New Books in Higher Education

We are delighted to welcome you at All for One and One for All: Public Seminar Series on Mental Health in Academia and Society. All for One and One for All talks shine the light on and discuss mental health issues in academia across all levels – from students to faculty, as well as in wider society. Speakers include academics, organisations, and health professionals whose work focuses on mental health. Live Q and A sessions will be held after each talk. For live webinar schedule please visit Lashuel lab website. Follow us on Twitter: @LashuelLabToday’s talk is hosted by Prof. Hilal Lashuel and Galina Limorenko, and we are happy to welcome Prof. Morteza Mahmoudi to discuss bullying in academia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are few thinkers who engender as much debate about their legacy as Leo Strauss (1899 –1973). His critics and biographers often don’t even agree about what scholarly discipline he practiced. Political theory or philosophy? Was he a proto-neoconservative or a middle-of-the-road Cold War defender of liberal democracy? He is often depicted as a major intellectual influence on sections of the national security state right, especially during the presidency of George W. Bush when he was portrayed as a puppeteer pulling from the grave the strings of such notable hawks as Paul Wolfowitz.But the writings of Strauss often go unexamined. That is partly because they lean towards the abstruse. Strauss was not a general-audience-friendly public intellectual in his day and much of the homage to and attacks on him at this point are to be found in the pages of academic journals and in the halls of think tanks.We are fortunate, therefore, that we can turn to the 2021 book, Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education by Timothy W. Burns for elucidation of Strauss's thinking about how we can preserve liberal democracy in the face of apathy from moderates, classical liberals and traditional conservatives flummoxed by the rise of an aggressive left that questions whether the United States is a democracy at all and an alienated alt-right that regards liberal democracy as now practiced as a character-sapping anachronism leading to civilizational decline.We learn from Burns of Strauss's admiration for Winston Churchill and touting of him as an exemplar of greatness within democracy. In one of the most absorbing sections of the book we learn of a 1941 lecture by Strauss entitled, “German Nihilism” in which he examined the arguments of such groups as rightist German students in the 1920s that liberal democracy fostered moral mediocrity.Burns contrasts in detail the ideas of Strauss and Martin Heidegger and shows that Strauss foresaw that the other man’s emphasis on resoluteness would metastasize into Heidegger’s support for Nazism. Burns tells us that Strauss can speak to us today via his call to defend democratic constitutionalism and its spiritual and religious traditions.That call can lead to charges of elitism against Strauss because it entailed his championing of the idea of an “aristocracy within democracy,” a cadre of cultivated, well-educated leaders who would help maintain the intellectual and cultural moorings of democracies.Let’s hear now from Professor Burns about who Leo Strauss was and what he actually wrote and thought.Hope J. Leman is a grants researcher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Richard Reeves about his important new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It (Brookings Institution, 2022).The statistics are stunning. Men have a 9% lower graduation rate from college. One in three men without a completed high school education are now out of the workforce. About 40% of births take place outside of marriage (up from 11% in 1970). And men are 50% more likely to die from Covid-19 than women after contracting the virus. The long and short of it, while also advocating for full, real opportunities for women, short shrift is often being given to the problems men face. Neither ignoring the problem (the liberal choice, often) or suggesting we turn-back-the-clock to the 1950s (the conservative choice, often) will suffice. In this episode, Richard Reeves dares to propose some real solutions regarding education reforms, workplace opportunities, and pro-childrearing roles for all dads, married or otherwise.Richard Reeves is a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. He’s the author of the 2017 book Dream Hoarders and is also a regular contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How does identity and experience inform your writing? This episode explores: Professor Talty’s journey from community college student to college professor. The importance of supportive mentors and professors. Using identity and experience ethically in fiction and nonfiction. Why finding the right form for your story matters. A discussion of the book Night of the Living Rez. Our guest is: Professor Morgan Talty, who is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He is the author of the story collection Night of the Living Rez from Tin House Books, and his work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. A winner of the 2021 Narrative Prize, Talty’s work has been supported by the Elizabeth George Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts (2022). Talty is an Assistant Professor of English in Creative Writing and Native American and contemporary Literature at the University of Maine, Orono, and he is on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA in creative writing as well as the Institute of American Indian Arts. Professor Talty is also a Prose Editor at The Massachusetts Review. He lives in Levant, Maine.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: A Calm and Normal Heart by Chelsea T. Hicks The Removed by Brandon Hobson There There by Tommy Orange Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot The Lesser Blessed by Richard Van Camp Welcome to The Academic Life! We reach 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. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

