Book List

Jodi Kantor’s groundbreaking reporting has toppled media magnates, sparked reform worldwide, and foretold many of the unsettling changes we see in the workplace today. But before all of this, Kantor was kicked off her college newspaper. Society expects perfection, but Kantor knows those first professional steps are often rocky. She also knows that young people are facing new and frightening terrain, with political upheaval, skyrocketing costs of living, and the unknowns of AI.
 
Kantor casts aside platitudes and false hope to offer tangible help. Work is how we spend much of our time. It’s our engine of progress: how cancer therapies are invented, political campaigns won, thrilling art created and matched with an audience. Instead of letting cynicism take over, Kantor identifies two principles to help young people discover their life’s work: craft and need. By pairing the two, they can navigate tough, sensitive choices: how to think about money. How much risk to take on. When to buck what others are saying.

In these days of an ever-expanding internet, generative AI, and term paper mills, students may find it too easy and tempting to cheat, and teachers may think they can’t keep up. What’s needed, and what Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger offer in this timely book, is a new approach—one that works with the realities of the twenty-first century, not just to protect academic integrity but also to maximize opportunities for students to learn.

Bertram Gallant and Rettinger provide practical suggestions to help faculty revise the conversation around integrity, refocus classes and students on learning, reconsider the structure and goals of assessment, and generally reframe our response to cheating. At the core of this strategy is a call for teachers, academic staff, institutional leaders, and administrators to rethink how we “show up” for students, and to reinforce and fully support quality teaching, learning, and assessment. With its evidentiary basis and its useful tips for instructors across disciplines, levels of experience, and modes of instruction, this book offers a much-needed chance to pause, rethink our purpose, and refocus on what matters—creating classes that center human interactions that foster the personal and professional growth of our students.

What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities.

Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career―he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college.

Author Presentation:
March 16 | 7:30 p.m.

Val. A Browning Center | Austad Auditorium
Free and Open to the Public | RSVP Here

If there is one sector of society that should be cultivating deep thought in itself and others, it is academia. Yet the corporatisation of the contemporary university has sped up the clock, demanding increased speed and efficiency from faculty regardless of the consequences for education and scholarship.

Focusing on the individual faculty member and his or her own professional practice, Berg and Seeber present both an analysis of the culture of speed in the academy and ways of alleviating stress while improving teaching, research, and collegiality. The Slow Professor will be a must-read for anyone in academia concerned about the frantic pace of contemporary university life.

Topics include:

  •  keeping students motivated and engaged, especially with online learning
  •  helping students remember information long-term, so it isn't immediately forgotten after a test
  •  how to teach inclusively in a diverse classroom where students have a wide range of abilities

Drawing on research findings as well as the authors' combined decades of experience in the classroom, Uncommon Sense Teaching equips readers with the tools to enhance their teaching, whether they're seasoned professionals or parents trying to offer extra support for their children's education.

A great read for General Education instructors!

Unlike in previous eras of war, relatively few Americans have had to do any real grappling with the endless, invisible conflicts of the post-9/11 world; in fact, increasingly few people are even aware they are still going on. It is as if these wars are a dark star with a strong gravitational force that draws a relatively small number of soldiers and their families into its orbit while remaining inconspicuous to most other Americans. In the meantime, the consequences of American military action abroad may be out of sight and out of mind, but they are very real indeed.
 
This chasm between the military and the civilian in American life, and the moral blind spot it has created, is one of the great themes of Uncertain Ground, Phil Klay’s powerful series of reckonings with some of our country’s thorniest concerns, written in essay form over the past ten years. In the name of what do we ask young Americans to kill, and to die? In the name of what does this country hang together? As we see at every turn in these pages, those two questions have a great deal to do with each another, and how we answer them will go a long way toward deciding where our troubled country goes from here.

Author Presentation:
Oct. 8 | 7:30 p.m.
Shepherd Union Building Ballroom

Free and Open to the Public | RSVP Here

Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world.

Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn. And his secrets will come to light.

Author Presentation:
March 16 | 7:30 p.m.Val. A Browning Center | Austad Auditorium
Free and Open to the Public | RSVP Here

One spring morning, a stranger named Theo arrives in the small Southern city of Golden. He doesn’t explain much about where he came from or why he’s there—but when he visits the local coffeehouse, where pencil portraits of the people of Golden hang on the walls, he begins purchasing them, one at a time, and giving each portrait to the person depicted. In exchange, he asks only for the person’s story. And so portrait by portrait, person by person, secrets are revealed, regrets are shared, and ordinary lives are profoundly altered.