Cathy N. Davidson

I can feel the capital letters and italics. Davidson is a person who is entirely sincere about the need to Innovate and Revolutionize and Engage higher education with 21st Century Challenges. She sees big looming problems ahead for colleges, which haven't been substantially reorganized in centuries. However, to meet these problems all she has are good wishes and a handful of anecdotes.

The book begins cannily enough, with the story of a wealthy college graduate unprepared for the tough job show more market following a financial collapse. This isn't some Millennial, rather she begins with Charles Eliot, a young man who in the wake of the Panic of 1857 would seek to reform higher education as a long-serving president of Harvard, essentially inventing the modern university of departments, majors, standardized testing, and courses designed to filter unprepared students. Her history of the university basically ends with the Industrial Revolution, with only cursory overviews of the research revolution and academic-military-industrial complex of the Cold War, the university as a center of resistance during Vietnam, and pretty much anything that's happened since 1980s, aside from austerity driven budget cuts.

Davidson decries higher education as it exists today, a system that burdens students with debt and has a shockingly high amount of failure, one that serves to insulate the 1% rather than drive an engine of economic mobility. She's right that the conventional set of assignments; tutorial driven problem sets, content-recitation multiple choice questions, and essays to be read only by the instructor. She's right to note that the increasing adjunctification means that the most youngest and most connected teachers have little incentive to rock the boat.

But beyond that? She points to some stuff that her CUNY school as done to improve graduation rates from an abysmal ~10% to a merely mediocre ~50%. And she points to innovative units at Kansas State, ASU, and Georgetown as new models. But ultimately it's just a reiteration of "we need flexible and engaging curricula", while glossing over the fact that real learning is often hard. Incorporating new modes of thinking, new facts, new skills, into your personal repertoire is one of the hardest things imaginable. I strongly believe that the best classes don't require any sort of exotic standards. Can you read pdfs? Do you have someone to talk about them with? Do you have something to write with? Okay, let's go. If you're willing to do the work. Enthusiasm is no substitute for effort. Knowledge is cumulative, and without an approach that balances the "why" and the "how", you either get appliers who know how to find an answer without understanding what it means, or people who invent the universe from first principles to bake an apple pie.

There are opportunities for solid, data driven work in this space. I recommend Arum and Roska's Academically Adrift for having both a better thesis, and better evidence. show less

Davidson begins with a fascinating premise. What if we seriously considered the ways in which we think, especially the ways in which we selectively pay attention to and ignore the world around us, and then formed our educational and workplace environments around our brains, rather than trying to hammer our polygonal personalities into round holes?

It's an idea so simple you'll be shocked you didn't have it. Anybody who's in school or the workplace will tell that something is rotten in the show more state of Denmark, and as Davidson reveals, our standardized test obsessed education system is the historical legacy of a system designed to take farm kids and immigrants and get them ready for assembly line industrial jobs. The modern office complex, with cubicles and corner offices and HR departments, is the white collar equivalent. The problem is that standardized education is pointless and alienating, it lacks rigor, relevance, and relationships, and assembly line careers are as dead as the Edsel. Rather, the future is collaborative and creative. Videogames and internet culture are far better models for productive endeavors than the old top-heavy bureaucracies.

Davidson's exploration of education, and her own experiences as a professor at Duke teaching radically new classes is very well done. Unlike certain people (Jane McGonigal *cough* *cough*) she isn't drinking her own kool-aid. The periphrial material, on the science of attention and on new business models, is less inspiring, more in the genre of 'superficial TED-talks a la Malcolm Gladwell and Howard Rheingold' (why isn't that a real genre yet?) But the central message of the book, that standardized tests measure only what they measure, and not anything externally worthwhile, is something that should be hammered into the heads of every politician, educator, and parent on the planet. Your kids know what's up, why don't know? show less

This book makes a strong case for collaboration and diversity if you want to see a big picture. I've seen this to be true in both work and social situations. Some things I’m thinking about as a result of reading it:
• Sometimes “pilot” can be just a label you give a project when you want a soft launch—might be better to leave expectations more open so that you won’t overlook unanticipated findings?
• She has a “strengths based” approach to a happy life, which I agree with. show more But I wonder if specializing too early, saying “I’m not good at that, interested in that” might cut off options later? Don't most jobs, relationships require that you be out of your comfort zone some of the time?
• Everyone needs to think "how can I jolt myself out of my routines so that I might see other options, areas for growth based on new technologies and opportunities?"
• Many of her examples of good environments for learning and working seem to come down to having truly engaged teachers and bosses—the exact techniques may matter less than just having someone thinking, aware, trying?
• It's a hopeful idea that if you think you are good at something you may actually be better at it than if you don’t. Believing clichés and excuses about getting older actually could make them come true?

Quotes:
• “When you think of learning as something external to yourself, learning becomes a levy—an assessment, not an asset. The assessment no longer matters after the schooling stops. The asset is a resource one draws on for a lifetime. “
• "If there is any word that defines the twentieth century, it might be normative: a defining and enforcing of standards of what counts as correct." show less

Overall this was an interesting and insightful book, just one that I had a few issues with.
Firstly there is the fact it is rather dated, but that is to be expected. In much of the book this was not a problem because as a memoir much of what she is talking about are universals such as identity, friendships and a sense of place. But whole sections - such as the one where she travels with her husband to Paris and all the other tourists seem to be Japanese - are no longer the case.

Secondly - a show more lot of the personal, non-Japanese parts are not nearly as interesting. Often these would slip in to lists of names of family member. "Bob and Jane, and my brother-in-law Tom, and his wife were there, along with our friend Harry and his wife, and ..." (Not a direct quote BTW). I think the author fell in to the trap many memoirists do of thinking the big events in their life will feel just as important to their readers when it is not the case. Or that they needed to list everyone who turned up to set the scene.

Finally - I did find the fact that in many cases she wrote disparagingly about the 'gaijin' who took the whole 'Japanese culture' thing too seriously - wouldn't mix with other foreigners, tried to be Japanese or at least took traditional culture a little too seriously - a bit hypocritical. This is a woman who built a faux-traditional Japanese house that even her friends say is more Japanese than Japan.

All that said - there are still some great insights in this book, both about Japan and about living a cross-cultural life, both the good and bad. Many 'I lived in Japan for awhile and got a book deal out of it' books have come along since this one, and not that many of them are as well thought out or go as deep as this one does. show less