My Freshman Year: What A Professor Learned by Becoming a Student / by Rebekah Nathan

As an anthropology professor at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest, Rebekah Nathan wanted to find out why so many of the faculty and students simply failed to understand one another. In an effort to research the issue, she decided to take a more hands-on approach to understanding the behavior of her students and promptly re-enrolled as an undergraduate. Getting (back) into school wasn't actually that hard. Professor Nathan was able to finagle a situation in which the administration of a local state school ("AnyU") allowed her to follow through on her little experiment. Though she admits the somewhat disorienting feeling of being a 50-year-old freshman, Nathan concedes that it was probably the best way to observe the relationship between today's college students and their academic work. And while the study is sociological in nature focusing on the average students lifestyle as well as their study habits, there's a more substantial portion of the content geared toward the academic side of things. Above all the author just wanted to know why her students seemed so disengaged from the world of intellectual pursuit of ideas as opposed to studying merely for a grade. Why have so many of tomorrow's leaders been transitioned to the mindset that college is yet another facet in the consumerism? Why are things like cheating, not reading the required material and skipping assignments altogether viewed as perfectly acceptable? Why is plagiarizing someone else's work in favor of producing your own no longer such a big deal?

My Freshman Year is, at the very least, an honest attempt to investigate and at least acquire some understanding on the state of higher education, and it succeeds in examining an outsider's assimilation into a particular social group. But it's far from foolproof. You have to actually read the book to realize it's not another pop culture critique by a savvy journalist wanting to investigate the more interesting social behavior of transitioning adolescents. The experiment succeeds, but only to a point. Nathan's resulting conclusion about today's college kids--"that, above all, college is about positioning yourself for a good job and an affluent future"--seems a bit inconclusive as she does little more than surmise on the partial dissolution of academia (the pursuit of knowledge) and its inability to adapt to contemporary society. She doesn't really get that of the majority of the individuals she's associated with, most are preconditioned to follow the same merit-oriented mindset in college ("careerism") which they were indoctrinated with during their more formative education years. The independent, scholarly "life of the mind", while theoretically still viable, has for better or worse been superseded by more pragmatic ideals, ones which aren't necessarily exclusive to the collegiate microcosm. (371.198 NATHAN)

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother / by Amy Chua

"This is a story about a mother, two daughters, and two dogs. This was supposed to be a story of how Chinese parents are better at raising kids than Western ones. But instead, it’s about a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory, and how I was humbled by a thirteen-year-old.” (cover)

The daughter of first generation Chinese immigrants, Amy Chua's childhood was instilled with the virtue of hard work, the value of academic excellence and the efficacy of superior performance achieved through strict attention-to-detail and time-intensive practice. It paid off. She excelled in school enough to get into Harvard where she also excelled, graduating magna cum laude in Economics and again cum laude from Harvard Law School. Currently she's a Yale professor and has a resume which includes a former professorship at Duke and an executive editor position for the Harvard Law Review.

Not without controversy, her parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, contrasting the Chinese way of child-rearing and the Western/American approach, probes, among other things, the reason why Asian children do better in school than Americans. Chua states, more than once, that her station and success in life is owed to the strict, uncompromising ideology which her parents adhered to during her upbringing; subsequently, she muses that it's no coincidence that Asian children do better in school than their Western counterparts. Americans are too concerned with self-worth and positive feedback, a system depriving children of the persistence needed to strive toward success. This westernized way of rewarding marginal achievements and too readily accepting failure  a viewpoint inevitably slanted toward sentimentality and self-esteem building, can't compete with the Chinese method more associated with punishing ignorance and extracting perfection, often through seemingly cruel and excoriating maneuvers. Additionally, by placing emphasis on a child's success in things like sports or drama, American parents are actually discouraging hard work in other more academically-oriented areas. 

But this book's not really about grades or test scores. Nor is it a hard-edged, this-is-the-right-way-to-do-things diatribe stressing personal preference or cultural difference. With candid exposition and good dose of familiar humor, it's more about Chua's interaction with her two daughters, how over the years she's imputed to them the same rigid structure her own childhood entailed and how the results have played out. No birthday parties, no sleepovers, no sports, no TV, no portable media devices, no being in school plays, no complaining about not being able to do/have said things, etc. pretty much grasps the gist of the way things work in the Chua's household. Failure to make not only good grades, but perfect grades, can and will result in removal and/or destruction of stuffed animals, dolls or toys. The same goes for not getting a musical solo piece exactly right within a condensed time window. Chua's narrative, strict stipulations and all, isn't as tyrannical as it may seem. Nor is the book a direct challenge to other, less aggressive parenting methods. In Chua's family, as in all cultures and generations, there are conflicts inherent in every parent-child relationship, problems which often have no solution, and stubborness at both ends which tends to escalate tension. There's also love, joy and genuinely heartfelt moments between mother and daughter(s), something making this book a worthwhile read. (B CHUA)

Lost In The Meritocracy: The Undereducation of An Overachiever / by Walter Kirn

"Percentile is destiny in America" (p. 5)

Like a lot of people Walter Kirn once esteemed the American higher education system as the pinnacle of scholarship. As a youth in rural Minnesota he ambitiously climbed his way up the ladder of honors classes, standardized tests and class rankings to a slot at an Ivy League school, Princeton to be exact. Originally a place his preconceptions had led him to believe to be a temple of elevated learning where students eagerly engaged a life of the mind, Princeton he soon discovered was a frighteningly different place altogether where social climbing, pedigree, brown-nosing and recreational drug use were the norm and the concept of scholarship had more to do with CV padding than learning and acquiring knowledge. In his literature classes, for example, Walter discovered that the object was not to analyze the structural content of course texts as much as it was to mirror the instructor's critical theories and pontificate on his or her own personalized opinions of said texts within the designated coursework--actual reading of the books was never officially required.
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It wasn't as if ambition or intellectual application was lost, rather Kirn found that it had been replaced by a quasi-scholastic system in which grade-grubbing and institutional meritocracy had usurped the pursuit of truth as the chief objectives within higher education. Gradually Kirn learned to play the game as well. He assimilated himself into the realm of the right classes, preferred curriculum and, of course, the appropriate peers. Kirn, it turns out, "learned a lot"; just not quite in the field(s) he'd originally thought he would. His recollections within this memoir, funny and satirical throughout, ring true at every turn. It may not qualify as an official indictment of America's higher education system, but does suggest every so slyly that the real higher education of today's college bound has little to nothing to do with indoctrinating oneself on the knowledge of the world and everything to do with accreditation for personally specialized reasons of self-promotion. Conversely, pursuing and meriting a degree, especially one from the elite realms of higher learning, has as much to do with educating oneself on the right ways going about it than with simply appropriating a chosen field of study and applying yourself to its fundamental precepts. (B KIRN)

Straight Man / by Richard Russo

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Richard Russo won a 2001 Pulitzer for his novel Empire Falls, which examines the dismal lives of people in a small Maine town. The author of over 10 mainstream novels, he's recently broken into Hollywood as screenplay author and script editor for the films Keeping Mum, Ice Harvest and 2007's Bridge of Sighs, based on his novel of the same name. Straight Man takes an introspectively humorous look at Academic life following an acting English department head at a small college through a particularly turbulent period of the semester.
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Professor William Henry Devereaux, Jr.--"Hank"--might be stuck as a tenured writing teacher at remote liberal arts college, but you don't have to tell him. He's well-aware of it. At the moment however, any midlife career angst he does feel is meshed against equally pressing issues like budget cuts forecasting doom for the already underfunded English department, lingering suspicions that his wife may be having an affair, unruly students, quibbling faculty and one particularly vital bodily (dys)function causing him indescribable pain. When a querulous incident involving a halloween mask, a live duck and a TV news camera makes Hank a 48 hour local celebrity, it's all he can do to maintain his composure and elicit control as acting head of the department.

Despite its somewhat misleading title, Straight Man--intended to connote a straight-forward individual in the company of fakers--is an amusing, jocular novel on the paradoxical absurdities of Academic life. Almost a Catch-22 styled plot with its abundance of oddball characters, multiple subplots and unseemly circumstances accepted as mere routine encounters, it's the truth conveyed within the sardonic narrative that readers relate to most. Hank's colorful running commentary about his various personal and institutional vexations lends American middle-age its due; and while you kind of sense that everything will turn out OK, that pitted feeling of life restrained by obligations is clearly identified. Though at times a bit rambling, the book is lightearted and entertaining and will connect with readers well-associated with the characteristics of a midlife crisis.