Neil Gross – författare

A sociologist who has been tracking the polarization of higher education for twenty years reveals how students are navigating the campus culture wars, what they wish their professors would do differently, and why theyre actually afraid of saying what they think. Anyone who wants to understand the crisis in higher educationand help solve itshould read this book. Greg Lukianoff * Everyone has an opinion about higher education, but ironically few scholars actually study it in a systematic way. What Happened to College? brings data and rigorous thinking to bear on the question of how a university system that is in many ways the envy of the world has lost the confidence of such a large share of the country. Matthew YglesiasAmerican universities are at the center of a political firestorm. Between attacks on DEI programming, dwindling enrollment in the humanities, questions about the value of a college education, funding cuts, and battles over woke activism and liberal indoctrination, the campus culture wars are raging. But the experience on campus is not quite what the culture warriors would have us believe. A decade after his landmark book on faculty politics, Neil Gross decided it was time to give those with the most at stake a chance to speak for themselves. Beginning in the spring of 2024, he launched a massive investigation into how our polarized politics have remade the college experience, interviewing students across the country and polling thousands more. He looked at liberal arts colleges, state schools, faith-based institutions, and elite universities and combed through studies tracking everything from campus dating habits to changes in syllabi. What he found was startling: Undergraduates today are choosing their schools, their friends, their partners, their activitieseven their majorson the basis of their political beliefs to a degree unimaginable ten years ago, with the goal of interacting as little as possible with anyone whose views dont line up with their own. Popular campus dating apps invite you to swipe left if you dont like someones political profilea metaphor for todays college experience writ large. Instead of resisting this trend, some faculty and administrators encouraged it, creating a cloistered environment where students could avoid uncomfortable disagreement. What Happened to College? paints a picture of an educational system in crisis and ripe for change. Grounding his analysis in sorely needed data and deftly debunking overstated claims, Gross points to places where open debate and friendship across political lines still thrive. What are these campus communities doing right? Can we teach college students to disagree better? At a time of growing political stridency, nothing could be more necessary.

Over the past quarter century, researchers have successfully explored the inner workings of the physical and biological sciences using a variety of social and historical lenses. Inspired by these advances, the contributors to "Social Knowledge in the Making" turn their attention to the social sciences, broadly construed. The result is the first comprehensive effort to study and understand the day-to-day activities involved in the creation of social-scientific and related forms of knowledge about the social world. The essays collected here tackle a range of previously unexplored questions about the practices involved in the production, assessment, and use of diverse forms of social knowledge. A stellar cast of multidisciplinary scholars addresses topics such as the changing practices of historical research, anthropological data collection, library usage, peer review, and institutional review boards. Turning to the world beyond the academy, other essays focus on global banks, survey research organizations, and national security and economic policy makers."Social Knowledge in the Making" is a landmark volume for a new field of inquiry, and the bold new research agenda it proposes will be welcomed in the social sciences, the humanities, and a broad range of non-academic settings.

On his death in 2007, Richard Rorty was heralded by the New York Times as "one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers." Controversial on the left and the right for his critiques of objectivity and political radicalism, Rorty experienced a renown denied to all but a handful of living philosophers. In this masterly biography, Neil Gross explores the path of Rorty's thought over the decades in order to trace the intellectual and professional journey that led him to that prominence. The child of a pair of leftist writers who worried that their precocious son "wasn't rebellious enough," Rorty enrolled at the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen. There he came under the tutelage of polymath Richard McKeon, whose catholic approach to philosophical systems would profoundly influence Rorty's own thought. