A skillfully argued study of higher education.
A former Harvard president examines the moral and political criticisms leveled against elite universities.
Economic inequality in American society permeates its systems of higher education. In his latest book, following The Struggle To Reform Our Colleges, Bok examines the challenges facing these elite institutions through critiques made by the left and right. Liberals have decried practices such as legacy admissions (which favor applicants from wealthy families) and investing in companies that perpetuate “evils and injustices.” The author suggests that while legacy admissions might offer “modest financial gains” for the institutions, the practice is also at odds with “the more important public purposes that our leading colleges and universities ought to serve.” On other issues, such as investing in problematic companies, the ethics become murky. Divestment affects everything from faculty salaries to student aid. A moral compromise, like the one Bok tried to achieve by offering scholarships to Black South African students, tries to balance all factors, though with admitted difficulty. Where liberals tend to focus on social issues, conservatives focus on what they see as attacks on personal freedoms—for example, what they perceive as liberal indoctrination of students by leftist professors and a concomitant loss of free speech. While empirical evidence suggests the professoriate tends to attract more liberals, Bok suggests that elite colleges and universities can bring faculties into greater political balance by hiring professors based on real-world credentials, such as conservative representatives and staffers. At the same time, while diversity is the key to a thriving university, it can also give rise to incidents of bigoted speech, which Bok believes should be addressed through reassurances offered to offended students and reasoned conversations with perpetrators. In this evenhanded and pragmatic text, Bok presents an all-too-rare moderate perspective on a system as ravaged by extremes as the society it serves.
A skillfully argued study of higher education.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780300273601
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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