New Books in Higher Education

Sarah Drummond provides a master class for any higher education leader contemplating a strategic alliance or merger with another institution. She describes and draws lessons from the many earlier failed partnership efforts of Andover Newton Seminary as it sought ways to continue its mission and become financially viable. And then describes in detail the carefully crafted, three-stage process which ANS negotiated with Yale Divinity School to move the Seminary to New Haven. This is the first of three episodes with presidents who’ve led the successful integration of their institutions into larger universities.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and Beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, 2020), Katina L. Rogers tackles three major issues in academia – post-PhD careers, academic labor practices, and inclusivity and equity. Rogers demonstrates how scholarly reward practices hide the realities of faculty work, value normative rather than innovative outcomes, drive admissions practices for graduate programs, and narrow the definition of post-PhD success. Yet Rogers does not accept that the university of the past – or even the present – must be the university of the future.Rogers begins from the basis that higher education, humanities graduate study and scholarly research are public goods. She calls for a more expansive view of humanities graduate training that is generative rather than replicative. Rogers argues against reducing humanities PhD cohorts and programs, instead laying out a framework for faculty and advisors to initiate institutional change. She provides graduate students with context and analysis to inform the ways they discern their own graduate training. Perhaps most importantly, she highlights that multiple careers pathways can offer engaging, fulfilling, and even unexpected pathways for students who seek them out.Amanda Jeanne Swain, PhD. Historian. Humanities Center executive director. Navigating academic systems with faculty and grad students. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In an age characterized by rampant anti-intellectualism, Kathleen Fitzpatrick in her 'Generous Thinking: A Radical Approach to Saving the University' (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) charges the academy with thinking constructively rather than competitively, building new ideas rather than tearing old ones down. She urges us to rethink how we teach the humanities and to refocus our attention on the very human ends that the humanities can best serve. One key aspect of that transformation involves fostering generous thinking, a mode of engagement that emphasizes listening over speaking, community over individualism, and collaboration over competition. Kai Wortman is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Education, University of Tübingen, interested in philosophy of education. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is a companion to the interview with David Galas on the founding of the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, the newest of the Claremont Colleges. Gayle Riggs describes the family background and unusual career path that prepared her husband Hank to successfully lead Harvey Mudd College and then found KGI. This included two very different roles at Stanford: first as a faculty member who founded the Engineering Management program whose graduates have led many Silicon Valley firms, and then as head of Development, where he led Stanford’s first billion dollar campaign. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Galas describes his unusual journey from Air Force brat to theoretical physicist to Systems Biologist in charge of the Human Genome Project for the U.S. Department of Energy. He then became a bioscience entrepreneur creating both a string of start-up companies and co-founding, along with Hank Riggs, the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Science, the 7th and newest of the Claremont Colleges. He describes their unusual partnership and what led Hank to create KGI after his successful tenures as President of Harvey Mudd College and leading the first billion-dollar campaign in higher education for Stanford University. Together with the founding faculty they created the first higher education institution with the mission of bridging the gap between scientists and business to develop leaders who could help commercialize the exciting breakthroughs coming from the life science revolution.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2014 and 2015, students at dozens of colleges and universities held protests demanding increased representation of Black and Latino students and calling for a campus climate that was less hostile to students of color. Their activism recalled an earlier era: in the 1960s and 1970s, widespread campus protest by Black and Latino students contributed to the development of affirmative action and open admissions policies. Yet in the decades since, affirmative action has become a magnet for conservative backlash and in many cases has been completely dismantled.In To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press, 2019), Amaka Okechukwu offers a historically informed sociological account of the struggles over affirmative action and open admissions in higher education. Through case studies of policy retrenchment at public universities, she documents the protracted―but not always successful―rollback of inclusive policies in the context of shifting race and class politics. To Fulfill These Rights provides a new analysis of the politics of higher education, centering the changing understandings and practices of race and class in the United States.Amaka Okechukwu is an Assistant Professor of sociology at George Mason University.Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press, 2020). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached 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. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at cgessler05@gmail.com or dr.danamalone@gmail.com. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN.In this episode you’ll hear about: Karin Fischer’s job as a contributing writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, how she researches stories about international students, what the pandemic means for her work and for the students she writes about, and what she’s hopeful about.Our guest is: Karin Fischer, a higher-education journalist with a focus on international education, American colleges’ activities overseas, the globalization of the college experience, and study abroad. Her work has appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, EdSource, the Washington Monthly, and University World News. Ms. Fischer is also a research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley and an international education leadership fellow at the University at Albany. She is a recipient of the East-West Center’s Jefferson Fellowship for reporting in Asia and the International Reporting Project fellowship. Her work has been honored by the Education Writers Association, the National Press Foundation, and the Poynter Institute.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women, gender, and sexuality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One year to the day after George Flloyd’s murder, Dr. Jamila Lyiscott discusses her book on racial justice in education: Black Appetite. White Food. Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom (Routledge, 2019) A community-engaged scholar-activist, nationally renowned speaker and spoken word artist, Assistant Professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and founding co-director of its new Center for Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research, Lyiscott—who may also invite you to call her Dr. J, if you’re cool—offers educators support for thinking and acting on issues of race, language, and the colonial logics that maintain white supremacy at the expense of Black wholeness through the lens of what she calls “Vision-Driven Justice.”Personal stories, scholarly citations, original poetry, choice excerpts of literature, and theoretical as well as applied analyses are written in the author’s flow of American Standard English, American Black English, and Carribbean Creolized English to manifest Black Appetite. White Food. The result is a material yet breathing example of what Lyiscott (and others) call fugitive literacies: a book that evades replicating multiple facets of the white supremacy enmeshed in education systems and products. The book invites readers to reflect thoroughly and continuously, but also expects us to move beyond those realms and into action. As Lyiscott writes, “The authority to author new, more equitable social realities belongs to each of us.”Christina Bosch is an assistant professor of special education at California State University at Fresno. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Crow describes his 19-year tenure leading ASU’s transformation from a regional, “party school” to what has been recognized as the U.S.’s most innovative research universities for six years in a row. He outlines the model of “The New American University” that represents “The Fifth Wave” in the Evolution of American Universities”, described in his books with these titles by William DeBars, to create an institution that defines its success by how many students it can serve, rather than how selective it has become, and pushing forward transdisciplinary research that has a positive real-world impact on Arizona and the planet. He sees his role as a design-architect, creating an environment that fosters the development of new schools, colleges and institutes bringing together experts from different fields to seek solutions to important problems.David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A Collective Pursuit: Teachers' Unions and Education Reform (Temple UP, 2020) focuses on the idea that individuals, in this case, teachers, are multifaceted and multidimensional actors who pursue goals for a variety of reasons and those reasons are connected to their capacity to do their jobs, to the best of their abilities, as well as their interests as citizens and community members. According to Lesley Lavery’s research, the data indicate that teachers are the most important in-school predictors of student success. This suggests that in thinking about educational structure and reform, the focus should always include the individual teacher in a classroom and their capacity to do their job well. Thus, Lavery’s analysis in A Collective Pursuit is both to understand the capacity and role of the individual teacher in the classroom and in the American educational system, and to understand the role that organized labor has played in working on behalf of teachers but within a changing educational landscape. This landscape, in recent decades, has seen the advent and expansion of the charter school movement, and various teachers’ strikes in expected places (Chicago public schools) and in unexpected places (West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and elsewhere). Lavery peels apart the various dimensions of these dynamics, examining the establishment of the two largest teachers’ unions in the United States (the AFT and the NEA) and how their origins impact both the way they approach their missions and how they work on behalf of educators. Into this dynamic, of public schools, teachers’ unions, state regulations of funding streams and the perpetual reform of education, we see the advent of charter schools, which are also public schools, but are allowed to operate a bit differently, in a number of states, from the traditional public-school model. Lavery’s analysis examines how charter schools have been integrated into the public-school arena, and now, how the teachers at some of these schools are moving towards unionization efforts and why they are inclined to do so. Lavery explores the important connection between organized labor, the individual teacher, and educational reform efforts. These connections are complex, but they are also at the heart of the American educational system and they need to be considered in context of reform, new approaches, and, as so many have experienced in the midst of the COVID pandemic, home schooling efforts and parent involvement in their children’s education.Lilly J. Goren is professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices