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Morning all. You know it’s getting towards XMAS when I start writing about the higher education books I’ve read recently. So, yes, those are Christmas bells ringing you can hear as you open this email and perusing my takes on the stuff I’ve read since Canada Day (I’ve already posted my January-June takes). Hopefully you can find a stocking stuffer or two in here for your own higher education nerd.

To start with the non-higher ed stuff. On the fiction side, I’m not having a great year. I think my favourite in the past six months have been Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (I’m a huge Vazquez fan, his The Shape of The Ruins might be my favourite Latin American novel of all time). I’ll throw in a Japanese novel, too. Not Murakami’s new The City and Its Uncertain Walls (which was better than his previous novel Killing Commendatore, but not much), but rather Asako Yuzuki’s Butter; a Novel of Food and Murder.

On the non-fiction side, conflict of interest rules forbid me from giving too much praise to Gerald Friesen’s The Honourable John Norquay: Indigenous Premier, Canadian Statesman, a timely book on Canada’s first Métis head of government, but you should read it anyway. My favourite from the past few months was The Soviet Sixties by Robert Hornsby, which is about that regime’s one decent decade and is quite excellent. I also enjoyed Wolfgang Münchau’sKaput: the End of the German Miracle, which suggests that the real historical anomaly was Germany’s accidental “good” decade of 2005-2015, not the train wreck of 2016-onwards (and the whole time all I could think about was everyone in Canada insisting that Canada could be just like Germany if only we did more apprenticeships…if you know anyone who still things like that, this book is a good antidote).

As for my higher education books: you’ve probably noticed my increasing tendency to turn books I have read recently into podcasts (subscribe to our YouTube channel! Never miss an episode!). Our episode about Mary C. Wright’s Centers of Teaching and Learning: the New Landscape in Higher Education ended up being our most-watched of the fall. Joseph Wycoff’s Outsourcing Student Engagement: the History of Institutional Research and the Future of Higher Education is a kind of quirky book, but is an excellent history of the most specific of higher education occupations, and the weird way in which it pre-surrendered to academic bullying to keep itself from being perceived as an alternative source of authority on academia. And finally there was Global Mega-Science by David Baker and Justin Powell which is an intriguing theory about the way that the massification of education has been a massive cross-subsidy to science.

In the same vein, there are another two books that I don’t feel I can tell you much about because I will be speaking to the authors on the podcast in the next few weeks. There was Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, which lays out the case for sanctions on Israeli universities. And there was The Governance of European Higher Education by Michael Shattock, Aniko Horvath, and Jürgen Enders. It’s one of a series from Shattock (who has also authored tomes on governance in British universities and on international trends in university governance), and it’s an excellent precis of how European universities in their three broad forms (Anglophone, Germanic, and Napoleonic) have moved in the last 40 years or so. Stay tuned.

Two other fairly ancient books I have covered in the blog already were The Blight on the Ivy by Dr & Mrs. (sic) Robert Gordon (a scream, but not always of the good kind) and The University, Society and Government, which was the report of the Commission on Relations Between Universities and Governments in 1970, which for the era presented an amazingly decentralist vision of Canada (I wonder, after decades of provincial indifference to postsecondary education regulation, what the authors would say now about the prospect for provincial leadership in science and research?)

When in Paris, I picked up a couple of books on French higher education, including Autopsie de l’Université: un regard sur l’enseignement universitaire et son évolution by Stéphane Louryan, which portrays the university (not entirely coherently) as being poised between the modern evils of “managerialism” and “wokeism” and Reconstruire l’Université by Louis Vogel, which is a long kvetch about the state of French universities and (at a very high level of abstraction) why they should be more Anglo-Saxon. A trip to the Architecture Museum in Montreal netted me a very slender book of essays by and about Arthur Erickson (architect of record for both Simon Fraser and Lethbridge) called Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, which is mostly a bunch of ideas around how university architecture can influence the organization of knowledge at universities. It’s mostly hopium and reads a lot like some of the stuff Buckminster Fuller was writing at the time, but at least it’s interesting hopium.      

