Reading Room: Omnivore on #highered systems

...the whole collection as is. Some but not all sources are journals and media from the Mundo Bizarro of highered. Others are main steam media and studies from outside the profession. All are informed. Consider this homework, prep reading for bigger picture, context for whatever the #CFHE gathering yields and is willing to share and seeing other perspectives, perhaps even ourselves, our profession, as others see it.

Eli Meyerhoff (Minnesota), Elizabeth Johnson (Wisconsin), and Bruce Braun (Minnesota): Time and the University. Robert Rhoads (UCLA): The U.S. Research University as a Global Model: Some Fundamental Problems to Consider. Study abroad? Why American students head north. What country has the best higher education system? 

A World Bank study titled The Road to Academic Excellence: The Making of World Class Research Universities finds that new universities can grow into top quality research institutions within two or three decades when academic talent, financial resources and governance — particularly autonomy and academic freedom — are present from the start. From The Guardian, it was meant to bring rigour to the tricky question of who deserves a grant or a post, but is the h-index's numerical score simplistic? 

From LRB, when what is real, in relation to university education, is student demand and jobs in the future — a pair of premises about as fictional as you can get — what are we to say in favour of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake? A review of What Are Universities For? by Stefan Collini (and more).


Check out Book Forum's blog Omnivore for daily collections of briefly annotated themed links