NB Education

In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband’s death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a victim, according to the Honolulu coroner’s jury, of strychnine poisoning. With her vast fortune the university’s lifeline, the Stanford president and his allies quickly sought to foreclose challenges to her bequests by constructing a story of death by natural causes. The cover-up gained traction in the murky labyrinths of power, wealth, and corruption of Gilded Age San Francisco. The murderer walked.

Deftly sifting the scattered evidence and conflicting stories of suspects and witnesses, historian Richard White gives us the first full account of Jane Stanford’s murder and its cover-up in WHO KILLED JANE STANFORD?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University (W.W. Norton & Company). Against a backdrop of the city’s machine politics, rogue policing, tong wars, and heated newspaper rivalries, White’s search for the murderer draws us into Jane Stanford’s imperious household and the academic enmities of the university. Although Stanford officials claimed that no one could have wanted to murder Jane, we meet several people who had the motives and the opportunity to do so. One of these, we discover, also had the means. Author-interview podcast link ↙️

https://newbooksnetwork.com/who-killed-jane-stanford-a-gilded-age-tale-of-murder-deceit-spirits-and-the-birth-of-a-university

Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in BANKERS in the IVORY TOWER: The Troubling Rise of Financiers in US Higher Education (University of Chicago Press), finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large.

With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America's unequal system of higher education. Check out the author's NBN interview 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/bankers-in-the-ivory-tower

In GOD, GRADES, and GRADUATION: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success (Oxford University Press), Ilana M. Horwitz offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers' religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. Religious students orient their life around God so deeply that it alters how they see themselves and how they behave, inside and outside of church. Find out how as Horwitz discusses the book on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/god-grades-and-graduation

THE LOST PROMISE: American Universities in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press) is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students.

The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In this new book, Ellen Schrecker— historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened. PODCAST LINK 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-lost-promise

WHEN COMMUNICATIONS BECAME A DISCIPLINE (Lexington Books) argues that speech and journalism professors embraced the concept of communication between 1964 and 1982. They changed the names of their scholarly societies and journals and revised their academic curricula. Five “strands” of scholarship became and remain central to this transformation. Communication is not a traditional academic discipline, but its scholars convinced their colleagues to understand and embrace it. Learn how on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/when-communication-became-a-discipline

Political Scientist Stacy Ulbig has a new book that dives into the political attitudes and behaviors of college students to assess how polarization and partisan antipathy in the general public have some genesis on college campuses. ANGRY POLITICS: Partisan Hatred and Political Polarization Among College Students (University Press of Kansas) explores affective polarization, and elicited responses from students who have noted that they are experiencing self-censorship across the political spectrum. Listen in as Ulbig examines the layers of student behavior around politics in an atmosphere that is characterized as fraught by a variety of news outlets on the podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/angry-politics

Despite their best intentions, college personnel frequently approach disability from the singular perspective of access to the exclusion of other important issues.

Drawing on multiple theoretical frameworks, research, and experience creating inclusive campuses, DISABILITY in HIGHER EDUCATION: A Social Justice Approach (Jossey-Bass) examines how disability is conceptualized in higher education and ways in which students, faculty, and staff with disabilities are viewed and served on college campuses, offering a new framework for understanding disability using a social justice lens.
Listen in as Autumn Wilke joins us on the Grinnell College Authors & Artists Podcast 👇

https://newbooksnetwork.com/disability-in-higher-education