Washburn University Books

Jennifer Washburn's investigation inside U.S. universities is disturbing. She paints a portrait of colleges that have forgotten their primary mission and societal role. That is upsetting enough for readers who cherish fond memories of free-thinking college days, but its implications reach far wider. She cites restraints on free inquiry and free speech that should alarm civil libertarians. Her reports of far-reaching attempts to generate profit through patents and technology transfers should concern businesspeople. The most perturbing element of Washburn's analysis covers how drug and medical trials have changed, as their control has shifted from the impartial hand of traditional science to the vested authority of pharmaceutical companies. She even implies that anyone using a drug developed in such trials is at risk. The issues in higher education are so sweeping that, at times, Washburn's treatment is more a foreboding sketch than a complete analysis. That aside, We recommend it to anyone interested in a well-articulated, strong point of view about higher education, or anyone who follows the issues involved in having a well-functioning civic society, including quality higher education.

This has to be one of the saddest books I've read in a while. It's beautifully ironic. This book comes along and laments of the conflicts of interests with the marriage of universities and business while I am learning to embrace that I can love to have money.

I graduated from the University of Southern California and had a sense that something was amiss in the university system. Back then, I saw a university that catered strongly to the football program and felt like I was getting the scraps. The football program brought in the money and with the latest successes some immeasurable advertising.

However, there was an uneasy truce of advancing education and earning money. A university gets all excited about a new corporate sponsor giving millions to a department. But what if the corporate sponsor stipulates that the money be spent on research for the advancement of the sponsor's own products? Or that any breakthroughs from the research would be considered the assets of the sponsor's? And what happens when a professor mentoring graduate students is an owner of a private company?

In the former scenario, the research would have a STRONG affinity toward saying something positive about the sponsor's product. What department would say something bad about their sponsor even if research says so? There's statistics that would be some bias. In the second scenario, the spirit of research/education in a university environment is stymied and looks more like competing departments in a business or competing businesses. Instead of open sharing of ideas at the local coffeehouse, students are making fake notes to disguise their research from each other. In the final scenario, we may have a professor who only supports a thesis that supports his stock portfolio.

I recommend the book for anyone who is in the process of higher education or thinking of going in that direction. It could turn your head. There's a whole lot of research and data in this book that began to numb my brain. I give the book 4 stars because it was difficult to read - perhaps more because of the revelation of the corruption of higher education. It will make a lot of you sick.

Jennifer Washburn has written the most important book about the impact of corporate culture on higher education since Thorstein Veblen's 1918 classic,The Higher Learning in America. Over the past quarter-century, Washburn shows, our leading universities have quietly allowed themselves to be transformed into "patent factories" generating income for the campuses and their corporate backers. The ability of faculty to produce basic knowledge has been compromised by the competitiveness, secrecy, and profit-seeking that characterize private sector (as opposed to traditional academic) research. Because they are less lucrative than the patent-generating disciplines, the social sciences and humanities have been downgraded. Emphasis on teaching, which is expensive and unrelated to patentable research, has diminished. Conflict of interest has run rampant. Washburn devoted the better part of a decade to research for this book, which is a model of investigative journalism. Indeed, I know of no more important study of the American university in print.
John Broesamle
Professor Emeritus of History
California State University, Northridge

A great book! It's a pointed critique of how universities have lost their way by involving themselves too closely with the business world. The author does a great job of weaving interviews, anecdotes, history, and economics together.

It reminds me of Fast Food Nation: with both books I had to stop reading several times along the way--not because I didn't enjoy it, but simply to keep from getting too angry. (A complement to the authors in both cases!) Although I was able to quit eating fast food altogether, I won't be able to give up my relationship with higher ed...

So I can only hope that students, parents, university administrators, scientists, government regulators and business executives read this book--and demand changes.

Over the past twenty years a flash flood of books has appeared which are critical of the intrusion of business models into the University. Washburn's book is striking the same vein - a cynic might sneer that the debate is beginning to have a 'burnt over' look to it. However, Washburn's book is unique in several respects. In the first instance it is very well written, well-paced, and the narrative fairly gallops along. Secondly, the examples of corporate contamination that she focuses on clearly illuminate the ambiguities that the University is prepared to live with, well at least the ambiguities that an Administration will live with. Moreover, Washburn identifies the tension between good old professor X receiving his state salary and good old entrepreneur professor X receiving huge sums of money from his privileged access to the social capital floating in the University environment. There are several very telling quotes from academics who believe it unwise to speak about their research too publicly lest a 'colleague' harness it to his or her own commercial enterprise. Thirdly, Washburn is balanced in her analysis. While acknowledging that corporatism can threaten many traditional values in the University, she is phelgmatic enough to acknowledge that some level of corporatism is both desirable and unavoidable (Roger Geiger in his book 'Knowledge and Money' refers to this nexus as the 'paradox of the marketplace'). The dilemma for Washburn and all who wish to espouse a both/and position on Business and the University, rather than an either/or position, is how to turn a seemingly sensible policy into a set of sensible procedures. Almost all books in this genre grudgingly accept the policy but few have ever laid out procedures to make it credible. Washburn goes some way towards closing the circle here (for instance, her proposal for an ammended Bayh-Dole Act and the setting up of specialist research contact points for industry). In conclusion then, Washburn's book is more grounded in the realities of the political economy than most. This is a debate that won't end soon. Every age has looked to the fruits of knowledge and discovery to oil the wheels of commercial progress. In the past much of this debate was hidden or disdained largely because participation in the University was for the elite - meaning those that had some money in their background. The opening of education and communication in the past thirty years however and the rapid growth of economies due to globalisation has created a new set of arguments to toss into the debate. Washburn's book is part of this new movement. A welcome breadth of fresh air.

Believing the Black community was a seedbed of pro-Japanese treason, this informative book tells of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's shameful but little-known inquisition and racist persecution of African-American journalists during WWII.

Two excellent companion volumes are Benjamin Colby, 'Twas a Famous Victory: Deception and Propaganda in the War with Germany, and Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II.

Although centered around the censorship of the Black Press during World War II, this book covers several other topics. During this delightful read, one will find interesting insight into laws of sedition during World War II; the relation of the FDR administration with the army, the FBI, and the justice department; the treatment of blacks in general during the war, etc. A must for history, legal, and journalism buffs.

A delightful read. This book covers more than just a journalistic view of the Black Press during World War II. Instead, this book provides interesting insight into censorship laws, the Justice Department, the treatment of Blacks in the armed forces, and the FDR administration. A great read for legal scholars, historians, and journalists alike.

I was lucky enough to live in Topeka 4 years where Ms. Davis wrote a column. I loved her then and I love her now.

How often have you read a book and said to yourself, that's exactly the way I have always felt about that, or thought about that? Have you ever wondered if you were the only person in the world who considered an act, an idea, a dream to be impossible?
Davis is (if you will pardon the cliche) "every woman" when she discusses her friends, her children, her fears, her humiliations, her triumphs, her hopes. You will weep with her, and laugh with her. One night, reading in bed, I had to literally cover my mouth so that my laughter would not ring through the house, and wake everyone up. The description of her "big interview" with a local radio station is hilarious. I recommend this book as a gift to friends who appreciate a good sense of humor and who have the gift of being able to laugh at themselves, because that is exactly what you are doing when you read Davis. She is without a doubt the Erma Bombeck of our generation. She picks up where Erma left off....and oh how we needed that!

Yet again the folks at Amazon have bungled matters. The other "review" of this book is in fact a review of (or a puff for) the Penn series of translations of Greek tragedy, not of Euripides' "Selected Fragmentary Plays," a scholarly edition offering Greek texts, English translations, and detailed notes on several of Euripides' fragmentary plays. It should also noted that the book in question is the recently published---and long-awaited---second volume of a work whose first volume appeared in 1995. Eventually, there will be a Loeb Classical Library edition of the major fragments of Euripides, but it is unlikely to replace these volumes of Collard et al., for their very full notes will remain invaluable.

I went to Columbia, with the most prominent 'great books' curriculum still in existence. 25 years later, I'm finding myself re-reading and discussing many of the titles. The Penn Greek Drama series is a handsome library of new translations that give fresh takes on the classics. It's useful to have Euripides on the shelf when you return home from the recent bravura performance by Fiona Shaw as Medea--it settled an argument too on how it 'originally' ended.

As we gaze over the vast edifice of dodecaphonic music this side of the Atlantic we find a number of profound creations, Stefan Wolpe, Ralph Shapey, Donald Martino, Charles Wuorinen, Ezra Simms, and of course Milton Babbitt. There is a premonition, a harbinger which had marked Babbitt's life, being the first American to welcome Arnold Schoenberg as he arrived from exile,escaping the darkest pages of European history with the then popularity of the fascists in Europe and some cults within the USA,as Father Cooglan, and then Senator McCarthy and Roy Cohn's dithyrambic Purges of left minded American workers.
Andrew Mead does an admirable job, tracing the vast diapasonal musical creations of Babbitt.
Mead admirably divides Babbitt's creativity into useful periods, ones marked with a penchant for theoretical discursis,an elan for the pure structural and durational devices his inventive mind had. It all begins with Schoenberg's evolutionary 12 Tone language,which Babbitt had devloped into further functional divisions of the almost Kabballah like power of the number 12. His Composition for Four Instruments, Flute, Clarinet, Violin and Cello was a primary achievement, although rhythmically tthis period was marked by a persistent provincialism of the parameter of rhythm.It wasb't until the Second String Quartet where such tactile parametric freedoms begin to reveal themselves in an effulgence language.. With the Third creative period Mead identifies here the years 1961 to 1980 we impart ourselves in stil greater expansive dimensions. A number of piano solo works distinguish this period, the "Post-Partitions", and a work I deeply admire the rather modest 'Sextets', for Violin and Piano from 1966,and a revistation of the genre in "Joy of more Sextets" from the displaying the hexachordal-like encysted divisions between both contrasting instruments. There the genre,of Violin and Piano,which emanates from the 19th Century Sonata, was truly redefined discovering newer contexts, within the predictable structure of duet. Babbitt had also developed theories which now aimed to consolidate the vagaries of the infinite permutations and combinatorial mixtures of the 12 tones,his More Phonemena was a summation piece. I am still thrilled by the Piano Concerto a work in the Eighties, where now we see a freer utilizsation of some of these theoretical achievements. He still maintained this penchant for discovering differing contexts for predictable musical genres,and interestingly pursued interesting combinations as the various 'Soli e Duettini', as the one for two acoustic guitars.

I have always admired Milton Babbitt's work, not least for the subtle beauties of his often misunderstood music -- misunderstood only by those who are not up to the challenge of this demanding, olympean music! Andrew Mead's Introduction is exactly what it claims to be, an introduction--but then how could it be otherwise, considering the vast scope of Babbitt's astounding technique--and a very clear and well written one at that. Most important, Mead clarifies the musical responses and exigencies which brought about this impressive technique in very readable english. The bibliography at the end of the book is also excellent, listing some very important articles in the study of twelve tone music theory. Also recommended is Milton Babbitt's own, very readable, "Words About Music".

This is Washburn's third transpersonal book and it is good.
It integrates much of what he has discussed in his previous work but takes it to the next step. Washburn's main opponent in transpersonal theory is Ken Wilber. But Washburn is second to no one in terms of a logical, honest presentation of his view of transpersonal developement. Perhaps his and Wilber's view of transpersonal growth are both true, like an electron is a wave and particle. Great book and a must have.

(First published in I-70 Review)

There are few poets who genuinely engage me as a reader, among them Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, W. S. Merwin, Philip Levine, William Stafford, W. D. Snodgrass, John Gilgun and now Roger Kirschbaum, to name a few. Though I know Roger and his work from the informal poets' circle at Missouri Western State College (now Missouri Western State University) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and enjoy his first chapbook from that era very much, Hunter Ranch is like discovering a new poet. He has matured and fine-tuned his poetic voice and vision into a perfect symphony of sight, sound, color, place, and meaning. Roger revels in the mystical commonplace, writing surgically precise but simple details of every day objects, activities and experiences, and gives them meaning through simple, commonplace language. Like the best of poets, Roger plays no tricks on his readers. Divided into four seasons - Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter - Hunter Ranch takes readers to the heart of the Midwest where nature, love, loss, family and an honest day's work are examined and praised with quiet, religious fervor.

Hunter Ranch, the place, was once a thriving cattle operation in Doniphan County, Kansas. Roger took refuge there in 1996 after the death of his first wife, Julie, and wrote the cycle of poems that would become Hunter Ranch, the book, four years later. Julie was an inexhaustible source of inspiration in Roger's life and work before her death as I recall, and continues to inspire him and his work in the poems of Hunter Ranch. Julie appears in name or character in less than half the poems, but her spirit and legacy are the bedrock for the other poems. That Roger does not dwell on what must surely be his unbearable grief for her, as other lesser poets might, is a testament and measure of Roger's professionalism. Roger (inadvertently perhaps) sums up Hunter Ranch himself in the poem "In Wolf River Valley" from the collection:

How eager I am to enter
the closely guarded rooms
where love is not itself until lost
until it becomes memory, becomes art.

The cover of Hunter Ranch, like the covers of most small press poetry books, appears uninspired and, in the case of this book in particular, antithetic to its contents, the poems both a colorful, moving and meticulously detailed study of Roger's past and a lasting monument to it. The cover is dark and foreboding, composed of a black-and-white photograph of Roger beside an old barn on a gray overcast day, presumably at Hunter Ranch, with the title set in Times in dark forest green and the blurb set in Helvetica in black, Times and Helvetica being arguably the two most common typefaces of the last century. The quality of the photo itself, slightly blurry and out of focus, resembling a tintype from the early days of photography, likewise contrasts the powerful imagery and rich colorful specific details of Roger's poetry.

The whole effect contradicts the carefully wrought work inside, but on closer consideration, one discovers that the cover, like the book's contents, works in multiple contradictory but complementary dramatic dimensions that are difficult to express in any medium but Roger's poems. On one level Hunter Ranch is Roger's means to exorcise his grief for the death of his wife and the unscripted chaos that her death brings. At the same time, readers witness and share this intensely personal experience with Roger, but for readers this experience both ends and repeats with every reading of Hunter Ranch. Readers now, like Roger, are haunted (bittersweetly) by it, at least for a time. That the typical seasonal cycle is skewed by one season in Hunter Ranch, ending with Winter, the season of death, instead of Spring, the season of rebirth, only serves to underscore the dramatic tensions at work in Hunter Ranch.

The best poetry demonstrates the highest art of linguistic compression, words considered and chosen so carefully that to change one of them is to destroy an entire dimension of symbolism and meaning within a poem. This art, unfortunately, seems lost in much of the poetry printed by the small press today; many of the poems which strive for compression do so so zealously they become internally disjointed with impossible imaginative leaps that make the poems uninteresting, difficult, and in the end inaccessible for most readers. Hunter Ranch, on the other hand, strikes a nearly perfect balance between compression and accessibility to communicate a mystical labyrinth of ideas, concepts and relationships that cannot be conscionably extricated, separated and dissected without destroying the poems. What remains after such study is dull, lifeless, sterile, silent. As T. S. Eliot might say, the poetry of Hunter Ranch communicates experiences impossible to communicate by any other means.

Written in the simple, unassuming everyday language of northeast Kansas and northwest Missouri, the poems of Hunter Ranch effortlessly meld work, nature and ritual, in seasonal context, into new meaning and new understanding, with unmistakably mystical and religious (and at times perhaps sacrilegious) overtones. This is no small task! In fact, Roger's Hunter Ranch is the only book I know which accomplishes this compression so consistently, so thoroughly, and so precisely as to make these elements inseparable for satisfactory discussion. Readers cannot examine one element without examining another, without destroying the poetry. Yet the poetry, despite this compression, remains perfectly accessible.

In Hunter Ranch, we find Roger and his family living, working and loving in typical small midwestern communities. As has been mentioned, Roger's wife, Julie, plays the largest role in this cycle of poems, but we also find Roger's son, Jhett, in several poems. Even after multiple readings, I understood these poems included Roger's circle of friends that I knew from my days at Missouri Western, i.e. Scott, Tony, Hans, John, Jeff, Dooley and others. Yet Roger never names them. Instead, Roger masterfully employs the first person plural "we" throughout the book, coaxing readers into familiarity, into the poems. As readers we become characters, become witnesses, and if readers (like myself) are familiar with small midwestern communities like those described by Roger, we cannot help but populate the poems of Hunter Ranch with the familiar types of characters we ourselves have known in these communities. This technique, for such readers, makes Hunter Ranch all the more personal and fulfilling.

As one might expect from a poet whose material is the Midwest, Roger's poems are also furnished with common objects characteristic of the Midwestern working class. This has long been one of my favorite features of Roger's poetry, powerful and effective even in his chapbook from the late 1980s. Throughout Hunter Ranch we find carefully placed bottle caps, brand names (Pepsi-Cola and Ford, for example), maps, rusted lanterns, storm windows, picket fences, axle grease, pickup trucks, farm implements, silos, cisterns, styrene, potbellied stoves, barns, honey bees, walking sticks, and other such things with a simple Midwestern flavor. In Hunter Ranch, these specific details are all the more powerful because they appear in unexpected juxtaposition among a network of grander ideas and themes. Such lively juxtapositions surprise, exercise and stretch the reader's mind.

The most powerful aspect of Hunter Ranch, however, is Roger's masterful ability to infuse the simple language, ordinary objects and unassuming characters of the Midwest with greater religious and spiritual significance. In the poems, Roger discusses work, marriage, teaching, history, farming, community, faith, love and other lasting universal themes. This short list reveals the depth and breadth of Roger's subject matter, and touches upon the rich mystic and religious possibilities that lie therein. Roger does not disappoint. Under Roger's tutelage readers discover the primeval healing and forgiveness of hands; the contradictory essence of language at once both limiting and limitless; euphoric altered experiences induced by youth, wine, honey, twilight, pain, and longing; baptism by rain, tears, sweat, rivers, lakes, snow, light, love, drowning, and loneliness; sermons on the nature of the soul, heaven, loss, guilt and love; tabernacles of fields of corn, beans and sorghum; and faith in weaving, weeding, planting, harvesting, fence building and other honest, rural labors. This list is by no means definitive. In Hunter Ranch, the most ordinary routines assume a rich spiritual and religious significance.

Roger Kirschbaum's Hunter Ranch is one of the most powerful books of poetry I've experienced in a long, long time. Some readers, no doubt, are quick to define or dismiss this book by date and region, by time and place, but we must not confuse any of these with simplicity, with being less important, less engaging, less accomplished, less accessible or less rewarding. Roger has skillfully and bravely wrestled with universal themes among the minutiae of the Midwest to publish a moving, timeless and masterful collection of poems. Roger's poetry is not simple. Every syllable, every word, every line, every poem in Hunter Ranch...not one word is wasted. For many poets, the powerful work collected in Hunter Ranch would be a pinnacle, a crowning achievement, their old man and the sea. Roger, however, is a young man, and his final master work, we hope, has yet to be written.

This introductory text seems to me to offer students a well rounded, topic-oriented, introduction to philosophy. There are five main topic categories with four to six sub topics in each. The topics are presented in a pro-con format, with Washburn writing as an advocate of the pro, con and sometimes middle position. He puts himself in the position of a defender of each position, summarizes their arguments and forcefully presents them as an advocate might. These are written in a style that should be very easy for students to understand, without compromising substance. Each sub section is followed by a brief look at a specific philosophical method or technique (such as arguments, analgoies, and more specific techniques) and by a summary outline of the nature of the dilemma just presented. Both of these sections are very useful in introducing critical thinking techniques, analytic tools philosophers use, and for pin-pointing the precise nature of the issues raised in the pro-con sections. While I have not yet taught from this book, I am using it in all my intro classes this fall. I anticipate that my students will find the book gets them into important topics, provides a good outline of the various positions taken by philosophers on the topics, and gives them additional insight into what philosophy is and how it is practiced. I am very much looking forward to trying the text out next semester. There is also an instructor's manual available, but I have not yet received my copy, so I cannot comment on it. Overall, the only possible drawback is that this is not a book that contains any primary source materials, either as excerpts or full texts of articles. If you are the kind of instructor who wishes such primary sources, perhaps a supplemental anthology would help. Otherwise an excellent topic-oriented text!!

This is the first book by Yokomitsu Riichi that I have read, and I hope to be able to find more books written by this extraordinary author. The book begins with a Japanese expatriate named Sanki who is waiting for a friend of his to arrive named Koya. Sanki is taking in the sights watching the coolies work and watching Russian prostitutes primp. His friend Koya never shows up so he decides to go to a Turkish bathhouse. The novel starts off simply enough the reader is introduced to the characters who're for the most part Japanese businesmen who are trying to make alot of money. Sanki works for a bank, Koya for a lumber company, and Yamaguchi who sells skeletons to doctors. The reader is drawn into this bookn and is able to see the nightlife of expatriates in Shanghai while at the same time seeing the pure squalor of the city. We also get to read about when the communists have had enough of foreign dominance and strike out against their Japanese oppressors. This is a very good boo that holds no punches back. Check it out.

Washburn is a mathematician and Crowe is an antrophologist. The book gives a very good description of both the mathematical ideas and the context around the art. The illustrations are great! As examples of the quality of the book, it gives the best description I've seen anywhere of the difference between p31m and p3m1 and a very interestig history of the study of patterns.

Only one minor complaint: On page 5 they mention that in 1987, all the 17 groups were finally found at Alhambra, but they do not give a reference. The place to go is J.M. Montesinos: Classical Tessellations and Three-Manifolds.