Four the better books I read were Follow the Money: Funding Research in a Large Academic Health Center by Henry Bourne and Eric Vermillion; The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India by Ajantha Subramanian: Burton Clark’s 1970 book, The Distinctive College: Antioch, Reed and Swarthmore; and David Staley’s Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education. The first is a detailed look at how the University of California, San Francisco actually works financially (and in general a useful handbook to understand the way America funds research, in the same vein as Paula Stephan’s How Economics Shapes Science. Subramanian’s book is good on how educational attainment “merit-washes” family wealth (and should be read by anyone who is under the deeply mistaken impression that meritocracy is a particular symptom of neo-liberal late capitalism). Clark’s book is an interesting examination of the “sagas” of Antioch, Reed and Swarthmore Colleges and it’s worth reading not just because they are interesting case studies in an of themselves, but for its excellent understanding of how university cultures develop over time. Staley’s book is bog-standard futurism (a bunch of ideas for future institutional forms that are not even vaguely examined in terms of the likelihood that they would ever find public or private funding), but it’s interesting and thought-provoking bog-standard futurism.

I also consumed HBCU: The Power of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, by Marybeth Gasman and Levon Esters, which managed to turn an interesting subject into something that really was kind of boring, and also Linda Tuhiwa Smith’s Decolonizing Methodology: Research and Indigenous Peoples, which I think should be more widely read not because it is a page-turner or anything, but rather to debunk certain ideas about what “decolonization” in academia means (it’s half about putting research at the service of indigenous peoples, which should be utterly incontestable, but the other half has an awful lot of French post-structuralism in it).

A couple of other single-college histories to mention are The University of Winnipeg: A History of the Founding Colleges by A.G. Bedford and Higher Education on the Brink: Re-imagining Strategic Enrolment Management in Colleges and Universities. I know, the latter doesn’t sound like it’s an institutional story, but it’s really just the author’s experience running Pittsburgh Technical College, written in universalist language. The former is pretty stultifying, with almost as much space given up to intra-mural sports as it is with actual intellectual, and its account of the Crowe Affair, (one of the huge academic freedom cases of the 1950s is, shall we say, highly tendentious, but, well, if you want to understand about how the politics of institutional federalism and the merger of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches affected higher education in Winnipeg  (which I recognize is a fairly specific demographic) then this is your book.

Finally, I read a load of books for a series of blogs on the history of Quebec universities I’ll be publishing early next year. There was l’Université en réseau. Les 25 ans de l’Universiteé du Quebec by LuciaFeretti (obviously this one’s a little old by now but hey! Open access!); La naissance de l’UQAM: Témoignanges, acteurs et contextes (also open access, I really like Presses de l’université du Québec) by Denise Bertrand, Robert Comeauand Pierre-Yves Paradis. Histoire de l’Université de Sherbrooke 1954-2004 by Denis Goulet tells the story of one of Canada’s more under-rated (and misunderstood) institutions. I also started (but haven’t yet completed) Jean Hamelin’s Histoire de l’Université Laval: les péripéties d’une idée, which frankly feels pretty dated, and the brand-spanking new Concordia at 50: A Collective History, edited by Monika Kin Gangon and Brandon Webb, which is more of a community history than an institutional one, an approach which has its pluses and minuses.

But the very best higher education book I read this year was L’université de Montréal: une histoire urbaine et internationale by Daniel Poitras and Micheline Cambron. I know institutional histories aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but this book is genius. It’s not an institutional history so much as it is the political history of one of Canada’s most important community institutions as well as an intellectual history of the city of Montreal as well as a history of an evolving community of scholars (it might be the most “international” history of any Canadian institution ever written). It’s massive, beautifully illustrated, and will make you re-think what institutional histories can be.

It’s absolutely the book of the year. Honorable mention to the novel How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto.

Happy holiday reading.