Assessing Quality in Postsecondary Education: International Perspectives, edited by Harvey P. Weingarten, Martin Hicks, and Amy Kaufman (McGill-Queen’s University Press; 197 pages; $39.95 paperback). Policy experts describe the various methods of defining and measuring academic quality that are being used or considered in Canada, Europe, and the United States.
Dissident Knowledge in Higher Education, edited by Marc Spooner and James McNinch (University of Regina Press; 319 pages; $34.95 paperback, free e-book). A collection of essays on how to shift universities away from a corporate sensibility and toward the quest for a more ethical and just world.
Leading Academic Change: Vision, Strategy, Transformation, by Elaine P. Maimon (Stylus Publishing; 166 pages; $95 hardcover, $29.95 paperback, $23.99 e-book). Proposals by the president of Governors State University, in Illinois, to restructure undergraduate education, including by having only full-time professors teach foundational, freshman-level courses.
Making Sense of the College Curriculum: Faculty Stories of Change, Conflict, and Accommodation, by Robert Zemsky, Gregory R. Wegner, and Ann J. Duffield (Rutgers University Press; 181 pages; $27.95 hardcover or e-book). Interviews with more than 180 faculty members at 11 colleges reveal an intense commitment to teaching, along with frustrations over the barriers to modernizing the curriculum.
Reclaiming Indigenous Research in Higher Education, edited by Robin Starr Minthorn and Heather J. Shotton (Rutgers University Press; 228 pages; $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback or e-book). Native scholars try to overcome the lack of attention to American Indian postsecondary students, and describe the indigenous experience at tribal colleges, with tribal financial aid, and with leadership development.
Reinvention: The Promise and Challenge of Transforming a Community College System, by Cheryl L. Hyman (Harvard Education Press; 170 pages; $56 hardcover, $29 paperback). A former chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago describes her efforts to shift the institution’s focus from access to student success.
Seeing the World: How U.S. Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era, by Mitchell L. Stevens, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, and Seteney Shami (Princeton University Press; 163 pages; $35 hardcover, $19.25 e-book). The authors look at research centers on the Middle East at American universities to explore why faculty members feel discouraged from studying subjects outside the United States, in spite of universities’ stated cosmopolitan goals.
Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education, edited by Joe Karaganis (MIT Press; 313 pages; $25 paperback, free e-book). An overview of how students across the world get the study materials they need, including through illegal downloads and unauthorized digital libraries.
25 Years of Transformations of Higher Education Systems in Post-Soviet Countries: Reform and Continuity, edited by Jeroen Huisman, Anna Smolentseva, and Isak Froumin (Palgrave MacMillan; 482 pages; $31 hardcover, free e-book). Contributing scholars describe how the Soviet model of higher education has evolved into different systems in 15 countries that were part of the Soviet Union before it broke up in 1991.
New books on higher education can be submitted to the Bookshelf editor.
