New Books in Higher Education

The past six years have been marked by a contentious political atmosphere that has touched every arena of public life, including higher education. Though most college campuses are considered ideologically progressive, how can it be that the right has been so successful in mobilizing young people even in these environments?As Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder show in this surprising analysis of the relationship between political activism on college campuses and the broader US political landscape, while liberal students often outnumber conservatives on college campuses, liberal campus organizing remains removed from national institutions that effectively engage students after graduation. And though they are usually in the minority, conservative student groups have strong ties to national right-leaning organizations, which provide funds and expertise, as well as job opportunities and avenues for involvement after graduation. Though the left is more prominent on campus, the right has built a much more effective system for mobilizing ongoing engagement. What’s more, the conservative college ecosystem has worked to increase the number of political provocations on campus and lower the public’s trust in higher education.In analyzing collegiate activism from the left, right, and center, The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today (U Chicago Press, 2022) shows exactly how politically engaged college students are channeled into two distinct forms of mobilization and why that has profound consequences for the future of American politics.Amy J. Binder is professor of sociology at John Hopkins University. She is the author of Contentious Curricula and coauthor of Becoming Right.Jeffrey L. Kidder is professor of sociology at Northern Illinois University. He is the author of Parkour and the City and Urban FlowMorteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Academic library hiring can be a bureaucratic and exclusionary process. Inclusive hiring practices can help libraries recenter the people in the process and incorporate transparency, empathy, and accessibility. Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices (2024, ACRL), rather than focusing just on how to diversify applicant pools, breaks down the many considerations involved in hiring and the intentional, thoughtful preparation and self-examination that leads to successful recruitment and retention in three parts.  Training for Search Committees and Stakeholders  Removing Barriers for Candidates  Transforming the Process for All  Throughout are practical solutions for emphasizing inclusivity and accessibility throughout the hiring process, including instructions and examples for developing the position description and job postings, tips for creating diversity statements, interview instructions and preparation lists, interview itineraries, sample candidate emails and feedback forms, evaluation rubrics, ideas for onboarding and mentorship, and more. While you are evaluating potential hires, they are evaluating you. Toward Inclusive Academic Librarian Hiring Practices can help you center equity in your hiring, attract job seekers, and support both candidates and search committees through these time-intensive, laborious, and crucial processes. Kathryn M. Houk is associate professor and undergraduate medical education librarian at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), School of Medicine Library. Jordan Nielsen is an associate professor and the Head of Access Services in the James E. Walker Library at Middle Tennessee State University. Jenny Wong-Welch is the Director of the build IT Makerspace and Head of Research, Instruction, Outreach at San Diego State University. Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Given the continued challenges that face the higher education job market in the Humanities in North America, this multi authored volume offers (i) a critical assessment of the current situation of Humanities doctoral students, early career scholars, and those now working in doctoral degree-granting institutions in the U.S. along with (ii) concrete proposals for a way forward. In turn, these proposals (iii) are the starting point for constructive reflections by faculty now working in leading American doctoral programs. The aim for the volume is therefore to initiate and then move forward a conversation among future, current, and recent graduate students as well as those who train them concerning the content, process, and purpose of acquiring advanced research skills in the early twenty-first century university.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Medical schools have increasingly incorporated the humanities and social sciences into their teaching, seeking to make future physicians more empathetic and more concerned with equity. In practice, however, these good intentions have not translated into critical consciousness. Humanities and social sciences education has often not only failed to deliver on its promise but even entrenched the inequalities that the medical profession set out to address. In Curricular Injustice: How U.S. Medical Schools Reproduce Inequalities (Columbia UP, 2024), Lauren D. Olsen examines how U.S. medical school faculty conceived, designed, and implemented their vision of education, tracing the failures of curricular reform. She argues that the way medical students encounter humanities and social sciences material in practice has served to reinforce the status quo by teaching them to individualize systemic problems. Students learn to avoid advocacy, critique, and attention to structural inequalities—while also gathering that it will be up to them to find coping strategies for problems from burnout to systemic racism. Olsen pinpoints the limitations of how clinical faculty understand the humanities and social sciences, arguing that in structuring and teaching courses, they assumed, reinforced, and glorified a white, elite model of the medical profession. Showing how deeply intertwined professional and social identities are in medical education, Curricular Injustice has significant implications for how occupations, organizations, and institutions shape understandings of inequality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this discussion, Domingo Morel, author of "Developing Scholars," dives deep into the history of college access programs for students of color. He outlines how community activism shaped a more inclusive approach to affirmative action during the 1960s. Morel reveals how protests—sometimes violent—sustained these vital programs and emphasizes the ongoing barriers faced by marginalized students in higher education. He examines the systemic challenges of credentialism and the urgent need for equitable educational reforms to support underrepresented communities.

The 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education remains to this day the largest and most ambitious attempt to provide free, universal college education in the United States. Yet the Master Plan, the product of committed Cold War liberals, unfortunately served to reinforce the very class-based exclusions and de facto racism that plagued K–12 education in the nation's largest and most diverse state. In doing so, it inspired a wave of student and faculty organizing that not only forced administrators and politicians to live up to the original promise of the Master Plan—quality higher education for all—but changed the face of California itself. Higher Education for All: Racial Inequality, Cold War Liberalism, and the California Master Plan (UNC Press, 2023)  is the first and only comprehensive account of the California Master Plan. Through deep archival work and sharp attention to a fascinating cast of historical characters, Andrew Stone Higgins has excavated the forgotten history of the Master Plan: from its origins in the 1957 Sputnik Crisis, through Governor Ronald Reagan's financial starvation and his failed quest to introduce tuition, to the student struggle to institute affirmative action in university admissions.Abigail (Abby) Jean Kahn is a PhD candidate in the history of education at Stanford's Graduate School of Education. She also currently sits on the Graduate Student Council for the History of Education Society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Black Woman on Board: Claudia Hampton, the California State University, and the Fight to Save Affirmative Action (University of Rochester Press, 2024) examines the leadership strategies that Black women educators have employed as influential power brokers in predominantly white colleges and universities in the United States. Author Donna J. Nicol tells the extraordinary story of Dr. Claudia H. Hampton, the California State University (CSU) system's first Black woman trustee, who later became the board's first woman chair, and her twenty-year fight (1974-94) to increase access within the CSU for historically marginalized and underrepresented groups. Amid a growing white backlash against changes brought on by the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, Nicol argues that Hampton enacted "sly civility" to persuade fellow trustees, CSU system officials, and state lawmakers to enforce federal and state affirmative action mandates.Donna J. Nicol is Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts at California State University, Long Beach, CA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today’s book is: A Pedagogy of Kindness (University of Oklahoma Press, 2024), by Dr. Catherine Denial, which explores why academia is not, by and large, a kind place. Without kindness at its core, Catherine Denial suggests, higher education fails students and instructors—and its mission—in critical ways. Part manifesto, part teaching memoir, part how-to guide, A Pedagogy of Kindness urges higher education to get aggressive about instituting kindness, which Dr. Denial distinguishes from niceness. Having suffered beneath the weight of just “getting along,” instructors need to shift every part of what they do to prioritizing care and compassion—for students as well as for themselves. A Pedagogy of Kindness articulates a fresh vision for teaching, one that focuses on ensuring justice, believing people, and believing in people. Offering evidence-based insights and drawing from her own rich experiences as a professor, Dr. Denial offers practical tips for reshaping syllabi, assessing student performance, and creating trust and belonging in the classroom. Her suggestions for concrete, scalable actions outline nothing less than a transformational discipline—one in which, together, we create bright new spaces, rooted in compassion, in which all engaged in teaching and learning might thrive.Our guest is: Dr. Catherine J. Denial, who is the Bright Distinguished Professor of American History and Director of the Bright Institute at Knox College. A regular speaker and consultant on teaching and learning, she is also the author of Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota and Ojibwe Country.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the producer of the Academic Life podcast. She holds a PhD in history, which she uses to explore what stories we tell and what happens to those we never tell.Playlist for listeners: The Power of Play in Higher Education Skills for Scholars: How Can Mindfulness Help? Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides The Good-Enough Life Exploring the value of taking a break, and seeking rest Meditation and the Academic Life Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by posting, assigning or sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 225+ Academic Life episodes? You’ll find them all archived here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Association of University Presses (AUPresses), a global organization of 161 mission-driven publishers, is proud to announce a collection of 123 books, journals, and projects that embody the #StepUP theme of this year’s University Press Week, happening Nov. 11 to 15. The featured publications, curated by AUPresses members in 12 countries, present thought-provoking concepts, new points of view, and inspiring ideas, many of which advocate for social change.For a complete list of UP Week events, see hereFor the gallery of 103 publications, see hereTo work at a university press, see hereAnthony Cond is director of Liverpool University Press and president of the Association of University PressesCaleb Zakarin is editor at the New Books Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game (UNC Press, 2024), Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva offer an existential challenge to one of America's favorite pastimes: college football. Drawing on twenty-five in-depth interviews with former players from some of the country's most prominent college football teams, Kalman-Lamb and Silva explore how football is both predicated on a foundation of coercion and suffused with racialized harm and exploitation. Through the stories of those who lived it, the authors examine the ways in which college football must be understood as a site of harm, revealing how players are systematically denied the economic value they produce for universities and offered only a devalued education in return.By illuminating the plantation dynamics that make college football a particularly racialized form of exploitation, the book makes legible the forms of physical sacrifice that are required, the ultimate cost in health and well-being, and the coercion that drives players into the sport and compels them to endure such abusive conditions.Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won. His next book, a biography of Moses Malone will be published in 2025. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices