published by ECW Press, about which I knew nothing. What do the initials stand for? I'm still not exactly sure:
At first the acronym was self-descriptive: Essays on Canadian Writing (the name of the journal of literary criticism we started in 1974). But as the company grew and changed, our name, in our minds, also changed. We’ve heard the company called Essential Canadian Writing, Excellent Contemporary Writing, or, more recently, Extreme Cutting-Edge Writing. And these names have been, and still are, appropriate. But now we realize that each of those letters represents a particular strain of ECW Press’s diverse passions — Entertainment, Culture, Writing.
ECW Press is located in Toronto and they have their own blog.
