Posts Tagged: book review

Can Academics Help Build a Partnership Between Humans and AI? (Books)

Book Review The Age of AI and our Human Future, by Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher, with Schuyler Schouten, New York, Little, Brown and Co., 2021. Reviewed by George McCully Artificial intelligence (AI) is engaged in overtaking and surpassing our long-traditional world of natural and human intelligence. In higher education, AI apps and their uses are multiply...

Looking Backwards (Book Review)

Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828; David B. Potts; Palgrave MacMillan; 2010. Liberal Education for a Land of Colleges: Yale’s Reports of 1828, is, in a sense, three small books under one cover. David Potts, an academic residing in the Pacific Northwest, was originally introduced to the documents more than 40 years ago as part of a graduate-level study of the h...

Book Review: Moral Victories?

Moral Problems in Higher Education, Steven Cahn, editor, Temple University Press, 2011. “Few philosophers have shown much interest in examining the moral problems …” in academe, their own bailiwick, complains Steven Cahn, a philosopher and former president of The Graduate School and University Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Cahn initiated a course in academic ethics ...

Physical Plant: A Review of Architecture and Academe: College Buildings in New England Before 1860

Architecture and Academe: College Buildings in New England Before 1860; Bryant F. Tolles Jr.; University Press of New England, 2011 It’s not the topic that New England’s higher education institutions generally boast about, but for many it is their most obvious attribute—the brick, stone, mullioned, porticoed and columned facades that helped set the standard for what much of coll...

New Amendment: Quality Ed as a Constitutional Right (Book Review)

Quality Education as a Constitutional Right: Creating a Grassroots Movement to Transform Public Schools; Theresa Perry, Robert Moses, Lisa Delpit, Ernesto Cortes Jr., Joan T. Wynne, editors; Beacon Press Books; 2010; Paperback $16 Quality Education as a Constitutional Right offers a provocative look at the continued disconnect between the rhetoric of reform and the facts of the real world. Stat...

Book Review: Edupunks Chart Coming Transformation of Higher Ed

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, Anya Kamenetz, Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, Vt., 2010Anya Kamenetz, a 2002 graduate of Yale and staff writer for Fast Company, could be an academic's worst nightmare. Articulate, forceful and skilled—her writing lobs volleys of criticisms that are hard to refute and harder still to ignore. In ...

Book Review: Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent

Harnessing America's Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning, Peter Smith, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 2010In 1970, I was a high school student in a suburban New England town. The invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State had brought spectacular illumination to the end of the academic year and dimmed hopes that the war in Vietnam would soon be over. But optimism and idealism left over ...

Extending (Books)

The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard, 1910-2009; Michael Shinagel; Harvard University Extension Monograph, Puritan Press, Hollis, N.H., 2009; $14.95 Reviewed by Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area writer who earned a graduate certificate through Harvard Extension. The old saying, attributed variously to John F. Kennedy and Count Ciano, that success has many fathers might...