New Books in Higher Education

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

Why read the Classics, and how to do it best? Louis Petrich teaches at St. John’s College, the third-oldest college and “the nation's most contrarian college” (according to the New York Times, meant as a compliment). St. John’s takes a remarkable approach to the liberal arts: students and teachers read and discuss 3,000 years of Great Books over four years, all via primary readings without disciplinary boundaries. Louis Petrich and I talked about teaching and reading Classic Books as a means of deepening rather than resolving the mystery of who we are, what we do, and how best to engage the world around us. St. John’s offers the series Continuing the Conversation with professors where “questions are more important than answers,” which is a natural companion to Think About It. 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

Writing and publishing are at the heart of most academic and research pursuits. Many potential authors, however, feel lost in the seemingly Everest climbing-like process. There is little formal education that authors receive during their education. In this regard, John Bond’s new book's The Little Guide to Getting Your Journal Article Published: Simple Steps to Success (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) seeks to pull back the curtain on the process and provide essential information to lead authors to their goals.The Little Guide answers all of a novice author's questions in a direct and useful fashion. The book can be read all the way through or serve as a spot reference guide as authors wind their way through the process. The book is divided into 29 short, focused chapters. Sections include "Getting Started," "Selecting Potential Journals for Submission," "Writing Your Article," "Submitting Your Article," and "Publication at Last. "Bond brings in a wealth of experience from decades of working in world of scholarly publishing and as a publishing consultant for authors. In this podcast he discusses the contents of his book and the challenges faced in the domain of scholarly publishing today and the simple steps for successful publication. Tune in to listen and get your article published!Sanjay Kumar, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer in the Center for Academic Writing at Central European University. Twitter: @sanju1235 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when jobs in academia are scarce, and few of the descriptions of jobs outside academia seem like a fit? How can graduates find the right job for them, whether it’s inside academia or far afield? This episode explores: Ways to explain your skills and expertise so an employer sees you as a good match for them. Tips for reframing how graduate students talk about themselves and their research. How advisors can encourage graduates to explore a wider range of jobs. A discussion of the book chapter “Beyond the Data: Navigating the Struggles of Post-PhD Employability,” in The Sage Handbook of Graduate Employability. Our guest is: Dr. Holly Prescott, who is a career guidance practitioner specializing in working with postgraduate researchers (graduate students/ PhDs). She completed a PhD in Literature and Cultural Geography at the University of Birmingham (UK) in 2011. Since then, she has gained ten years' experience in postgraduate student recruitment, admissions, and careers support. Holly also holds a PGDip (QCG) in Career Guidance from Coventry University (UK) and the Career Development Institute, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is currently the Careers Adviser for Postgraduate Researchers at the University of Birmingham (UK). Holly is particularly passionate about developing Postgraduate Researchers' awareness of career routes beyond and adjacent to academic research, helping them to make transitions into meaningful careers. This led her to found the PhD careers blog ‘PostGradual’ (www.phd-careers.co.uk). Holly lives with a rare autoimmune eye condition called AZOOR which causes visual field defects, and outside of work she volunteers for the British sight loss charity RNIB. She is also Assistant Artistic Director of Ottisdotter Theatre Company based in London. She is the author of “Beyond the Data: Navigating the Struggles of Post-PhD Employability,” in The Sage Handbook of Graduate Employability.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: The Employability Journal, by Barbara Bassot Leaving Academia: A Practical Guide, by Christopher L. Caterine Candid Advice for New Faculty Members, by Marybeth Gasman Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom, by Katina Rogers Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers, by Kathryn Linder, Keven Kelly, and Thomas Tobin The Connected PhD podcast episode, part one Academic Life podcast episode on Hope for the Humanities PhD Academic Life podcast on Leaving Academia Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have an engaging discussion with Dr. Dan Greenstein, who in 2018 left the Gates Foundation, where he led the Post-Secondary program, to become the Chancellor for the PASSHE system. He knew he was taking on a great challenge with a system that had seen enrollment decline over the prior decade from a peak of 120,000 to fewer than 90,000 students. He was able to garner the necessary political support for a major transformation of the system, starting with financial stabilization by taking out $300 million in costs while freezing tuition for 4 consecutive years. This was followed by a system redesign, integrating sets of 3 independent institutions in the Western and Eastern parts of Pennsylvania into two new universities: West Penn and Commonwealth University. He shares lessons from this reform effort that will be part of a forthcoming book.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives-- sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same old hierarchies and inequities. The stories gathered in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship (SUNY Press, 2023) challenge our fundamental assumptions about mentorship, illuminating the obstacles that make it difficult to connect meaningfully and ethically while reimagining the possibilities for reciprocity. Does mentorship require sameness? Might we find more inventive, collaborative ways to bond than the traditional top-down model of mentoring? Drawing on their experiences in academia, creative writing, publishing, and journalism, the volume's editors, Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman, and their twenty-six contributors collectively strive for relationships that acknowledge differences alongside the importance of common bonds. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship will resonate across workspaces and arrives at a moment when the need to form feminist connections within and between generations couldn't feel more urgent.Host Annie Berke sits down with Drs. Miller and Oksman, as well as contributor Dr. Elizabeth Alsop, to discuss the origins of this anthology, the biggest myths behind mentorship, and what mentors and mentees owe to one another.Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her many books include My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism; Breathless: An American Girl in Paris; What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past; and But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives.Tahneer Oksman is Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College. She is the author of "How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?" Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs and coeditor (with Seamus O'Malley) of The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself. She reviews memoirs, graphic novels, and comics for NPR and The Washington Post.Elizabeth Alsop is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at the CUNY School of Professional Studies, and affiliated faculty in the M.A. in Liberal Studies program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Making Conversation in Modernist Fiction (Ohio State UP, 2019) and a number of scholarly essays on 20th-century fiction, film and television aesthetics, and contemporary TV storytelling. Her cultural criticism has appeared in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, and The New York Times Magazine. She is currently writing a book on the films of Elaine May.Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why is education so important in a democracy? Are democracies capable of producing the citizens they need? What do John Locke and Alexis de Tocqueville have to teach us about education in a liberal democracy? Jeffrey Sikkenga, Executive Director of the Ashbrook Center, joins Madison's Notes to answer these questions and more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton UP, 2020) offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have altered how and what students are taught, as courses across the arts, humanities, and sciences increasingly are set aside to make room for joyless, mechanical reading and math instruction. Students have been robbed of a complete education, their imaginations stunted by this myopic focus on bare literacy and numeracy. Education is about thinking, Newstok argues, rather than the mastery of a set of rigidly defined skills, and the seemingly rigid pedagogy of the English Renaissance produced some of the most compelling and influential examples of liberated thinking. Each of the fourteen chapters explores an essential element of Shakespeare's world and work, aligns it with the ideas of other thinkers and writers in modern times, and suggests opportunities for further reading. Chapters on craft, technology, attention, freedom, and related topics combine past and present ideas about education to build a case for the value of the past, the pleasure of thinking, and the limitations of modern educational practices and prejudices.Scott Newstok is professor of English and founding director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment at Rhodes College. A parent and an award-winning teacher, he is the author of Quoting Death in Early Modern England and the editor of several other books. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Gita Manaktala, Editorial Director at the MIT Press, and Ellen Finnie, Co-Interim Associate Director for Collections at MIT Libraries, discuss the Ideas series: a hybrid print and open access book series for general readers, that provides fresh, strongly argued, and provocative views of the effects of digital technology on culture, business, government, education, and our lives.Learn more about the full series here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is postmodernism? Does the Biden Administration support Critical Race Theory? How might a recommitment to classical liberal principles help fight "Woke-ism"? James Lindsay joins the show to answer these questions and more and discuss his book (co-written with Helen Pluckrose), Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. About the "Grievance Studies Affair," here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices