My newest book, The Emergent Genius of American Higher Education, was published in August, 2025.
Here’s a link to the book. And here’s a link to the book’s introduction, which gives an overview of its 23 chapters.
This book is a collection of pieces I wrote about the emergence of the peculiar American system of higher education and what makes this system so remarkable. The heart of the story is that this is a system without a plan. Its strength came from the fact that it emerged from the bottom up instead of being imposed from the top down. Only a madman would have planned a system as radically decentralized, chaotically organized, and stunningly inefficient as the system that eventually came into being. And yet it turned out that these same organizational inefficiencies have helped establish the system’s effectiveness as an educational institution, making it the envy the world. Its strength came from the fact that it emerged from the bottom up instead of being imposed from the top down.
The essays here were written at different times, for different purposes, and published in widely different venues – as journal articles, book chapters, magazine articles, speeches, op-eds, and blog posts. I have not tried to weave them together in a single story running through this book but instead simply clustered them into three rough categories – The US System of Higher Education, Scholarship, and Schools of Education – and left them in their original form. Feel free to skip around and look for things you are interested in rather than plowing through from beginning to end. I’m hoping these essays will be useful for teachers, students, and anyone else who would like to ruminate about American higher education.
David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing 