At times we need to know that the Lord is a God of justice. When slumbering giants of injustice emerge in the earth, we need to know that there is a God of power who can cut them down like the grass and leave them withering like the Greek herb. When our most tireless efforts fail to stop the surging sweep of oppression, we need to know that in this universe is a God whose matchless strength is a fit contrast to the sordid weakness of man. But there are also times when we need to know that God possesses love and mercy. When we are staggered by the chilly winds of adversity and battered by the raging storms of disappointment and when through our folly and sin we stray into some destructive country and are frustrated because of a strange feeling of homesickness, we need to know that there is Someone who loves us, cares for us, understands us, and will give us another chance. When days grow dark and nights grow dreary, we can be thankful that our God combines in his nature a creative synthesis of love and justice that will lead us through life’s dark valleys and into sunlit pathways of hope and fulfillment.

Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart” in Strength to Love

Earlier this week, The Wall Street Journal ran a special section on the future of cities, which included a number of mildly interesting pieces. The best two were about walkability and natural disasters. Tucked right in the middle, though, was a half-page piece titled “Pizza Delivery Gears Up for a Driverless Era.” It seems smart cities and driverless cars are going to improve pizza delivery, and testing for that is already underway.

I’ve got nothing against pizza, and if I order it, I’d like it to arrive hot. So in one sense better pizza delivery is… ok.

In another sense, there’s a very real risk that better pizza delivery is about the best thing we get from these technologies. There’s a real risk, as I wrote elsewhere a few years ago, that new technologies will give us “more of the same—not the city of tomorrow but the city of yesterday with the sensors of tomorrow. In the end, Big Data is less likely to deliver on utopian promises and more likely just to help deliver our pizza faster.” Featuring a piece on pizza delivery in the WSJ Future of Cities special may foreshadow exactly that.

(Cf. Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash)

From my review of Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education in this summer’s issue of The Hedgehog Review.

Orwellian is an epithet with many meanings, all of them negative. It can refer to doublespeak, the use of pretentious diction, distortion, evasive speech, intentional ambiguity, and euphemism meant to make an unpleasant truth sound more palatable. It can describe forces that promote or require conformity. And finally, there are those who take Orwellian to refer to generally dystopian social and political conditions.

But when Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, says that he loves education too much to accept the “Orwellian substitute” that is our education system in the United States, there’s no need to figure out how he means it: He clearly has all three definitions in mind. To Caplan, “education,” and especially “higher education,” has become a euphemism for base credentialism that promotes conformity and results in profligate spending that undermines investments of time and money in worthier goods.

Lest prospective students and their parents head for the doors before finishing this review, it’s not that education doesn’t pay. On an annual basis, the average college graduate earns 73 percent more than the average high school graduate; people with at least a master’s degree earn three times the income of a high school dropout. Unlike the concerns of parents and prospective students, however, Caplan’s question is not whether employers pay handsomely enough to make education adequately rewarding for individuals. Rather, Caplan is interested in the social costs and benefits of education. He wants to know whether our massive public expenditures in favor of education—from state funding of public universities to federal provision of grants and subsidized loans—can be justified.

More here.

Last week, I posted my response to students who ask me how they should continue to read after graduation. I’m following that up with another post about reading.

I’ve mentioned before that every summer I read at least one book on writing/publishing, at least one book on teaching, and at least one book on higher education. Of course I do other reading, too — this summer, I plan to read quite a bit of Lorrie Moore’s work, for example — but my practice is to engage these three themes with regularity and intentionality.

Before I get to that summer reading list, I have two brief comments on last week’s post. (Skip ahead if you just want to get straight to books I’ve chosen for this summer.)

Two comments on my cover-to-cover reading comments from last week

Last week, I wrote:

• “Read some things cover to cover.” For me, choosing to read a few publications cover to cover is a discipline that keeps me from picking the topics in which I already have interest, the perspectives that mach my own, the titles or headlines that intrigue me, or the authors that I already know and trust. My cover-to-cover reads are The Chronicle of Higher Education, Comment,  and The Hedgehog Review. [INSERT THE LAMENT FOR BOOKS & CULTURE AGAIN HERE.] For years, I’ve tried to cut down the amount of news and commentary that comes to me via social media. This semester, in order to get news slower, I specifically chose to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal in print — I read the front section cover to cover just about every day and the review section every week. (I also subscribe to the New York Times, but not in print (the educator discount isn’t as steep as it is for the WSJ), so I don’t read it cover to cover, exactly, and I try to stay away from the day’s breaking news.) Of course, my cover-to-cover reads are not my only reads. I read from a lot of other sources and some of it is crowdsourced or curated by who I follow on social media, but I think I’m in a better position to filter and interpret the reading that comes to me through those algorithmically determined and bubble-icious channels if I’m disciplined about regularly reading other sources.

First, I want to clarify that a lot of my reading still comes to me through social media. While I’m trying to avoid getting the day’s breaking news and hot takes that way, I still regularly encounter recommended commentary, essays, books, and more. I follow/friend a really diverse group of good readers, and I’m grateful that they find and post — and write! — good material. Moreover, I often crowdsource book recommendations. What I want to avoid is getting the news from my social media feeds.

Second, as soon as I posted this, I felt like something about my cover-to-cover reads was not quite right. Over the past few years, it hadn’t changed much. Books & Culture was discontinued [WORTH INSERTING THE LAMENT FOR BOOKS & CULTURE AGAIN] and I had added The Wall Street Journal, but something was missing. While in the past few years I have felt more keenly than ever the need to read and listen to Christians of color — and to allow their conversations to direct some of my attention — my cover-to-cover list didn’t reflect that. So I’ve asked some friends for recommendations about what I might add. I haven’t quite settled on anything yet, but Faithfully Magazine is one I’ll check out. If you’re reading this and want to suggest something, feel free to tweet the recommendation my way.

Now, my summer reading

Here are this summer’s choices in the categories of writing/publishing, teaching, and higher education (and a bonus category):

Writing/publishing

In this category, I’ll be reading What Editors Do: The Craft, Art, and Business of Book Editing. Over the years, I’ve read a number of books on editing, specifically. I think they’re helpful to me as I write, they demystify a key part of the publishing process, and, well, they may or may not be part of my strategy for writing procrastination.

Teaching

In this category, I’ll be reading On Christian Teaching: Practicing Faith in the Classroom, by David Smith. Smith may be the leading thinker on how integration of faith and learning happens in the classroom. I had the privilege of spending the first half of this week in a seminar/workshop that he led on the topic, and I look forward to diving into his latest book.

Higher Education

This summer, I’m choosing a few extra books (five in total) in this category. (I’m also coordinating a Wheaton faculty summer reading group on the topic, but we won’t be reading all of these.) Included below are books I’ll read this summer, but also a few on which I cheated and got a head start. I meant to include them in summer reading, but couldn’t resist and got to them in late spring.

I’ve recently finished Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. It’s fascinating, worthwhile, and mildly depressing. Tl;dr version: Past models of higher ed demand have been too crude. The author, a labor economist at Carleton, develops a new, more sophisticated, and more granular model that accounts for variables like parents’ educational attainment and geography. The model suggests that our present slow decline in demand for higher education will be followed by a sharp but short-lived increase in the mid-2020s, which will be followed by a very sharp and uneven decline from 2026 on. Two-year schools and schools outside the top 100 in their categories will be hardest hit. Elite schools (top 50 in their categories) will actually see increasing demand. That will leave schools between 50 and 100, which will face a substantial decrease in demand, competing to fill their classrooms and dorms with the overflow from the top 50. So, my takeaway: if you’re in that 50-100 range, fight to stay near that top of that, get to the top of some niche, strengthen recruitment where demand will grow most, and develop programs and aid packages that make you a student’s top choice in their second tier.

I’ve also recently finished reading The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Caplan. This book has been getting a lot of press lately (in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets). If you want my take, read the summer issue of The Hedgehog Review, in which I review it. Preview: Caplan is a clever writer and the book is a fun read. An Orwellian read, but a fun read.

In addition to those two, I’ll also read American Academic Cultures: A History of Higher Education, The Seminarian: Martin Luther King, Jr. Comes of Age (which I’m counting as a higher ed book), and Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education.

Evangelicalism (bonus category)

This summer, I’ve decided to do some remedial reading on evangelicalism. While I’ve read a lot around the topic (e.g., evangelicals and higher education, evangelicals and the environment, evangelicals and race), I haven’t read as much as one might expect on the topic. That’s not to say that I’ve read nothing, but current conversations about the state of evangelicalism often leave me wishing I had given the topic more attention earlier. After crowdsourcing an incredible (and incredibly long) list of readings, I’ve chosen to read the following this summer:

I’ll start with the introduction to Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism and all of Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism. (These two are the first texts in another reading group I’m co-organizing this summer.)

After those, I’ll be reading Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, and Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith.

We’ll see what’s next after reading all of that — my master list now includes several dozen books that have been recommended by friends. At some point, I may write a bit about what I think I’ve learned.

This is commencement weekend at Wheaton College. After a week of final exams, our graduating seniors will finally walk across the stage shake the president’s hand and receive a diploma showing that they’ve earned their college degree. Afterward, they’ll take photos outside, tassel turned to the correct side and folio held open to show off the goods.

If I recall correctly, back when I crossed the same stage, I received a note indicating that I needed to return several books to the library and that I owed substantial fines I had to pay before I could actually receive my diploma — thus, all of the photos afterward were taken with the folio closed. But who could blame me? (The answer to that is, I guess, the library and student accounts, but not, I suppose, anyone reading this post.) After spending multiple semesters as one of the worst students at Wheaton College (which is a story for another day), I had only recently figured out where the library was, and I was newly excited about the books it held. On the one hand, I’m certain I was still a recovering bad student — too lazy and disorganized to find some of the books, much less to return them. On the other hand, I like to think that I was also a bit anxious about whether I’d ever again have a chance to read so widely, alongside so many smart and interested readers, and surrounded by so many excellent resources. Nevertheless, in order to graduate, I had to return (or pay for) the books.

I remember this story every year in late April and early May as graduating seniors ask for my advice about what to read after they graduate or how to find good books when they’re not assigned on a syllabus. (And it strikes me that the very fact our students are asking such questions should play some role in assessment — an “our work here is done” kind of role.) I’d say I got this question from about a dozen students this year, with a few office hours appointments that turned out to have been made just to ask it. So here are some of my answers:

• “Keep some great readers among your friends.” That was basically the answer I gave to a student who asked in general terms about how to find great books, but also specifically asked how I came across Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, a novel I assigned for a section of my capstone course addressing the theme of vocation, and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, another novel which I assigned as the last reading in my course on Environmental Politics. The first had been recommended to me by my (late) friend Brett Foster, whose reading recommendations I am sure never to exhaust. The second was assigned after I read a review of Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and asked my friend Tiffany Kriner whether I should be reading Ward. She said, yes, and not only yes, but that some interesting eco-critical work had been done on Salvage the Bones, and I might consider it for my Environmental Politics class.
• I had come across the Ward review in The New Yorker, which leads me to the second piece of advice that I handed down: “Read some periodicals that take books seriously.” [INSERT LAMENT FOR BOOKS & CULTURE HERE]
• “Read some things cover to cover.” For me, choosing to read a few publications cover to cover is a discipline that keeps me from picking the topics in which I already have interest, the perspectives that mach my own, the titles or headlines that intrigue me, or the authors that I already know and trust. My cover-to-cover reads are The Chronicle of Higher Education, Comment,  and The Hedgehog Review. [INSERT THE LAMENT FOR BOOKS & CULTURE AGAIN HERE.] For years, I’ve tried to cut down the amount of news and commentary that comes to me via social media. This semester, in order to get news slower, I specifically chose to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal in print — I read the front section cover to cover just about every day and the review section every week. (I also subscribe to the New York Times, but not in print (the educator discount isn’t as steep as it is for the WSJ), so I don’t read it cover to cover, exactly, and I try to stay away from the day’s breaking news.) Of course, my cover-to-cover reads are not my only reads. I read from a lot of other sources and some of it is crowdsourced or curated by who I follow on social media, but I think I’m in a better position to filter and interpret the reading that comes to me through those algorithmically determined and bubble-icious channels if I’m disciplined about regularly reading other sources.

Right now, I’m off to commencement ceremonies (faculty are gathering in the library, where perhaps I should check in to be sure I’ve actually paid all my fines!). For some of our students, once they cross that stage, there are no more syllabi, no more assigned readings. For others who may be off to graduate school there are plenty of assigned readings, though some may miss the breadth of their liberal arts education. Either way, the good news is that there’s plenty of good reading to do… even if you’ve returned all your books to the library so that you can show off your diploma.