Each year, the Martin Center adds quite a few books to our extensive library relating to education. We also come across ones we don’t have but ought to have. The Center’s president, Jenna Robinson, has compiled a list of ten titles we’d like to acquire.

Here’s just one: Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education by David J. Staley (2019)

From the publisher:

How can we re-envision the university? Too many examples of what passes for educational innovation today ― MOOCs especially ― focus on transactions, on questions of delivery. In Alternative Universities, David J. Staley argues that modern universities suffer from a poverty of imagination about how to reinvent themselves. Anyone seeking innovation in higher education today should concentrate instead, he says, on the kind of transformational experience universities enact. In this exercise in speculative design, Staley proposes ten models of innovation in higher education that expand our ideas of the structure and scope of the university, suggesting possibilities for what its future might look like.

As Jenna suggests, we’re very receptive to book donations, even if not Christmas-wrapped.