Building the Intentional University: Minerva and the Future of Higher Education, edited by Stephen M. Kosslyn and Ben Nelson (MIT Press; 431 pages; $45). Essays on Minerva, a four-year undergraduate program, created in partnership with the Keck Graduate Institute, that emphasizes practical knowledge, uses a cloud-based platform for small seminars, and offers a rotating residential model in which students live and study in seven cities around the world.
Degrees That Matter: Moving Higher Education to a Learning Systems Paradigm, by Natasha A. Jankowski and David W. Marshall (Stylus Publishing; 216 pages; $95 hardcover, $35 paperback). Discusses a model for evaluating and improving how well students are learning.
Fraud and Misconduct in Research: Detection, Investigation, and Organizational Response, by Nachman Ben-Yehuda and Amalya Oliver-Lumerman (University of Michigan Press; 266 pages; $75). Uses data on nearly 750 incidents between 1880 and 2010 to examine fraud through the sociological frame of deviance in organizations.
The Miseducation of the Student Athlete: How to Fix College Sports, by Kenneth L. Shropshire and Collin D. Williams Jr. (Wharton Digital Press; 95 pages; $15.99). Argues that obtaining a meaningful degree should be made the priority for student-athletes; proposes, in turn, an approach that would extend the traditional time for completion as well as allow a return to college, even for “one and done” athletes.
The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, by Cathy N. Davidson (Basic Books; 318 pages; $28). Argues, among other things, for teaching that focuses on students’ achieving the crucial umbrella skill of “learning how to learn.”
The Politics of Writing Studies: Reinventing Our Universities From Below, by Robert Samuels (Utah State University Press; 165 pages; $23.95). Uses analyses of work by Charles Bazerman, Ann Beaufort, Sidney Dobrin, and other scholars to argue that recent research in the emerging field of writing studies is inadvertently reinforcing structures of inequality in higher education; offers an alternative.
A Practical Education: Why Liberal Arts Majors Make Great Employees, by Randall Stross (Stanford University Press; 304 pages; $25). Draws on oral histories recounting the experiences of recent liberal-arts graduates of Stanford University, who with their B.A. degrees found professional positions, including in Silicon Valley.
Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education, by John Palfrey (MIT Press; 171 pages; $19.95). Argues for a view of free speech and diversity that sees the two values as mutually supportive.
Shifting the Dialog, Shifting the Culture: Pathways to Successful Postsecondary Outcomes for Deaf Individuals, by Stephanie W. Cawthon and Carrie Lou Garberoglio (Gallaudet University Press; 234 pages; $70). Discusses individual and systemic factors that help or hinder success in higher education and careers for deaf students.
Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity, by Charles T. Clotfelter (Harvard University Press; 439 pages; $39.95). Focuses on the topics of diversity, competition, and inequality in quantitative comparisons of data from selective and less-selective colleges since the 1970s.
