It’s that time again, where reviewers recommend the year’s best books. In 2019, we had a bevy of excellent books about American higher education, covering its history, controversies, and contributions. Here’s my list of the year’s best titles.A Pulitzer prize-winning historian, Taylor explores the links between slavery and the founding of the University of Virginia, where he’s on the faculty. He demonstrates how slavery shaped the university just as it did every institution of that time.
by Steven Brint. If you want a book that gives an upbeat assessment of major research universities, this book is for you. Its balanced view of the successes and challenges of higher education is a welcome counterpoint to the overstated critiques of American colleges so often favored in the press.. Zaloom, an economic anthropologist at New York University, interviewed 160 families about the burdens of paying for college.
by Herb Childress. Based on his own experiences as an adjunct faculty and interviews with others similarly situated, Childress exposes what he sees as the damage associated with adjunctification, and he carefully traces the forces that have driven higher ed’s shift from tenured faculty to nomadic, nontenured adjuncts.The City Game: Triumph, Scandal and a Legendary Basketball Team