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Recent News

• With the new school year right around the corner, Inside Higher Ed took a close look at Lee Cuba et al.’s Practice for Life: Making Decisions in College.
• Terry Kleeman spoke with the New York Times blog Sinosphere about Celestial Masters: History and Ritual in Early Daoist Communities and how Taoism provided an alternative political model to Confucian imperial order—such that today’s Communist government tries to control its practice.
• A piece on the Anthropocene at the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone explored Timothy Morton’s argument, developed in The Ecological Thought, that the modern environmental movement is “infused with a sense of mourning and melancholia.”
• The Harvard Gazette featured the forthcoming Dumbarton Oaks volume The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, which illustrates how eighteenth-century botany laid the groundwork for “big science” and “big business.”

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August 11: Why Read yet Another Book on Higher Education?

Practice for Life: Making Decisions in College begins with the observation that college doesn’t just start one day during orientation week and then end ceremonially some years later. Instead, argue authors Lee Cuba, Nancy Jennings, Suzanne Lovett, and Joseph Swingle, college is “a liminal space and place in which students make lots of decisions that serve as practice for the many more they will make as older adults.” The case they make for the enduring value of liberal education is novel and unconventional, but—as they acknowledge early on—their book enters a not-uncrowded space. So why read yet another book on higher education? In the brief excerpt below, they address the…