Sometimes information clicks. Like the success of pink dresses on the red carpet outside of the Golden Globes (allow us—chagrin, we know—that cultural comparison), you can't anticipate how new scholarship, when produced, might take off and traffic through the usual spheres of commerce and the circuitry of Web 3.0. With that in mind, we couldn't be more fascinated by the explosive debut today (surprising findings in tow) of Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

The Chronicle of Higher Education places the book in profile in a four-part (I II III IV) series ranging from commentary and news analysis to a more targeted study, including an excerpt from the book itself.

As the Chronicle summarizes:

In the new book, Mr. Arum and his coauthor—Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia—report on a study that has tracked a nationally representative sample of more than 2,000 students who entered 24 four-year colleges in the fall of 2005.

Three times in their college careers—in the fall of 2005, the spring of 2007, and the spring of 2009—the students were asked to take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, or CLA, a widely-used essay test that measures reasoning and writing skills. Thirty-six percent of the students saw no statistically significant gains in their CLA scores between their freshman and senior years.

And that is just the beginning of the book's bad news.

At the NYT's blog "The Choice," Jacques Steinberg's post, which synthesizes Arum and Roksa's research in light of findings from the National Survey of Student Engagement, has already received over 70 comments in just a few hours. In addition, USA Today opened their Education section with commentary on the book, offering the following lede:

Nearly half of the nation's undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college, in large part because colleges don't make academics a priority, a new report shows. Instructors tend to be more focused on their own faculty research than teaching younger students, who in turn are more tuned in to their social lives, according to the report, based on a book titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.

In a much trafficked post, Inside Higher Ed hones in on one of the book's key points: "The main culprit for lack of academic progress of students, according to the authors, is a lack of rigor." The Huffington Post continues in this vein:

The study, an unusually large-scale effort to track student learning over time, comes as the federal government, reformers and others argue that the US must produce more college graduates to remain competitive globally. But if students aren't learning much, that calls into question whether boosting graduation rates will provide that edge.

"It's not the case that giving out more credentials is going to make the US more economically competitive," Arum said in an interview. "It requires academic rigor. . . . You can't just get it through osmosis at these institutions."

But how do you know when a scholarly book has really gone viral? Two recent reviews from Vanity Fair and Gawker (respectively) place Academically Adrift's findings in a bit more vernacular light:

In a crushing exposé of the heretofore secret society known as "college," a recent book by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa reveals precisely what parents, grandparents, and anti-intellectual naysayers have long feared: university students spend nearly five times as much of their day in bed, playing Frisbee golf, and updating their Facebook statuses as they do attending class and studying.

**

To succeed in America, you must get a college degree. To get a college degree, you must go into a soul-crushing amount of debt. And what do you get for all that money? Not learning. College kids don't learn stuff.

No matter your thoughts on the particularities of what Arum and Roksa's findings truly reveal—who to blame, how to adjust, and what next to to further our core understanding—even the book's index presents a faceted take on the dynamics of undergraduate education ("e-mail correspondence, time spent on" and "student culture; and disengagement compact between faculty and students"). For more information on the book, check out its UCP page here.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Books for the News | Commentary | Education | Reviews
Posted by KAM at 02:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past Friday, one of New York City's most venerable cultural institutions, the 92nd Street Y (136 years strong and still kicking!) bestowed a unique honor upon one of the University of Chicago Press's most beloved authors. In all of the years that the 92Y has been creating and playing host to vibrant lectures, readings, conferences, community service opportunities, and city-wide programming, it had yet to endow and bestow an award named after a living figure—that is, until now. Please join us in celebrating the 92Y Vivian Gussin Paley Award for Early Childhood Education and its inaugural recipient, the "playful" visionary and early childhood education pioneer, Vivian Gussin Paley.

From the 92Y's commendation:

Vivian Gussin Paley examines children's stories and play, their logic and their thinking, searching for meaning in the social and moral landscapes of classroom life. A kindergarten teacher for 37 years, Mrs. Paley brings her storytelling/story acting and discussion techniques to children, teachers and parents throughout the world. In addition to her direct contributions to children and teachers, she is a MacArthur fellow and recipient of numerous awards, including: the Erikson Institute Award for Service to Children (1987); American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement (1998); the John Dewey Society's Outstanding Achievement Award (2000); and she was named Outstanding Educator in the Language Arts by the National Council of Teachers of English (2004).

The award itself celebrates Paley's inspirational contributions to the 92Y's Wonderplay initiative, which includes a conference attended by more than 900 educators each year, all of whom come together to consider Wonderplay and its core values, which seek to "awaken children's innate sense of wonder, promote self-discovery, build self-esteem, and inspire a love of learning."

We couldn't imagine a more deserving recipient than Paley. We're proud to publish five of her original books: Bad Guys Don't Have Birthdays: Fantasy Play at Four, Boys and Girls: Superheroes in the Doll Corner, Mollie Is Three: Growing Up in School, Boy on the Beach: Building Community through Play (check out an excerpt online at the book's UCP site), and A Child's Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play (an excerpt aimed at first-grade education available here).

Feeling overwhelmed and not sure where to begin? Have a look at Patricia M. Cooper's The Classrooms All Young Children Need: Lessons in Teaching from Vivian Paley. Charting the change of attention paid to debates about the reduction of children's play time, the role of race in education, and the results of No Child Left Behind, this collection of essays embraces a holistic view of Paley's many books and articles. Here you'll find the evolution of Paley's thought, as well as the key characteristics of her teaching philosophy—everything from storytelling to superheroes.

In the meantime, here's a clip from our acclaimed advocate herself, delivering a talk at the 2008 Wonderplay conference:

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Awards | Books for the News | Education
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This week's issue of the New York Review of Books takes a stance on a hot-button issue that just happens to be the subject of a major new documentary. If you watch Oprah, read the Nation or Time magazine, or, you know, listen to conversations with President Obama on the nightly news, you know that Davis Guggenheim, director of the Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth (shoutout to Al Gore and polar bears!), helms a new movie about the fate of public education in America and the plight of five children competing for admission to in-demand charter schools. Waiting for "Superman" paints a provocative portrait of the rise of a new generation of charter schools, many funded by the government but privately run, and each presenting an alternative to troubled U.S. public schools.

But as Diane Ravitch notes in the NYRB article:

Waiting for "Superman" and the other films appeal to a broad apprehension that the nation is falling behind in global competition. If the economy is a shambles, if poverty persists for significant segments of the population, if American kids are not as serious about their studies as their peers in other nations, the schools must be to blame. At last we have the culprit on which we can pin our anger, our palpable sense that something is very wrong with our society, that we are on the wrong track, and that America is losing the race for global dominance. It is not globalization or deindustrialization or poverty or our coarse popular culture or predatory financial practices that bear responsibility: it's the public schools, their teachers, and their unions.

There's certainly room for debate here, but no matter what one's definitive stance is on how to improve public education, few can argue with its premise: to provide free education, regardless of race or class or social status, without a lottery for admission. At Chicago, our own education list runs widely and deeply through the rugged terrain of these contemporary debates. We publish everything from the American pragmatist and educational reformer John Dewey's The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum to Patricia M. Cooper's The Classrooms All Young Children Need: Lessons in Teaching from Vivian Paley. In terms of the pressing questions raised by Waiting for "Superman" and Diane Ravitch's informed response, I'd point readers towards two important recent Chicago titles:

William A. Fischel's Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts prefaces our current debates about charter schools by arguing that the historical development of school districts reflects Americans' desire to make their communities attractive to outsiders—which Fischel contends has created a standardized system of education not overly demanding for either students or teachers that forms the basis for localized social capital in American towns and cities. Check out a Rockefeller Center lecture by Fischel on the subject of the book:

In Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, a team of authors track the 1988 decentralization of the Chicago public school system in over 200 Chicago elementary schools. The result two decades later? An illuminating book that identifies a comprehensive set of practices and conditions that were key factors of improvement in certain schools, and failed social dynamics, including crime, that chronicle a different trajectory. Be sure to read an excerpt from the book at the Press's website here.

Archived in Books for the News | Commentary | Education | Reference and Writing
Posted by KAM at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this month the State University of New York at Albany announced "that the university was ending all admissions to programs in French, Italian, Russian, and classics, leaving only Spanish left in the language department once current students graduate. The theater department is also being eliminated." Over the weekend the New York Times asked a panel of scholars to respond to this news, wondering how necessary the study of French really is. Among their respondents was Gaye Tuchman, author of Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, who argues that "ending programs in the arts and humanities because they are not making money transforms universities into trade schools. This corporatization of colleges and universities has already squelched the notion that higher education is a public good."

The process of corporatization is one Tuchman has studied extensively, as seen in Wannabe U, which tracks the dispiriting consequences of trading in traditional educational values for loyalty to the market. In a recent essay for the Chronicle Review, Tuchman examined the effects of one particular trend that universities have borrowed from corporations: an obsession with measuring success numerically. After detailing the various ways faculty and administrators have collaborated in developing an "audit culture," Tuchman notes:

Colleges and universities have transformed themselves from participants in an audit culture to accomplices in an accountability regime. The term "audit culture" refers to rituals of verification that measure whether and how institutions and individuals engage in self-policing, much as a diabetic pricks her finger to learn her blood-sugar level. Besotted with rituals that are characteristic of the corporate world, higher education has inaugurated an accountability regime—a politics of surveillance, control, and market management that disguises itself as value-neutral and scientific administration.

The long-term effect of this process is a university more concerned with measuring success than educating successfully. Ultimately, Tuchman concludes, the problem with the new corporate university's love of metrics is that "such numbers have no meaning. They cannot indicate the quality of a student's education. . . . One cannot tell what the metrics have to do with the supposed purpose of institutions of higher education—to create and transmit knowledge."

Archived in Education
Posted by RH at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The September 14th issue of the London Review of Books features an extended, combative review by Elif Batuman of a recent book from Harvard University Press, Mark McGurl's The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Though Batuman takes issue with many of McGurl's points, her essay is the sort of review any author ought to be happy to get, one that takes the book seriously enough to engage deeply with its ideas.

Ultimately, however, Batuman is simply much more critical of university writing programs and the fiction they've spawned than McGurl is, arguing, among other things, that their ahistorical approach to fiction is a short-sighted, narcissistic mistake. "Literary scholarship," writes Batuman, "may not be an undiluted joy to its readers, but at least it's usually founded on an ideal of the collaborative accretion of human knowledge."

Batuman's essay brought to mind one of our books, D. G. Myers's The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880, which takes a longer view than McGurl's book, surveying and analyzing more than a century of debate over how—and even whether—creative writing should be taught. Myers draws on a wide range of writers—including Longfellow, Emerson, Frost, John Berryman, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Saul Bellow—and buttresses his account with relevant background information on nineteenth-century educational theory; shifts in technology, publishing, and marketing; the growth of critical theory in this country; and the politics of higher education.

Ultimately, Myers's take, like Batuman's is highly skeptical—and in fact, at his Commonplace Blog, where he rarely seems to pull punches or hold back opinions, in a post titled bearing the unambigious title "Against Creative Writing," he wrote,

As it is now conceived and organized in the university, creative writing is not a discipline of knowledge at all. It is merely a bureaucracy for the public employment of writers and the boost­ing of English course enrollments. It has no larger purpose; or none that has been thought through.

Archived in Education | Fiction | Literature
Posted by LTS at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For much of the last century American universities have held their place as global leaders in higher education, but recently, with the United State's economic dominance increasingly jeopardized by rising world powers such as China, and to a lesser extent India, there have been some quiet grumblings about a possible "reverse brain drain." Numbers of US born grad students in the sciences have, of late, been on the decline, while many foreign-born students—who make up a significant portion of the domestic scientific community, and who continue arrive in droves to attend the nation's elite research institutions—are increasingly able to find high quality employment in their home countries.

And while other factors may come into play—post 9/11 restrictions on employment visas, political decisions that redirect funding for scientific research— a new book from the National Bureau of Economic Research, American Universities in a Global Market edited by Charles T. Clotfelter, offers some fascinating insights into this phenomenon, viewing the issue in terms of economics, and drawing on the knowledge of some of the world's leading economists to help analyze it.

From a recent interview with Clotfelter for Inside Higher Ed:

Q. There've been lots of recent analyses of American higher education's standing in the world, but this one comes from the economists' point of view. What distinguishes this analysis (apart from it having a whole lot more tables and regression equations)?

A. It is true that nearly all the essays in this volume were written by economists. In addition, the discussants at the conference that preceded its publication—a group that included two former university presidents and several more former provosts and deans—were also mainly economists. Famed MIT economist Robert Solow has put forward the view that economics as a discipline contains three central ideas: equilibrium, rationality, and greed. Economists often apply these ideas in seemingly inappropriate contexts. But a strength of this way of looking at things, as we tell our microeconomics students, is the license it gives to look beyond institutional detail to focus on allocating scarce resources to achieve desired aims.… Economists may appear to be taking perverse pleasure in applying elements of their standard models in unaccustomed applications, but there is often value to be gained from comparing the model to the actual.

To find out more about the US's changing role in the "higher education ecosystem" read the complete interview on the Inside Higher Ed website.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Education
Posted by TXM at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Study after study has tackled the question of how young children learn—and for decades Vivian Gussin Paley has argued that if we want the best answers to that question, we simply need to listen to children. In her nearly fifty years as a teacher and writer, Paley has done just that, listening closely as kids, at play and at school, tell stories, invent characters, and imagine situations to help them understand the complicated and surprising world around them.

With The Boy on the Beach, Paley continues her listening, using the stories of young children—recounted in their own words—to help understand how they use play and stories to build community in the classroom, on the playground, and at home. She then follows a kindergarten class through one school year, letting us watch as the children get to know one another and their teacher, and incisively analyzing the role their increasingly shared imaginative lives play in their education and development. Never less than charming, yet rich with ideas and insight, The Boy on the Beach is vintage Vivian Paley, sure to be embraced by teachers and parents alike.

Read the press release.

Also read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Education | Press Releases | Psychology
Posted by TXM at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an article that appeared in yesterday's Chicago Journal, reporter Megan Cottrell offers a nice summary of the results of a study conducted by researchers from the Consortium on Chicago School Research and recently published in Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago. The study, conducted over a seven-year period, aimed to track the effects of the 1988 decentralization of the Chicago Public School system—a move that granted parents and communities significant resources and authority to reform schools. But, as Cottrell notes, the researchers found that the results of these reforms varied greatly from school to school, some dramatically improving the academic performance of their students, while others floundered.

In their book, Anthony S. Bryk, Penny Bender Sebring, Elaine Allensworth, Stuart Luppescu, and John Q. Easton have sifted through mountains of data to identify the key ingredients required to, as Cottrell's article puts it, 'bake up a good school." Cotrell writes:

A good school, it turns out, is a lot like a cake. Put in sugar, eggs and oil, but forget the flour, and all you end up with is a sweet, sloppy mess. Without all the right ingredients, success will continually evade you.

It all starts with the chef. Without a good principal, says the research, most improvement efforts are wasted. But the principal has to have good material to work with—quality teachers—and an eye for academic and professional improvement. The teachers and leadership should be connected to the parents and to the wider community. All three groups must focus on making the school a safe, academically rigorous environment for the children they serve.

Remove any of these five "essential supports," the authors' research shows, and the likelihood that a school will improve plummets.

Continue reading the complete article on the Chicago Journal website and read an excerpt from the book.

Archived in Books for the News | Chicago | Education
Posted by TXM at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a profile of one of the most consistently interesting academics today, Mark C. Taylor, chair of the religion department at Columbia University and a prolific author, having published tens of books and innumerable articles on topics from poststructuralism to the visual arts. Recently however Taylor's copious oeuvre has been slightly overshadowed by his controversial critique of tenure and the structure of the academy, originally published in the New York Times, and the basis of his forthcoming book from Knopf, Crisis on Campus.

In the Chronicle article, “The Provocations of Mark Taylor”, Eric Banks revisits the furor created by the article's radical recommendations for interdisciplinarity and the abolishing of "traditional disciplinary structures" but connects Taylor's critique to his other work, including his recent book from Columbia University Press, Field Notes From Elsewhere, his 2004 Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption, and his 2007 treatise on religion in contemporary culture After God.

Noting his concurrent efforts at reform in the religion department at Columbia, Banks article concludes:

"Whether his administration at Columbia, or for that matter his forthcoming Knopf title, will light a fire of reform, the experience is worth trying for Taylor. Consider it a continuing experiment born out of his own dissatisfaction: "I always say to my students, 'You don't desire satisfaction. Satisfaction is death. And there are a lot of living dead.'"

Also see all of Taylor's books published by the University of Chicago Press.

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Religion
Posted by TXM at 02:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Elaine Allensworth, co-author of a new study recently released by the Consortium on Chicago School Research, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, was invited on Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight yesterday to discuss the book's findings. The book tracks the effects over a twenty year period of the radical program of reform put in place by the Illinois General Assembly in 1988—a program which has utilized some controversial tactics to accomplish its goals from the consolidation of students, to staff replacements, to wholesale school closures. Listen in as Allensworth and others deliver an insightful analysis of the project to reform Chicago's public school system on the Chicago Public Radio website, then read an excerpt from Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Chicago | Education
Posted by TXM at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As Patricia Cohen recently wrote in the New York Times reviewing two new books on higher education, "champions of the market can turn up in the oddest places. At the same time that bankers and businessmen are acknowledging the downsides of unregulated capitalism, college and university reformers are urging the academy to more closely embrace the marketplace." And one of the reformers Cohen reviews is our author.

In Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities James C. Garland draws on more than thirty years of experience as a professor, administrator, and university president to argue that a new compact between state government and public universities is needed to make these schools more affordable and financially secure. As Cohen writes:

Mr. Garland is concerned with putting public university systems on a solid financial footing. Although they educate 80 percent of the nation's college students, public institutions have seen their quality sapped by shrinking government aid, changing demographics and growing income inequality. In Saving Alma Mater, Mr. Garland argues that government should end subsidies altogether and allow supply and demand to rule. Let public universities compete for students and set their own tuitions. To ensure that poor students can afford to attend, legislatures should eliminate institutional financing and instead use that money for financial aid to individuals. In essence, he proposes a voucher system.…

Mr. Garland also wants to bring some market discipline to the culture of academia. While professors tend to be progressives, they are stubbornly conservative when it comes to change. Indeed, as Mr. Menand points out, early reformers argued that the only way to elevate excellence above profits in a capitalist society was by protecting the profession from the market's insistence on cash rewards.

The result, Mr. Garland maintains, is that professors are oblivious to the costs of complex procedures, drawn-out debates and layers of committees; appeals to increase efficiency and productivity are routinely scorned.

For more about Garland's take on financial reform in public universities read Cohen's complete review on the NYT website. Or check out the following links for a debate we hosted right here on the blog several weeks back when we invited Garland, and another of our authors, Gaye Tuchman—whose book Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University presents a formidable counterpoint—to dialogue on the issue.

Part 1

Part 2

Also read an excerpt from Garland's book and see the author's blog.

Archived in Economics | Education | Politics and Current Events | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

WGN's Milton J. Rosenberg recently invited several guests on his radio talk show Extension 720 to discuss the press's recent publication of The Child: An Encyclopedic Companion—the definitive reference book for parents, social workers, researchers, educators, and others who work with children.

Listen in as editor-in-chief Richard A. Shweder, contributor Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon, and house editor Mary Laur, talk about their new book and field questions from callers on the WGN Extension 720 website.

Bringing together contemporary research on children and childhood from pediatrics, child psychology, childhood studies, education, sociology, history, law, anthropology, and other related areas, The Child contains more than 500 articles—all written by experts in their fields and overseen by a panel of distinguished editors led by anthropologist Richard A. Shweder—each providing a concise and accessible synopsis of the topic at hand. In addition to these topical essays, The Child also contains more than forty "Imagining Each Other" essays, which focus on the particular experiences of children in different cultures. Compiled by some of the most distinguished child development researchers in the world, The Child is an essential addition to the current knowledge on children and childhood.

To find out more navigate to this special website for the book featuring a full table of contents and several sample articles.

Archived in Anthropology | Books for the News | Education | Psychology | Reference and Writing | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Like other recent analyses of academic careers, Joseph Hermanowicz's Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers delivers some rather brutal news for all those wanna-be tenure track professors out there hoping to leave their mark on their discipline—it probably ain't gonna happen. As Beryl Lieff Benderly writes in a recent review of Hermanowicz's book for Science Career Magazine:

Many aspirants to research careers lack an accurate idea of where they're headed. In fact, Hermanowicz writes, accepting an unrealistically rosy image of one's future is a basic step on the road to becoming an academic scientist.

That image traditionally includes a pantheon of the greats of one's discipline, faith in the high intrinsic value of research, and belief that recognition by the scientific community is a valid measure of worth. This image also implies that, with talent and dedication, any young scientist has a chance of making a distinguished contribution.… [But] as the great majority of faculty members learn … the opportunity to do important science and gain major recognition only ever exists for a relative few—overwhelmingly those educated and employed at the most prestigious universities.

Yet, as Benderly points out, this certainly isn't the most surprising revelation Hermanowicz has to offer, instead, "what Hermanowicz's book adds is insight into the human lives behind these well-known processes.

Scientists at elite schools, he found, retain to the end of their careers their original dedication to research, the goal of pursuing eminence, and a belief in the essential fairness of the scientific reward system. In contrast, at pluralist and communitarian schools, most faculty members must accept that their early faith was misplaced and their dreams will never be realized. Some pluralists do succeed in attaining prominence, but most cannot. This early loss of faith has an advantage, Hermanowicz says: The painful task of coming to terms gives many of these individuals an impressive depth of humanity.

Elite faculty, on the other hand, generally perceive only at the end their careers—and to their intense disappointment—that decades of single-minded striving have not won a perch in the 'pantheon.' Only then begins their process of re-evaluation. Only after lives of great privilege and good fortune—the extent of which many never appreciate—do most begin to question the basic fairness of science's system of rewards."

To read the rest of Benderly's article navigate to the Science Career Magazine website.

Archived in Education | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's Inside Higher Ed. contains an interview with James C. Garland, author of Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities. In the interview Garland discusses the economic difficulties that many public universities currently face, among them declining faculty salaries, dramatic rises in tuition costs, and deferred maintenance that "far exceeds state renovation budgets." More than just fallout from the nation's worst recession since the '30s, as Garland argues "the historic economic model—ample public subsidies resulting in affordable tuition—has broken down and cannot be fixed. The current economic crisis has obviously accelerated the decline, but even after the economy recovers I believe there will be no turning back the clock."

Thus in Saving Alma Mater: A Rescue Plan for America's Public Universities Garland offers readers a timely and comprehensive "rescue plan" for America's public universities that would tie university revenues to their performance and exploit the competitive pressures of the academic marketplace to control costs, rein in tuition, and make schools more responsive to student needs.

In the interview Garland cites four elements to his approach including: turning public universities into autonomous state-owned entities governed by independent boards of trustees; pushing states to redirect taxpayer dollars that previously subsidized campuses to fund grants and scholarships only to eligible students; streamline campus decision-making through financial incentives to encourage professors and administrators to use their time more productively; and lastly, revamping the methods for selecting presidents, chancellors, and trustees to mimic the more informed and rigorous procedures at private institutions.

To find out more about Garland's plan for saving alma mater, read the full interview on the Inside Higher Ed. website and read an excerpt from the book.

Also see the author's blog.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Education
Posted by TXM at 01:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a review of Joseph C. Hermanowicz's new book Lives in Science: How Institutions Affect Academic Careers for the current issue of Nature magazine, reviewer Rachael Ivy highlight's the book's surprising conclusions about the career paths of scientists (specifically physicists) at the nation's elite universities: many of them end up feeling like they've been conned. Ivy summarizes Hermanowicz's argument, writing that while physicists at less-prestigious universities learn early on how to console themselves with the probability that their contributions to the field will be marginal, those granted tenure at elite universities tend to remain optimistic about the level of prestige they can achieve in the course of their careers, that is, until their careers draw to a close. Ivy writes:

Those at less-prestigious universities, who were also more likely to have graduated from similar institutions, were generally satisfied because of the balance they ultimately achieved in their lives. Like other academics, they had once hoped to achieve scientific greatness, but quickly realized that such recognition would elude them. They dealt with disappointment about their career paths early on.

By contrast, physicists who got the early prize of an elite university job were satisfied with their careers—until the end. Then they were hit with the realization that the scientific recognition for which they had striven so long would now go to younger scientists. For the first time, this elite group's "expectations for their careers exceed reality" and their satisfaction was low.

Ivy's article concludes:

Lives in Science reveals that all scientists are socially conditioned to contribute substantially to the knowledge base and expect to receive recognition for it. But all must reconcile themselves to the shortcomings of the academic game. With research pressure growing in less-prestigious universities, and with limited resources, [the gap between expectations and reality] will remain with us. Its cure is to require graduate institutions to present a more realistic picture of what it means to be a scientist.

Read the full review on the Nature website.

Archived in Education | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 2006 David S. Brown’s Richard Hofstadter, a sweeping intellectual biography of a man and his era, was published to great acclaim— E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post called it “the most important political book of the year that’s not about politics”—and definitively established the continuing importance of Hofstadter’s work and his legacy as a leader of the Eastern intellectual establishment.

With Beyond the Frontier: The Midwestern Voice in American Historical Writing, Brown returns with a collective biography of the prominent intellectuals—including William Appleman Williams, Charles Beard, and Christopher Lasch—who publicly opposed Hofstadter and the growing interventionist consensus he represented among America’s postwar elite.

Troubled by the burgeoning military-industrial complex and what they saw as America’s reckless fomenting of the cold war, they argued strenuously for a different path: a return to an older American tradition of progressivism and reform. Only that way, they believed, could the individual freedom and self-sufficiency that historically had represented the heart of American democracy survive. And while America’s imperial ambitions clearly remain strong, Brown shows how these ideas remain potent today, animating the work of prominent figures like William Cronon and Thomas Frank.

A fascinating follow-up to Richard Hofstadter, Beyond the Frontier draws timely attention to an intellectual tradition that is currently being rediscovered by conservatives and liberals alike.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biography | Education | History | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since the onslaught of the financial crisis, the federal government has bailed out Wall Street and Detroit. But at least one more venerable institution now needs saving, according to polymath and long-time UCP author Mark C. Taylor: the University. In an op-ed contribution published yesterday in the New York Times, Taylor lays out a six-point plan for restructuring higher education in this country. Among the many controversial recommendations Taylor offers—including dissolving academic departments and abolishing tenure—is a prescriptive that affects the publishing community in general and the academic press world in particular: the publication of dissertations. Taylor suggests that graduate students produce "analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games" instead of traditional "books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text." Whether or not that evolution comes to pass, Taylor's call to critically examine the state of the modern university has been met with vociferous debate in the Times' online comment forum.

Many of the ideas that Taylor espouses in the piece, especially that of complex adaptive networks, have been explored in books ranging from The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture to Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption to After God. For more on Taylor's unique approach to knowledge, understanding, and faith in a modern world, read an excerpt from his uniquely interdisciplinary scholarship.

Archived in Books for the News | Education
Posted by at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An article in yesterday's New York Times reveals some not so startling facts about corporate interests infiltrating the ivory tower at Harvard's Medical School where the American Medical Student Association recently brought the school under national scrutiny by giving it an F grade in terms of how well it monitors and controls drug industry money. The article begins with one entering medical student's tale of innocence lost:

In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

"I felt really violated," Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. "Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn't as pure as I think it should be."

But on the other side of the issue are many arguments about the enabling funding that drug companies provide, made all the more enticing to school faculty and administrators in the context of the current economic downturn. The NYT article cites: Dr. Thomas P. Stossel, "a Harvard Medical professor who has served on advisory boards for Merck, Biogen Idec and Dyax, and has written widely on academic-industry ties. 'I think if you look at it with intellectual honesty, you see industry interaction has produced far more good than harm.'"

You can read the rest of the article on the NYT website, but for a more thorough treatment of these contentious issues we offer acclaimed journalist Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism. In his book, Greenberg reveals a middle path, suggesting that while the threat has been overhyped, the need for oversight is real and a valuable asset to the integrity of academic science. From research that has shifted overseas so corporations can avoid regulations to conflicts of interest in scientific publishing, Greenberg argues that the temptations of money will always be a threat, but they can be effectively countered through the vigilance of scientists, the press, and the public. Based on extensive, candid interviews with scientists and administrators, Science for Sale is an indispensable resource for anyone who cares about the future of scientific research.

Find out more about the book on the UCP website or read the rest of the article.

Archived in Biology | Books for the News | Economics | Education | History
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Introducing a report yesterday on Stanford University's newly announced energy institute—to be funded by a $100 million gift by wealthy alums—the host of American Public Media's Marketplace noted that though "it's tough sledding out there if you're a charity or a foundation or a university endowment … the money hasn't completely dried up.… [But] schools will have to rely on private funding for a while, and that could cause some sticky situations."

Daniel S. Greenberg, whom Marketplace interviewed for yesterday's report, is an expert on those kinds of situations, and in Science for Sale: The Perils, Delusions, and Rewards of Campus Capitalism, he reveals that the ties between private wealth and college campuses are more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest. But just because potential corruption is overhyped, Greenberg argues, doesn't mean that there's no danger. As he told Marketplace, "the Ivory Tower is gone.… The record seems to show that universities are much more interested in getting the money and getting on with the project than they are in protecting their traditional values."

For its part, Stanford noted that, in the words of university president John Hennessy, "universities such as Stanford need to focus their full talent on the greatest challenges facing the world today.… Energy is certainly one of those issues." According to the Stanford Daily, the $100 million grant will fund "will fund faculty hiring, graduate student support and energy research."

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Politics and Current Events
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President-elect Obama's nomination of Arne Duncan as Education Secretary has put U.S. education policy—and educational reform in the Chicago system—in the national and international spotlight.

With all the global tumult in the news, these headlines will, inevitably, recede, but our growing list of education titles will sustain anyone's continuing interest in education and the people for whom it's not a passing news story but a way of life. Dan C. Lortie's Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study, for example, has been dubbed one of the best portraits available of the world and culture of this vitally important profession. And we are excited to announce that, this spring, Lortie will follow up his classic text with School Principal: Managing in Public, a compelling look at what principals do, how they do it, and why. Examining a third group of people vital to children's education, Parents and Schools: The 150-Year Struggle for Control in American Education is an invaluable guide to understanding how parent-teacher cooperation, which is essential for our children's educational success, might be achieved.

And if your interest in education runs deep enough that you choose to pursue it as a career? We publish a slew of books in curriculum and methodology as well as Requirements for Certification, the most complete and current listings of the requirements for certification of a wide range of educational professionals at the elementary and secondary levels.

Archived in Books for the News | Education
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With universities across the country slashing budgets and implementing hiring freezes, the job market for many PhDs seems to be, as the Chronicle of Higher Education recently put it, cloudy.

But our career guides can serve as sturdy life rafts in this storm of bad news. Susan Basalla and Maggie Debelius's "So What Are You Going to Do with That?", for example, covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to translating skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate. A witty, accessible guide full of concrete advice for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world, "So What Are You Going to Do with That?" is packed with examples and stories from real people who have successfully made this daunting—but potentially rewarding—transition.

Taking a more specific approach, The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology is designed to help students and post-docs navigate the tricky terrain of an academic job search—from the first year of a graduate program to the final negotiations of a job offer. In the process, it covers everything from how to pack an overnight bag without wrinkling a suit to selecting the right job to apply for in the first place.

And when you do land that job? The world of scientific research is, of course, a competitive one, with grants and good jobs increasingly hard to find, but The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science is intended to help scientists not just cope but excel at the critical early phases of their careers.

Finally, no matter which discipline you're in, The Chicago Guide to Your Academic Career offers frank answers to the profession's most enduring questions. Its three distinguished authors—with more than 75 years of combined experience—talk openly about what's good and what's not so good about academia, as a place to work and a way of life. Written as an informal conversation among colleagues, the book is packed with inside information—about finding a mentor, avoiding pitfalls when writing a dissertation, negotiating the job listings, and much more.

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Reference and Writing
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In the July issue of Physics Today William H. Wing reviews Daniel S. Greenberg's recent book Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism—a revealing look at academic science and its commoditization in the hands of private interests. From the review:

Greenberg's research is extensive. His knowledge of the institutions, policymakers, and industries involved in the development of marketable science, and their effects on the science community and public policy, is vast.…

[But] many of Greenberg's examples pertain to the biomedical sciences. Some difficulties he describes—the complex ethical issues involved in human-subject research, extensive regulations, and massive documentation requirements—are issues that physical scientists rarely encounter. Thus those scientists may infer that the book is not relevant to them. They should not. Results in the physical sciences can have enormous human and societal impacts and can raise knotty moral problems, as history has shown. Science for Sale is a cautionary tale that should provoke thoughtful discussions among researchers and academic administrators.

Read the review on the Physics Today website.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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The July 6 Boston Globe published an enlightening interview with Steven Shapin, Harvard professor of the History of Science and author of the forthcoming book The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. In the interview Shapin discusses his book and its critique of conventional notions about the various motivations and incentives that drive scientific production. Instead, Shapin proposes a much more nuanced picture of of the scientific career and character. From the preface to the interview:

Testifying before congress in 1950, MIT president Karl Compton declared, of American scientists: "I don't know of any other group that has less interest in monetary gain."

That view of scientists might draw a few wry smiles around Kendall Square today. But it also represents a lingering 20th-century ideal: The scientist as a virtuous academic who pursues knowledge as an end in itself. In contrast to that ideal stands the wealth-seeking industrial scientist, a specialist who merely applies science to the problem of putting new products on the market.…

That's the wrong way to think about the whole scientific enterprise, says Steven Shapin.… Scientists, Shapin thinks, do not merely choose between virtue and riches, instead worrying more about where they can pursue their intellectual goals, and thus open up new scientific frontiers.

Thinking otherwise means we fail to understand the very people whose inventions in medicine or computer science are, Shapin writes, "making the worlds to come."

Read the interview on the Boston.com website.

Also see these other books by Steven Shapin previously published by the press:

A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England
The Scientific Revolution

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 02:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last year’s report from the National Science Foundation dolefully confirmed what many researchers have suspected for years: while the number of PhD graduates in the sciences continues to increase, tenure-track positions have remained static since the early 1980s. And after spending years in the post-doc trenches, this glut of PhDs is enough to make many would-be scientists wonder about their next steps.

As the founders of their university’s first office for postdoctoral affairs, Victor A. Bloomfield and Esam E. El-Fakahany have first-hand experience with the challenges young scientists face. Together, they’ve mentored thousands of students, and now they’ve combined that experience in teaching, counseling, and research to create The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science. From preparing a CV and resume, to writing grants and scientific papers, to networking with fellow scientists, The Chicago Guide to Your Career in Science truly is a “toolkit” for aspiring scientists—helping them not just cope but excel at this critical phase in their careers.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Education | Press Releases
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The University of Chicago News Office has posted a podcast featuring Charles Lipson, author of Succeeding as an International Student in the United States and Canada speaking about his new book. In the podcast, Lipson addresses many of the hot button topics for foreign students trying to adapt to life in the United States and Canada, both in and beyond the classroom. From the norms of classroom participation to obtaining health insurance, Lipson covers what students need to know to have a successful and enjoyable adventure as an international student.

To find out more listen to the podcast or see this special website for the book featuring reviews, info on institutional use, and an excerpt from the book, "Passports and Visas: A Quick Overview."

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Reference and Writing
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Joseph M. Williams, Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at the University of Chicago, died Friday, February 22 at his home in South Haven, Michigan. Williams will be remembered as the founder of the University's writing program and for his contributions to the development of some of Chicago's most influential books on the teaching of writing. These include his Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, as well as the book he co-authored with the Gregory Colomb and the late Wayne Booth, The Craft of Research—the third edition of which is slated for publication this spring. Williams was also a contributor to Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations and was at work on the accompanying Students Guide at the time of his passing.

William's contributions to the University and its students, and to writers and scholars everywhere, will most certainly be missed, as will he himself.

Archived in Chicago | Commentary | Education
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The Chronicle of Higher Education is running an article by James M. Lang on the current state of undergraduate education titled "The Myth of First-Year Enlightenment." In the article Lang cites Tim Clydesdale's recent book, The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens after High School to explore modern students' reactions to their first introduction to academe:

You'll recognize this story: Intelligent but naïve high-school graduate heads off to college… [and] discovers how limited her worldview has been. Her consciousness is awakened. She emerges from her first year of college a changed human being, with more thoughtful views on religion, politics, and her own identity.

Our institutions… hawk the tale to prospective students and their parents on Web sites, in brochures, and on campus tours: You will come back from your first year a changed man or woman. You will be on the path to your new and more enlightened life. You will have had the best four years of your life.

Not so, according to Tim Clydesdale, an associate professor of sociology at the College of New Jersey, and author of The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School.… "Most of the mainstream American teens I spoke with neither liberated themselves intellectually nor broadened themselves socially during their first year out," he writes. "What teens actually focus on during the first year out is this: daily life management."

In other words, freshmen spend most of their time and intellectual energy figuring out how to handle life without parental restraints and support: how to deal with money; negotiate newfound freedoms with sex, drugs, and alcohol; and determine how much time to devote to studying, working, and playing.

But what freshmen don't do during their first year of college comes as more of a (perhaps depressing) surprise: "Most American teens keep core identities in an 'identity lockbox' during their first year out and actively resist efforts to examine their self-understandings through classes or to engage their humanity through institutional efforts such as public lectures, the arts, or social activism."

Read the rest of the article on the Chronicle website.

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Philosophy | Religion | Sociology
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An interesting review of Daniel S. Greenberg's Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism is currently running in the January-February issue of the American Scientist. Reviewer Robert L. Geiger praises Greenberg's book for its lucid and balanced look at the influence of corporate funding on American academic institutions:

[In] Science for Sale, [Greenberg] ventures outside the Beltway to scrutinize the state of academic science and its supposed burgeoning ties with the corporate world. Although the somewhat fraught title would seem to place this work with an abundance of books condemning university ties with industry, Greenberg has provided a more nuanced analysis and offers some different conclusions.…

He begins with an iconoclastic portrayal of corporate-sponsored research. Far from dominating or corrupting universities, it has been a marginal and (since 2000) shrinking portion of the research they conduct. Academic research has great value for industry, but companies prefer to let the government pay for it. "Not many corporations are besieging universities to take their money," Greenberg says. "Eagerness for even more business is strongest on the university side of the relationship." Moreover, he sees little scope for industry to take advantage of this hunger: "In the current era of heightened sensitivity to abuse of academic integrity, the risk of public opprobrium for offending accepted values is substantial." Given the predominance Greenberg ascribes to self-interested behavior, it is not surprising that he frequently alludes to the fear of institutional embarrassment or individual ruin as the force driving ethical behavior. However, when he returns to this theme in his conclusion, he emphasizes the growing effectiveness of the systems now in place to police and punish scientific misconduct.

The review concludes:

Overall… Greenberg has provided an important assessment of the state of academic science. He finds that public doubts about the integrity of the research enterprise are probably overdone: "Science is in good shape, productive and socially beneficial," he says. "The negative elements," he believes, "pose a more complicated, less measurable story." But Greenberg's account makes it clear that those negative elements are concentrated in the biomedical borderlands, where vigilance in the enforcement of ethical standards is indeed called for.

Read the full review on the American Scientist website.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Reviews
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The Sacramento Theatre Company reimagines Euripides' Electra as Electricidad, while off-Broadway's Signature Theatre puts on Iphigenia 2.0 and an Indian director stages Raja Oedipus, an adaptation of the famous Sophocles play featuring Karbi gods and goddesses in place of the original Greek deities: if you've seen any of these recent performances—or one of their countless counterparts on stages across the globe—you've experienced the timelessness, renewed popularity, and ever-broadening reach of Greek tragedy. But how are today's productions different from their ancient peers? What are the best strategies for interpreting these dramas on contemporary stages? In this follow-up to his acclaimed Love, Sex & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes our Lives, renowned classicist Simon Goldhill responds to these questions (and many others) with his long-awaited guide How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today.

Read the press release.

Archived in Classics | Education | History | Literature | Press Releases
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Now Available in Paperback—In Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.

Read the press release.

Archived in Education | History | Press Releases
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The media are awash with stories about increasingly close ties between college science departments and multi-million dollar corporations, but is that relationship endangering science? Have universities, bedazzled by visions of huge profits from biotechnology and drug patents, allowed themselves to be fatally compromised by corporate cash?

With Science for Sale, journalist Daniel S. Greenberg draws on sources developed through his forty years of reporting to paint a clear and detailed picture of the state of university science. Taking on everything from drug tests to the technology transfer offices that have sprung up at many universities, Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest.

Read the press release.

Archived in Biology | Economics | Education | History and Philosophy of Science | Press Releases
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article in the July 6 issue on the recent activities of Edward Castronova in furthering the study of online gaming and virtual worlds. Two years ago we published his book, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games.

Castronova has been working on several new projects at Indiana University. One is the construction of the online space Arden, a virtual world that draws upon Shakespeare's works. Castronova "sees Arden as the first virtual environment among many at Indiana that will serve as a 'petri dish' for large-scale social-science experiments.… Experiments could involve testing basic economic principles, setting up different political systems, communist or capitalist, and comparing how the communities evolve, or doing an ethnographic study that contrasts people from different parts of the world." A test experiment will take place in August.

Another project is "an unusual academic conference that tries to replicate the enthusiasm and hubbub that people experience playing competitive online games." Ludium II, the second conference in the series, was held last month. Participants used the role-playing technique of online games to create a set of public policies for virtual worlds. "The group came up with ten policies for virtual worlds that they decided to send to Congressional and presidential candidates in the 2008 elections."

Learn more about the worlds of Edward Castronova at his blog, Terranova.

Also read our interview with the Castronova.

Archived in Books for the News | Economics | Education
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Susan Basalla May, co-author of So What Are You Going to Do with That?: Finding Careers Outside Academia has posted an interesting FAQ for students preparing for a nonacademic career to the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Culled from the question and answer sessions that follow her frequent lectures, Basalla comments on a variety of topics including how to get started as a freelancer and how to explain to potential employers about unfinished dissertations. You can find the full article in the career section of the Chronicle.

A witty, accessible guide full of concrete advice for anyone contemplating the jump from scholarship to the outside world, So What Are You Going to Do with That? covers topics ranging from career counseling to interview etiquette to translating skills learned in the academy into terms an employer can understand and appreciate. Packed with examples and stories from real people who have successfully made this daunting—but potentially rewarding— transition, and written with a deep understanding of both the joys and difficulties of the academic life, this fully revised and up-to-date edition will be indispensable for any graduate student or professor who has ever glanced at her CV, flipped through the want ads, and wondered, "What if?"

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Reference and Writing
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The current issue of the New York Review of Books is running an interesting article titled "Scandals of Higher Eduction" written by Andrew Delbanco, professor in the humanities and director of American studies at Columbia University. The article is the typical NYRB in-depth review of recent books, in this case offering varying critiques of the state of the American educational system, especially the higher educational system as it is embodied by the nation's elite schools. Delbanco's article draws on several books that rehash now commonplace critiques of flawed admissions policies that favor money over smarts. But he reserves a special place for former U of C dean Donald Levine's new book, Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America; a work with an insightful approach that picks up where the others fall short in its incisive analysis of the state of higher eduction. Delbanco writes:

If…it is a scandal that so few disadvantaged students are able to attend our most advantageous colleges, it is also urgent, in the words (the italics are his) of Donald Levine, former dean of the college at the University of Chicago, to notice that

the scandal of higher education in our time is that so little attention gets paid, in institutions that claim to provide an education, to what it is that college educators claim to be providing.

In Powers of the Mind: The Reinvention of Liberal Learning in America, Levine has written a fascinating history of curricular debates at the University of Chicago, reaching back to its founding more than a century ago. It is a story of serious teachers responding to continuous change in the world and in their particular academic disciplines while always keeping in view the enduring goal of liberal education, which Levine succinctly calls "the cultivation of human powers."

Drawing on his own lifetime of teaching and educational leadership at the University of Chicago, Levine's book looks beyond the headlines to provide an intelligent critique of the American university system and offer a viable paradigm for liberal arts today.

Archived in Education | Reviews
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Ruth Fredman Cernea, editor of The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate, was interviewed in the February 20 edition of the Jewish Ledger, a Connecticut weekly. In her conversation with staff writer Judie Jacobson, Cernea talks about the genesis of the University of Chicago's famous Latke-Hamantash debates, some of its notable participants, and the meaning—or lack thereof—in its annual deliberations. From the interview in the Ledger:

Q: When and why did the debate get started?

A: It began more than 60 years ago as an inspired "lark" by three people at the University of Chicago—Professor Sol Tax, an anthropologist; Professor Louis Gottshalk, a historian, and Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky. They were worried about the intellectual and social climate at the university for the numerous Jewish faculty and students there. This was a time when it was not professionally advisable to advertise your ethnic background on campus, when being an objective scientist meant burying the "yid" inside. In fact, many of the faculty had been brought up in homes rich in Eastern European Jewish culture: they knew Yiddish, ate the traditional East European foods, and went to "cheder." In another world they might have become Talmudists. …

The Tax-Gottshalk-Perkarsky spur-of-the-moment idea? A shmooze in the Hillel house, with faculty arguing the merits of familiar traditional foods, just before winter break. It would be a haven in the midst of the Christmas carols on campus. Sol Tax would make latkes. Faculty would let their hair down and speak the in-group vernacular of their childhood homes, Yiddish, and students would experience these forbidding figures as approachable, whole human beings.

Q:Who are some of the people who've participated in the Latke-Hamantash Debate?

A: It's almost easier to list who has not! The book includes papers by two Nobel Prize winners, Milton Friedman and Leon Lederberg; three university presidents, former Chicago President Hanna Grey, former Princeton University President Harold Shapiro, and Barnard's current President Judith Shapiro; and key people from a wide range of academic disciplines. Considering that it takes significant effort to produce an academic paper, spoof or not, it's noteworthy that such serious scholars took the time to write and joke about their lives and their life's work.

Our online feature for the book includes the text and audio of Ted Cohen’s “Consolations of the Latke” as well as recipes for both the immortal pancake and the equally worthy pastry. With Purim about two weeks away, there's still time to learn to make hamantashen.

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Education | Literature | Religion
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The October 23 issue of the New Yorker has a fascinating review by Anthony Grafton of William Clark's Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University:

Clark thinks that the modern university, with its passion for research, prominent professors, and, yes, black crêpe, took shape in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And he makes his case with analytic shrewdness, an exuberant love of archival anecdote, and a wry sense of humor. It's hard to resist a writer who begins by noting, "Befitting the subject, this is an odd book."

It's also hard to resist Grafton's review when it's titled "The Nutty Professors" and asks some perfectly sensible questions:

Why, in the age of the World Wide Web, do professors still stand at podiums and blather for fifty minutes at unruly mobs of students, their lowered baseball caps imperfectly concealing the sleep buds that rim their eyes? Why do professors and students put on polyester gowns and funny hats and march, once a year, in the uncertain glory of the late spring?

Why indeed? Clark shows how the university developed in response to market forces and the intrusiveness of the state bureaucracy, and established itself as a self-regulating research enterprise. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor.

Extending Clark's history into the present, Grafton writes:

Today, academic charisma—and the ascetic life of scholarship that goes with it—retains a central place in the life of universities. Scholars in all fields continue to gain preferment because they are "productive" (the academic euphemism for obsessive), and students continue to emulate them. Future investment bankers pull all-nighters delving into subjects that they will never need to know about again, and years later, at reunions, they recall the intensity of the experience with something close to disbelief—and, often, passionate nostalgia. The university has never been a sleek, efficient corporation. It's more like the military, an organization at once radically modern and steeped in color and tradition.

Archived in Education | History | Reviews
Posted by DB at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

William Clark's most recent work, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, is one of the first books to take on the daunting task of charting the evolution of academics in the western world. Full of profound insights into the development of the profession, the academics themselves have been quick to praise Clark's book for its comprehensive and insightful account of the discipline. Sheldon Rothblatt, professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Berkeley writes in a review for the American Scientist:

In almost any way that one can imagine, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University is an astonishing book. Earlier reviews have said as much. It is astonishing in style, voice, structure, method, conception, breadth, and learning.…

[Clark's book] introduces a startling set of new ideas: It was not the professors who created the modern academic profession; rather, it was the rationalizing, bureaucratic, market-conscious functionaries who served the various German states of the 18th century.… This emphasis on the state as the ultimate, if indirect, source of intellectual creativity challenges received opinion, but it also challenges a certain high-mindedness about the pursuit and embrace of knowledge that the inherited account assumes. The corrective is necessary; but it is also a corrective derived from a certain skepticism about current academic values.

A eye opening account of the discipline, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.

Archived in Education | History | Reviews
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Great reviews continue to pour in for David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. In his review for Slate.com, David Greenberg called the book "perceptive and lucid."

Wilfred M. McClay of the Wall Street Journal wrote about Brown's honest examination of Hofstadter: "The paradoxical effect of Mr. Brown's biography, however, is to lower rather than raise our estimation of Richard Hofstadter as a historian and thinker. This may come as a bit of a shock to those who have admired him for so long and have clung to his example as an alternative to the narrowly academic or tendentious historical writing of the present day. It is a bit disconcerting, like the archetypal visit to one's childhood home and neighborhood, where everything that once seemed so great and magical looks infinitely smaller and shabbier than one remembered. But Mr. Brown's book makes it hard to evade the fact that Hofstadter was a historian who, for all the charm of his work, was nearly always wrong in his most important assertions."

In his review in the Summer 2006 issue of Bookforum, Robert S. Boynton called Richard Hofstadter "excellent."

In the Boston Globe, Christopher Shea noted that Hofstadter "had a knack for picking topics that resonated with the present" and that "some of [Hofstadter's] themes seem presciently in tune with our times, too-tension between rural and urban America, grass-roots distrust of experts and intellectuals, democracy's vulnerability to demagoguery. All of which makes Brown's biography, the first of Hofstadter, especially timely." On a similar note, in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, author David S. Brown describes how Hofstadter predicted the rise of today's right wing.

The author of The American Political Tradition and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Richard Hofstadter was one of the most celebrated and respected historians of twentieth-century America—and certainly one of its most influential public intellectuals. His championing of the liberal politics that came out of the New Deal, his fierce opposition to McCarthyism and then the acolytes of Barry Goldwater, and the many ideas that he introduced to our nation's political conversation shaped not only the way we think of the historian's role in civic life, but steered the direction of American politics as well. This masterful biography explores Hofstadter's remarkable life story in the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | Education | History | Reviews
Posted by at 05:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Publishers Weekly recently praised Richard A. Lanham's The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. From the review: "Lanham's points are strong and well-researched, as shown through his 'background conversations,' substitutes for endnotes included at the end of every chapter. If style is going to increasingly operate as the decision-making arbiter, Lanham should be commended on his: clear, jargon-free and forward-thinking."

Richard A. Lanham here traces our epochal move from an economy of things and objects to an economy of attention. According to Lanham, the central commodity in our new age of information is not stuff but style, for style is what competes for our attention amidst the din and deluge of new media. In such a world, intellectual property will become more central to the economy than real property, while the arts and letters will grow to be more crucial than engineering, the physical sciences, and indeed economics as conventionally practiced. For Lanham, the arts and letters are the disciplines that study how human attention is allocated and how cultural capital is created and traded. In an economy of attention, style and substance change places. The new attention economy, therefore, will anoint a new set of moguls in the business world—not the CEOs or fund managers of yesteryear, but new masters of attention with a grounding in the humanities and liberal arts.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Economics | Education | Literature | Reviews
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The New York Sun recently reviewed David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. From the review by Adam Kirsch: "As David Brown shows in his fascinating new study, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, Hofstadter's life and times prepared him to be the kind of historian he was. Indeed, the sometimes unsettling insight that drives Mr. Brown's book is that each generation of historians reads their own experience into the American past, turning historiography into a kind of biography.… As Mr. Brown shows, Richard Hofstadter has receded into the American past he helped to illuminate; but he remains one of its most honorable figures."

In this masterful biography, David S. Brown explores Hofstadter's life within the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism. A fierce advocate of academic freedom, racial justice, and political pluralism, Hofstadter charted in his works the changing nature of American society from a provincial Protestant foundation to one based on the values of an urban and multiethnic nation.

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | Education | History | Reviews
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The author of The American Political Tradition and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Richard Hofstadter was one of the most celebrated and respected historians of twentieth-century America—and certainly one of its most influential public intellectuals. His championing of the liberal politics that came out of the New Deal, his fierce opposition to McCarthyism and then the acolytes of Barry Goldwater, and the many ideas that he introduced to our nation's political conversation shaped not only the way we think of the historian's role in civic life, but steered the direction of American politics as well. Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography explores Hofstadter's remarkable life story in the context of the rise and fall of American liberalism.… Read the press release.

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Archived in Biography | Education | History | Press Releases
Posted by at 09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Publishers Weekly recently reviewed David S. Brown's Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography. From the review: "Richard Hofstadter wrote several of the 20th century's most popular and important works of American history, but, as historian Brown reminds readers in this nuanced study, those works were as much a critique of the political culture of his own day as they were an analysis of the past. [Brown offers] brief, pointed readings of the Columbia-based thinker's books and analyses of his era's conflicts…. As he makes a strong case for the relevance of Hofstadter's influential understanding of political conflict to contemporary society, Brown is attentive to his flaws, as well: most notably, his personal devotion to postwar, meritocratic liberalism often led him to apply and selectively develop his historical arguments. Although the Hofstadter estate's prohibition against quotation from his letters weakens the presentation of his inner life, Brown's thorough research has yielded plenty of well-chosen snippets from the words of Hofstadter's family, colleagues and students to flesh out this valuable intellectual portrait."

Read an excerpt.

Archived in Biography | Education | History | Reviews
Posted by at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Latke-Hamantash Debate was born at the University of Chicago some sixty years. In Chicago the debate is traditionally held on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. On other campuses—Cornell University, for example—the debate takes place around the celebration of Purim.

Purim, Hanukkah, or, heck, the Fourth of July, any time is an appropriate time for the intellectual and gastronomic delights of The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate, a collection of the best of nearly sixty years of brilliant University of Chicago oratory deployed on behalf of latkes and hamantashen.

In the Jerusalem Report Matt Nesvisky writes, “Editor [Ruth Fredman] Cernea, herself an anthropologist and a former Hillel official, has done a creditable job of combing through the organization’s archives to come up with essays that are never quite hilarious but are usually at least moderately amusing. I for one confess to a fondness for Ralph Marcus’s charming couplet: ‘Though David admired Bathsheba’s torso/ He liked her hamantashen more so.’ A close second is when Lawrence Sherman has Mercutio remarking ‘Women who are cold, cold latkes/ Cannot warm a young man’s gatkes.’”

Our online feature for the book includes the text and audio of Ted Cohen’s “Consolations of the Latke” as well as recipes for both the immortal pancake and the equally worthy pastry.

Archived in Books for the News | Education | Literature | Religion
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"Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can't teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white."
—Barack Obama, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 2004

Ron Netsky, a writer for City (Rochester, NY), observed that the term "acting white" has been appearing in the media a lot lately (most recently in The Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times) . Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu popularized the term in a study published in Urban Review in 1986. Fordham is also the author of Blacked Out: Dilemmas of Race, Identity, and Success at Capital High, a book which explores academic achievement within the Black community and the price students pay for attaining it.

Earlier this month, Netsky interviewed Fordham about Black education issues and what it means to "act white."

City: In Blacked Out, you write that one of the things that seems to make the education process difficult is generational.

Fordham: After the Brown decision and the Civil Rights act—in the 1960s generally—black people were engrossed in acknowledging what they had achieved. Their children were the kids that I studied, and their parents were always baffled by why their kids wouldn't take advantage of what they saw as the wider opportunities available to them. And rightfully so. You fight for something so hard, why don't the kids do so much better? Because if we had those opportunities, we would have gone much further in life than we've actually gone.

But they don't get what is happening in culture systems, how they operate. These kids are fearful of the loss of identity. This is not something they would verbalize or even have the understanding to talk about if you asked them.

The rest of the interview and an essay by Signithia Fordham titled "Was Rosa Parks 'acting white'?" can be read here.

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Archived in Anthropology | Black Studies | Books for the News | Education
Posted by at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)