Weekend Reading: Good Friday Edition

April 6, 2012, 12:19 pm

Last May, I wrote about the launch for the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, a meta-organization of higher education groups that, among many other goals, seeks to promote the views of faculty members about higher education. Part of the Campaign’s work is a virtual think tank, The Center for the Future of Higher Education, which this week published its first policy report: Gary Rhoades’s Closing the Door, Increasing the Gap: Who’s not going to (community) college? (both the executive summary and full report are available as PDFs).

What’s helpful about Rhoades’s analysis is that it systematically takes on the completion agenda as part and parcel of public disinvestment in higher education, documenting the ways in which higher costs at four-year schools appear to be crowding out many possible students, as well as how community colleges are being forced by that disinvestment to turn their backs on the promise of open access.

On to this week’s links!

At The Scholary Kitchen, Joseph Esposito reviews “E-books int he Academy — A Story of Limitations and Affordances”: While it is sometime amusing to imagine a scholar in his or her study, surrounded by huge, unkempt piles of paper, there may be a method to the madness as the use of paper in such a way can serve as an organizing tool. Now that we increasingly are seeing people working at computers with multiple monitors, we should not be surprised that others want even more “windows” open in the form of multiple print documents spread across a desk or table or even on the floor.
At Full Stop, Stephanie Berhnhard is annoyed by “The Rise of the Lecherous Professor (in Fiction)”: Though I like many novels that take professors as protagonists, I find the trend of academic novels annoying. Depressed professors just seem so damn convenient as rhetorical devices that I can’t help feeling the author is taking an easy way out.
Have a Twitter feed? Why not have it printed onto usable toilet paper?
Clive Thompson on how he reads: In the case of War and Peace, I actually had 16,000 words worth of notes and clippings at the end of it. So I printed it out as a print-on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace.
Malcolm Harris has edited a terrific book, Share or Die: Youth in Recession, which is freely available online, or you can purchase the PDF for $15. Much of it is directly relevant to ProfHacker readers (or our students), but I especially like Jenna Brager’s comic, “Who Needs an Ivory Tower?”