In this timely book, historian James Axtell offers a compelling defense of higher education. Drawing on national statistics, broad-ranging scholarship, and delightful anecdotes, Axtell describes the professorial work cycle, the evolution of scholarship in the past three decades, the importance of ?habitual scholarship,? and the best ways to judge a university. He persuasively confronts the critics of higher education, arguing that they have perpetuated misunderstandings of tenure, research, teaching, curricular change, and professorial politics.

For years American colleges and universities have been criticized by the media, cash-strapped state legislators, and many others. Bearing the brunt of these attacks are the professors, accused of working too little and of neglecting their teaching responsibilities in favor of research. In this lively and timely book, the distinguished historian James Axtell offers a compelling defense of higher education. Drawing on national statistics, broad-ranging scholarship, and delightful anecdotes, Axtell reminds us of the dedication of professors and the increasing demands placed on them. He describes the professorial work cycle, the evolution of scholarship in the past three decades, the importance of "habitual scholarship", and the best ways to judge a university. He discusses, with imagination and wit, the many pleasures of academic life, including intercollegiate sports, the "benign pathology" of loving and collecting books, teaching and service outside the classroom, life in college towns, and working vacations. Axtell persuasively confronts the major critics of higher education, arguing that they have perpetuated misunderstandings of tenure, research, teaching, curricular change, and professorial politics.

This book takes up one of the most important themes in Chinese thought: the relation of pleasurable activities to bodily health and to the health of the body politic. Unlike Western theories of pleasure, early Chinese writings contrast pleasure not with pain but with insecurity, assuming that it is right and proper to seek and take pleasure, as well as experience short-term delight. Equally important is the belief that certain long-term relational pleasures are more easily sustained, as well as potentially more satisfying and less damaging. The pleasures that become deeper and more ingrained as the person invests time and effort to their cultivation include friendship and music, sharing with others, developing integrity and greater clarity, reading and classical learning, and going home. Each of these activities is explored through the early sources (mainly fourth century BC to the eleventh century AD), with new translations of both well-known and seldom-cited texts.

In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.

Pedagogical Pleasures inquires into pleasure (understood as enjoyment, delight, and/or gratification) as a crucial but neglected aspect of teachers' lives and work. Pleasure is examined as an historically contingent and unstable product of language use, rather than as a spontaneous, personal, and psychological«feeling.» This book is a departure from conventional accounts of pedagogy in two ways It is unashamedly about teachers rather than students, and it does not offer any solution to pedagogical problems. Instead, it seeks to extend pedagogical knowledge by inquiring into the sorts of pleasure that are available to teachers at this historical time.

"Engaging, evocative…[Bloom] is a supple, clear writer, and his parade of counterintuitive claims about pleasure is beguiling." —NPR Why is an artistic masterpiece worth millions more than a convincing forgery? Pleasure works in mysterious ways, as Paul Bloom reveals in this investigation of what we desire and why. Drawing on a wealth of surprising studies, Bloom investigates pleasures noble and seamy, lofty and mundane, to reveal that our enjoyment of a given thing is determined not by what we can see and touch but by our beliefs about that thing’s history, origin, and deeper nature.

In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.