College football is a massive enterprise in the United States, and southern teams dominate poll rankings and sports headlines while generating billions in revenue for public schools and private companies. Southern football fans worship their teams, often rearranging their personal lives in order to accommodate season schedules. Andrew McIlwaine Bell's book The Origins of Southern College Football: How an Ivy League Game Became a Dixie Tradition (LSU Press, 2020) sheds new light on the South’s obsession with football and explores the sport’s beginnings below the Mason-Dixon Line in the decades after the Civil War.Military defeat followed by a long period of cultural unrest compelled many southerners to look to northern ideas and customs for guidance in rebuilding their beleaguered society. Ivy League universities, considered bastions of enlightenment and symbols of the modernizing spirit of the age, provided a particular source of inspiration for southerners in the form of organized or “scientific” football that featured standardized rules and scoring. Transported to the South by men educated at northern universities, scientific football reinforced cultural values that had existed in the region for centuries, among them a tolerance for violence, respect for martial displays, and support for traditional gender roles. The game also held the promise of a “New South” that its supporters hoped would transform the region into an industrial powerhouse. Students and townspeople alike embraced the new sport, which served as a source of pride for a region that lagged woefully behind its northern counterpart in terms of social equity and economic prowess.The Origins of Southern College Football (LSU Press, 2020) is an entertaining history of the South’s most popular sport cast against a broader narrative of the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, two momentous periods of change that gave rise to the game we recognize today.Bennett Koerber is an instructor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He can be reached at bkoerber@andrew.cmu.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Barbara Sarnecka, Professor of Cognitive Sciences and Associate Dean of Research and Graduate Studies for Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. We talk about putting your mind in print. She is the author of The Writing Workshop: Write More, Write Better, Be Happier in Academia.Barbara Sarnecka : "The more quantitative a person's field of study is, the more likely they are to say that they just don't think that writing is a big requirement in their field. And they'll say, 'Well, writing isn't very important. I'm a biologist.' They imagine that writing is somehow for people in the humanities, or it's for playwrights or novelists, or something like that. But whenever anyone fails to be productive as a scientist, it's because they're not writing. It's because they're not publishing manuscripts or they're not producing funding proposals that are getting funded. It's not because they don't have enough ideas for experiments, or because they didn't collect enough data, or because they didn't learn to analyze the data properly. Those things are all kind of trivially easy, and that's why we can subcontract them to graduate students or the statistical consulting center or somebody to do them for us. You can't get somebody else to think for you, and you can't get somebody else to write for you." Find about more about Barbara, including why she chose to self-publish, in this interview. Read the research on Barbara's writing-shop intervention here. Read the research on cascading mentorship here and here.  Contact Barbara's editor at michael.dylan.rogers@gmail.com Daniel Shea is committed to helping scientists write at their best. Contact me at daniel.shea@kit.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ever felt uncertain about how to manage the academic mid-career stage? This episode explores: Why the mid-career stage is so important to mid-career faculty. Strategies for taking control of your mid-career advancement plans. Equity issues surrounding women, academic mothers, and faculty of color. The importance of the department chair for mid-career faculty. Being strategic about your mentoring needs in mid-career. Two critical considerations for mid-career faculty developing programs. Our guest is: Dr. Vicki L Baker, author of Managing Your Academic Career: A Guide to Re-Envision Mid-Career (Routledge). Vicki is the E. Maynard Aris Endowed Professor in Economics and Management at Albion College and serves as the Faculty Director of the Albion College Community Collaborative (AC3), Co-Chair of the Economics & Management Department, and instructor for Penn State University’s World Campus. Prior to joining the academy as a faculty member, Vicki worked at Harvard Business School (Executive Education) and AK Steel Corporation. Vicki is the author of 90 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, invited works, and several books. Recognized as a “Top 100 Visionary” in Education by the Global Forum for Education and Learning (20-21), Vicki is at the forefront of innovation and strategy in faculty and leadership development; her goal is to help faculty members and colleges and universities thrive. She earned her PhD (Higher Education) and MS (Management & Organization) from Penn State University, MBA from Clarion University and BS from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Vicki also holds a certificate in Human Resource Management from Villanova University and is a certified professional in HR from the Society for Human Resource Management.Our host is: Dr. Dana M. Malone, co-producer and co-host of The Academic Life channel. Dana is energized by facilitating meaningful conversations and educational experiences for folks across the academy and beyond. Dana is the author of From Single to Serious: Relationships, Gender, and Sexuality on American Evangelical Campuses, (Rutgers UP).Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: New Directions in Higher Education volume, Bridging the Research-Practice Nexus: Resources, Tools, and Strategies to Navigate Mid-Career in the Academy. Edited by Vick L. Baker and Aimee LaPointe Terosky. The Evolving Faculty Affairs Landscape - a compilation of publications from Inside HigherEd focused on faculty (several focused at mid-career). This Academic Life channel conversation with Vicki Baker on navigating mid-career choices as a faculty member. This Academic Life channel conversation with Laura Gail Lunsford on how to create a mentor network. How to Chair a Department by Kevin Dettmar (Johns Hopkins). Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal by Rebecca Pope-Ruark (Johns Hopkins). Welcome to The Academic Life! You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach 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. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: What inspired Clare Griffin to move far from home. The hidden curriculum of academic relocation. Her research concerns given world tensions and wars. The complexity of taking your pet from country to country. The importance of creating a community. Our guest is: Dr. Clare Griffin, a neuroatypical historian, fiction writer, and mental health advocate who is an assistant professor in the department of history at Indiana University Bloomington. Originally from the UK, her work has taken her to Russia, Germany, and Kazakhstan. Her research focuses on science, medicine, and expertise in the early modern Russian Empire, in particular how those processes intersected with colonialism and globalization. Alongside her academic work, she also publishes fiction and advocacy pieces focused on her experiences of neurodiversity and mental illness. Her new book is Mixing Medicines: The Global Drug Trade and Early Modern Russia. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the co-producer of the Academic Life.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: The Eternal Dislocation of Academic Living  Manu Sander’s blog post on academic relocations  Academic Nomad The Long Road to A Dream Job  You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach 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. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A sweeping history of the federal legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in education, published on the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX.“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” —Title IX’s first thirty-seven wordsBy prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education, the 1972 legislation popularly known as Title IX profoundly changed the lives of women and girls in the United States, accelerating a movement for equal education in classrooms, on sports fields, and in all of campus life.Sherry Boschert's book 37 Words: Title IX and Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination (New Press, 2022) is the story of Title IX. Filled with rich characters—from Bernice Resnick Sandler, an early organizer for the law, to her trans grandchild—the story of Title IX is a legislative and legal drama with conflicts over regulations and challenges to the law. It’s also a human story about women denied opportunities, students struggling for an education free from sexual harassment, and activists defying sexist discrimination. These intersecting narratives of women seeking an education, playing sports, and wanting protection from sexual harassment and assault map gains and setbacks for feminism in the last fifty years and show how some women benefit more than others. Award-winning journalist Sherry Boschert beautifully explores the gripping history of Title IX through the gutsy people behind it.In the tradition of the acclaimed documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, 37 Words offers a crucial playbook for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and who is horrified by current attacks on women’s rights.Jane Scimeca is Professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Raj Balkaran speaks with Jacqui Hargreaves & Ruth Westoby about SOAS’ exciting new online learning platform: Yoga Studies Online.Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices