New Books in Higher Education

I am not now nor at any time have ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Yet I serve as dean of a large faculty of political science in a Chinese university that trains students and provincial cadres to serve the country as Communist Party officials: It’s typically a post reserved for members of the CCP, given the political sensitivity of the work. That’s part of the surprise. Th...

During Leo Lambert’s 19-year tenure as president at Elon University, the institution moved from a regional college to becoming one of the U.S.’s top 100 national universities. It is consistently ranked #1 for undergraduate education, ahead of Brown and Princeton. Lambert describes the five core “Elon Experiences” and other high impact practices that have helped Elon become one of the leaders in ac...

In Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), futurist Bryan Alexander explores higher education during an age of unfolding climate crisis. Powered by real-world examples and the latest research, Alexander assesses practical responses and strategies by surveying contemporary programs and academic climate research from around the world. He establishes a m...

How are hiring and admissions decisions made in the hard sciences if not by merit? What are the risks of allowing science to be politicized? Professors Dorian Abbot (University of Chicago), Anna Krylov (University of Southern California), David Romps (University of California, Berkeley), and Bernhardt Trout (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), join the show to answer these questions and others...

Dorian Abbot is an Associate Professor of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) had invited Abbot to deliver their prestigious Carlson Lecture, but rescinded the invitation after receiving complaints about an article Abbot had written for Newsweek, titled "The Diversity Problem on Campus." In response, Princeton University's James Madiso...

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

Why do so many students and academics worry that they are imposters? Is it normal to experience this kind of self-doubt? This episode explores: The difference between imposter syndrome and imposter phenomenon. How we can better understand imposter syndrome. Why it strikes some people. How to recognize it when it does. Tips for helping others and ourselves. Our guest is: Dr Darragh McCashin, who is...

On Music Theory and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press, 2023) by Philip Ewell is an unflinching look at white supremacy and the academy, specifically in the discipline of music theory, although Ewell’s insights and arguments can apply just as well to all music studies and most, if not all, other academic fields. Using meticulous research and his own experiences,...

Listen to this interview of Jan Recker, Professor for Information Systems and Digital Innovation at the University of Hamburg, Germany and author of Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner's Guide (Springer, 2021). We talk about how your research is what you write. Jan Recker : "Very few of us scientists are gifted readers, and very few of us are gifted writers, but those who are, I...

Today I had the pleasure of talking to Jay Ke-Schutte on his just released book, Angloscene: Compromised Personhood in Afro-Chinese Translations (U California Press, 2023). Angloscene examines Afro-Chinese interactions within Beijing's aspirationally cosmopolitan student class. Jay Ke-Schutte explores the ways in which many contemporary interactions between Chinese and African university students...

State censorship and cancel culture, trigger warnings and safe spaces, pseudoscience, First Amendment hardball, as well as orthodoxy and groupthink: universities remain a site for important battles in the culture wars. What is the larger meaning of these debates? Are American universities at risk of conceding to mobs and cuddled “snowflake” students and sacrifice the hallowed values of free speech...

This book delves deep into the question of what is legal education for? Who does it serve, and how, as educators can we reflect on what we deliver in the law classroom? In answering this question, What is Legal Education For? Re-assessing the Purposes of Early Twenty-First Century Learning and Law Schools (Routledge 2022), editors Dr Rachel Dunn, Professor Paul Maharg and Dr Victoria Roper bring t...

Why read the Classics, and how to do it best? Louis Petrich teaches at St. John’s College, the third-oldest college and “the nation's most contrarian college” (according to the New York Times, meant as a compliment). St. John’s takes a remarkable approach to the liberal arts: students and teachers read and discuss 3,000 years of Great Books over four years, all via primary readings without discipl...

Writing and publishing are at the heart of most academic and research pursuits. Many potential authors, however, feel lost in the seemingly Everest climbing-like process. There is little formal education that authors receive during their education. In this regard, John Bond’s new book's The Little Guide to Getting Your Journal Article Published: Simple Steps to Success (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023)...

What happens when jobs in academia are scarce, and few of the descriptions of jobs outside academia seem like a fit? How can graduates find the right job for them, whether it’s inside academia or far afield? This episode explores: Ways to explain your skills and expertise so an employer sees you as a good match for them. Tips for reframing how graduate students talk about themselves and their rese...

Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives-- sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same old hierarchies and inequities. The stories gathered in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship (SUNY Press, 2023) challenge our fund...

We have an engaging discussion with Dr. Dan Greenstein, who in 2018 left the Gates Foundation, where he led the Post-Secondary program, to become the Chancellor for the PASSHE system. He knew he was taking on a great challenge with a system that had seen enrollment decline over the prior decade from a peak of 120,000 to fewer than 90,000 students. He was able to garner the necessary political supp...

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

How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education (Princeton UP, 2020) offers a short, spirited defense of rhetoric and the liberal arts as catalysts for precision, invention, and empathy in today's world. The author, a professor of Shakespeare studies at a liberal arts college and a parent of school-age children, argues that high-stakes testing and a culture of assessment have a...

In this episode, Gita Manaktala, Editorial Director at the MIT Press, and Ellen Finnie, Co-Interim Associate Director for Collections at MIT Libraries, discuss the Ideas series: a hybrid print and open access book series for general readers, that provides fresh, strongly argued, and provocative views of the effects of digital technology on culture, business, government, education, and our lives. L...

What is postmodernism? Does the Biden Administration support Critical Race Theory? How might a recommitment to classical liberal principles help fight "Woke-ism"? James Lindsay joins the show to answer these questions and more and discuss his book (co-written with Helen Pluckrose), Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everyb...

Joshua Myers considers the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logic of academic disciplinarity and how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom. Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, Of Black Study (Pluto Press, 2023) focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvi...

Today’s book is: Gay on God's Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities (UNC Press, 2018), by Jonathan Coley. Although the LGBT movement has made rapid gains in the United States, LGBT people continue to face discrimination in faith communities. In this book, sociologist Jonathan S. Coley documents why and how student activists mobilize for greater inclusion at Ch...

What are the "great books"? What makes them great? Is the cultivation of an intellectual life especially important to citizens of a democratic republic? Zena Hitz, Tutor at St. John's College, joins the show to discuss all this and more! You can buy Hitz's book Lost in Thought here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can a PhD program pivot from a professoriate-apprenticeship system, to one that is mindful of students’ post-grad career goals? This episode completes our three-part series on The Connected PhD, and explores: The positive effect on professors when their graduate students can prepare for multiple career options. How speaking one-on-one with students helped one program reexamine what “support” i...