How does one define success? It is a good job, money in the bank, or doing what one loves? Does making a difference make one successful? Being happy? The move into adulthood, the search for identity and success, is a complicated mix of what we bring to the table, what has been done to us,…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
Learning from a Miseducation
What do we know – truly know – of our students? What strengths, talents and abilities may be within them, waiting to be tapped and for them to flourish? It’s a question that begs to be asked when reading Brandon P. Fleming’s fascinating memoir, Miseducated. He is a very talented man whose life easily could…
Han and Action
What moves people to engage in public life? It is a vitally important question, perhaps never more so than now when the very tenets of democracy are at risk. It is the primary question driving the research, scholarship and influence of Hahrie Han, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. Han is the…
Rethink That History Textbook!
If you have ever wondered about the durability of racism and white supremacy in America, why these odious evils have persisted for so many years, Donald Yacovone has an provocative answer: we have been teaching them for centuries. Yacovone is a scholar, researcher and writer with long-standing ties to two important Harvard University centers, the…
Enabling the ADA
American politics teaches anyone who pays attention an essential political lesson: rights are not given away. Rights have to be secured – through the ballot box, through legislation, in the courts, the media, and in people’s minds. As much as we all may hope for a fair and just society, fairness and justice do not…
Women and Yale: A Study of Change and Resistance
Anne Gardiner Perkins, Yale alumna, is an historian of higher education who came to research after an academic administrative career. Her first book, based on her doctoral thesis, is an accessible, important and extremely timely account of the movement to coeducation at at her alma mater. Yale Needs Women: How the First Group of Girls…
Higher Education By Any Other Name
In 2019, before the pandemic, Paul Tough’s book The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us, came out to good reviews. It was repackaged in 2021 and given a new tile: The Inequality Machine: How College Divides Us. Having read the book under its original title, I can confidently state the new…