Okay, now down to three books that really made me think. The first was Reforms, Organizational Change and Performance in Higher Education: A Comparative Account from the Nordic Countries (Pinheiro et al, eds), which I mentioned here. It provides top-notch mixed-methods comparative research into how educational institutions are actually managed, a field which in North America often relies too much on discussion about “neoliberalism.” Elizabeth Buckner’s Degrees of Dignity: Arab Higher Education in the Global Era was also excellent. I didn’t agree with everything in there, but it contains some excellent insights and I think Dr. Buckner found an appealing way to write about “regional” higher education and hope her style gets copied far and wide. Finally, there is Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (Stevens, Miller-Idriss and Shami). This intriguing book is ostensibly about area studies and how geographically-based knowledge gets systematically devalued in big traditional disciplines like Political Science and Economics in favour of universal “placeless” knowledge. That in itself is interesting, but perhaps more intriguing is the way they document how this fight plays out bureaucratically inside universities, when well-funded and secure disciplinary “departments” can behave imperiously towards more precarious cross-disciplinary “centres”. Clocking in at around 140 pages, this one is well worth the time of anyone seeking to better understand the politics of knowledge inside social science and humanities disciplines.