New Books in Higher Education

During Leo Lambert’s 19-year tenure as president at Elon University, the institution moved from a regional college to becoming one of the U.S.’s top 100 national universities. It is consistently ranked #1 for undergraduate education, ahead of Brown and Princeton. Lambert describes the five core “Elon Experiences” and other high impact practices that have helped Elon become one of the leaders in active and engaged learning. He also discusses the other strategies that enabled Elon to advance so significantly, including: adding a law school, creating a top-ranked School of Communications, an AACSB-accredited Business School, and a new School of Health Sciences, and constructing over two-thirds of the buildings and facilities on its beautiful North Carolina campus. In Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) he shares numerous insights from Elon and a diverse set of 16 other colleges and universities that have intentionally focused on building deep connections for students with faculty, staff and their peers.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), futurist Bryan Alexander explores higher education during an age of unfolding climate crisis. Powered by real-world examples and the latest research, Alexander assesses practical responses and strategies by surveying contemporary programs and academic climate research from around the world. He establishes a model of how academic institutions may respond and offers practical pathways forward for higher education. How will the two main purposes of education—teaching and research—change as the world heats up? Alexander positions colleges and universities in the broader social world, from town-gown relationships to connections between how campuses and civilization as a whole respond to this epochal threat.Brady McCartney is an environmental educator and the Consortium Director of the EcoLeague, an environmental education consortium currently based at Dickinson College's Center for Sustainability Education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How are hiring and admissions decisions made in the hard sciences if not by merit? What are the risks of allowing science to be politicized? Professors Dorian Abbot (University of Chicago), Anna Krylov (University of Southern California), David Romps (University of California, Berkeley), and Bernhardt Trout (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), join the show to answer these questions and others. Resources:  Dorian Abbot "The Views That Made Me Persona Non Grata at MIT" Yascha Mounk "Why the Latest Campus Cancellation Is Different" Bret Stephens, "What Does a University Owe Democracy?"   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dorian Abbot is an Associate Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had invited Abbot to deliver their prestigious Carlson Lecture, but rescinded the invitation after receiving complaints about an article Abbot had written for Newsweek, titled "The Diversity Problem on Campus." In response, Princeton University's James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions invited Abbot to speak at the James Madison Program. He'll do so live on Zoom on October 21st, at 4:30 PM ET. Abbot joins the podcast to discuss MIT's capitulation, academic freedom in the hard sciences, and more.Abbot's essay "The Diversity Problem on Campus" is here. Abbot's article "MIT Abandon's its Mission. And Me" is here.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is academic freedom for? What are the greatest threats to academic freedom today? Should Critical Race Theory be taught on college campuses? What about in K-12 classrooms? Keith Whittington, Chairman of the Academic Freedom Alliance's Academic Committee and the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University, joins the show to answer these questions and discuss the work of the Academic Freedom Alliance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why do so many students and academics worry that they are imposters? Is it normal to experience this kind of self-doubt? This episode explores: The difference between imposter syndrome and imposter phenomenon. How we can better understand imposter syndrome. Why it strikes some people. How to recognize it when it does. Tips for helping others and ourselves. Our guest is: Dr Darragh McCashin, who is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology at Dublin City University (DCU), and is interested in digital youth mental health, and clinical/forensic applications of technology. Previously, Darragh was a Marie Curie Fellow/PhD student at University College Dublin (UCD), examining technology-enabled youth mental health within the EU H2020-funded TEAM-ITN project, specifically the role of technology-assisted cognitive behavioural therapy for children using mixed methodologies. A second strand to Darragh’s research is that of forensic/criminal psychology. With an MSc in Applied Forensic Psychology (University of York), Darragh has previously worked as an Associate Lecturer and Research Assistant in the Online-Protect research group at the University of Lincoln case formulation tools for those with convictions for internet sexual offences.With respect to policy-making, Darragh is currently the taskforce leader for Mental Health of Researchers within the Policy Working Group of the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), and co-founded the researcher mentoring programme Referent. Darragh also sits on two COST Actions: Researcher Mental Health Observatory (CA19117; Working Group Chair), and the European Network for Problematic Usage of the Internet (CA16207; management committee member for Ireland).Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship and Community, by Mia Birdsong It’s a Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding a Meaningful Existence, by Frank Martela Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, by Nedra Glover Tawwab The Rejection That Saved My Life, by Jessica Bacal The Academic Life podcast on belonging and the science of creating connection and bridging divides The Academic Life podcast Dealing With Rejection The Academic Life podcast On The Museum of Failure Welcome to The Academic Life! On the Academic Life channel we are inspired and informed by today’s knowledge-producers, working inside and outside the academy. Find us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Jan Recker, Professor for Information Systems and Digital Innovation at the University of Hamburg, Germany and author of Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner's Guide (Springer, 2021). We talk about how your research is what you write.Jan Recker : "Very few of us scientists are gifted readers, and very few of us are gifted writers, but those who are, I do think that they have an advantage in science. It's not that they're the better scientists, but they just understand the literature better, or they can help a reader understand their own research better. And these are just really key and fundamental techniques of the research." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023) by Philip Ewell is an unflinching look at white supremacy and the academy, specifically in the discipline of music theory, although Ewell’s insights and arguments can apply just as well to all music studies and most, if not all, other academic fields. Using meticulous research and his own experiences, Ewell documents the results of music theory’s white racial frame. He shows how the power traditionally wielded by white, cisgender men in academia is supported by the methodologies, the pedagogy, and the very music that most music specialists study, perform, and teach, and how this white racial frame makes it difficult for anyone else to feel comfortable, much less succeed in the field. Ultimately, the book brings attention to the myriad ways that people are excluded, denigrated, and marginalized by deeply entrenched beliefs, analytical methods, and systems in music theory. Ewell reminds readers that there is a difference between diversity work and antiracism, and how important it is to recognize when “solutions” are actually supporting the very racial injustices they purport to reform. Although the problem is too complex for easy answers, Ewell ends the book with some strategies to begin to subvert music’s white racial frame and make “music more welcoming for everyone.”Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honors departments at North Carolina State University. Her research centers on race and class in American popular entertainment at the turn of the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing's aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students are mediated through complex intersectional relationships with whiteness, the English language, and cosmopolitan aspiration. At the heart of these tensions, a question persistently emerges: How does English become more than a language—and whiteness more than a race? Engaging in this inquiry, Ke-Schutte explores twenty-first century Afro-Chinese encounters as translational events that diagram the discursive contours of a changing transnational political order—one that will certainly be shaped by African and Chinese relations.A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

State censorship and cancel culture, trigger warnings and safe spaces, pseudoscience, First Amendment hardball, as well as orthodoxy and groupthink: universities remain a site for important battles in the culture wars. What is the larger meaning of these debates? Are American universities at risk of conceding to mobs and cuddled “snowflake” students and sacrifice the hallowed values of free speech and academic inquiry? Bradford Vivian examines the heated debates over campus misinformation as a language unto itself that confirms existing notions and often provides simple explanations for complex shared problems. In his book, Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford UP), he shows how the free speech crisis on US college campuses has been manufactured through misinformation, distortion, and political ideology, and how campus misinformation is a threat not only to academic freedom but also to civil liberties in US society writ large.In our conversation, Bradford explained how campus speech crises are used – and also how faculty, administrators, students and others can recognize recurring patterns and properly respond, for example to distinguish between abuses of scientific evidence and sound scientific claims in public argument. Bradford Vivian is a professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. His research and teaching focuses on theories of rhetoric (or the art of persuasion) and public controversies over memory, history, speech and other issues. Among his books are Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (Oxford University Press), Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (Penn State Press) and Being Made Strange: Rhetoric beyond Representation (SUNY Press). He is also co-editor, with Anne Teresa Demo, of Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form: Sighting Memory (Routledge). He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and, from the National Communication Association, the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, the Critical/Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year Award, and the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award.Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices