So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed
Jon Ronson. Riverhead, $27.95 (304p) ISBN
978-1-59448-713-2
Bestselling author Ronson (The
Psychopath Test) ruminates on high-profile
shaming in the social-media age in this
witty work. He interviews disgraced pop-science author Jonah Lehrer, fresh off a
hellish apology tour, and the remorseful
journalist who outed Lehrer as a plagiarist.
PR executive Justine Sacco reflects on her
own life, left in ruins after a single ill-con-ceived tweet, and elsewhere Ronson
recounts how an inappropriate comment
at a tech convention devolved into bedlam,
with online threats of rape and death. For
historical perspective, Ronson goes into
19th-century stockades, public whippings, and the theory of “group madness”
popularized by Gustave LeBon, inspiration for the controversial Stanford Prison
Experiments, in which ordinary students
were transformed into sadistic guards.
Ronson’s explorations also take him to an
S&M sex club, a ridiculous “
shame-eradi-cation workshop,” and a therapy program
for incarcerated women run by former
New Jersey governor James McGreevey.
Ronson is self-reflective and honest about
his own complicity in the cultural piling-on he observes, recalling a spite-fueled
campaign he orchestrated via Twitter
against a journalist. Clever and thought-provoking, this book has the potential to
open an important dialogue about faux
moral posturing online and its potentially
disastrous consequences. Agent: Natasha
Fairweather, United Agents. (Mar.)
Syria:
A History of the Last Hundred Years
John McHugo. New Press (Perseus, dist.),
$26.95 (304p) ISBN 978-1-62097-045-4
Syria, lacking natural defenses and
located at the crossroads of three continents,
has always been susceptible to foreign
interference. McHugo (A Concise History of
the Arabs), an international lawyer and
Arabist, untangles the fraying threads of
Syria’s fragile polity and tracks the global
fault lines that make the current civil war
arguably “the last proxy conflict of the
Cold War.” Proceeding briskly from the
fall of the Ottoman Empire to the present-day chaos, he sketches how Syria’s first,
hopeful experiments with democracy
inexorably gave way to military domi-
The End of College:
Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
Kevin Carey. Riverhead, $27.95 (288p) ISBN 978-1-59463-205-1
Education-policy advisor Carey heralds the coming annihilation of the “hybrid
university,” the “deeply flawed” land-grant/research/liberal arts dinosaur respon-
sible for “mediocre learning, high dropout rates, and skyrocketing tuition.”
Carey turns his focused and attentive analysis to new education
technologies that take into account real principles of learning
science. With frequent excursions into personal and institu-
tional histories, Carey describes ambitious Silicon Valley
ventures such as the Minerva Project, Dev Bootcamp, Udacity,
and Coursera as catalysts that, he hopes, will burn down the
archaic “cathedrals of learning” and allow the “University of
Everywhere” to rise from the ashes. Carey doesn’t go into detail
on how the assortment of startups and independently funded
ventures will coalesce into an entity that will allow millions of students to get
high-quality education, online, for free, but he does address how the creation of
a shared and dependable credential to replace the diploma poses a ticklish ques-
tion. Despite his insistence that college professors are lousy teachers, Carey’s own
experience with MIT’s EdX program and the innovations he describes taking
place at Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and elsewhere suggest that some in
“traditional academia” are eager to provide individual learners “exactly what
they need.” Though filled with engaging profiles, insightful history, thorough
detail, and grandiloquent calls for a “better, higher learning,” Carey’s picture of
the real diversity of postsecondary education in the U.S.—and his vision for what
should replace it—is incomplete. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Agency. (Mar.)
★ College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education
Ryan Craig. Palgrave Macmillan, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-1-137-27969-9
Combining a flair for numbers with a grasp of the bigger picture, venture
capitalist and educational entrepreneur Craig spells out the threats facing
higher education in America, among them crises of affordability and gover-
nance, “the effects of technological disruption and globalization,” and “abso-
lutely no outcome data related to student learning.” With
sportive analogies to pop culture and his
own college pranks at Yale University, Craig outlines what
institutions can do to position themselves for “the Great
Unbundling,” in which students pay for education rather than
for faculty research, fancy buildings, and college athletics.
Craig’s strategic vision is strictly a business model, requiring
institutions to compete for consumers, market their brand, and
successfully
distribute their products worldwide, but his advice makes sound economic
sense: to survive, he argues, institutions need to reprioritize “knowledge
creation and dissemination” and provide a good return on investment by
cultivating in students the cognitive, self-management, and “creative and
critical thinking skills that employers demand.” His suggestions, he admits,
take “a ton work,” but his discussion of the existing data, federal policy, and
market trends address “clear social [and] economic needs.” Savvy, sharp, and
ultimately optimistic, Craig’s book offers an ambitious blueprint that adminis-
trators would be wise to heed. Agent: Carole Mann, Carole Mann Agency. (Mar.)
Hacking Higher Ed. ▲
Two new books tackle the future of higher education.
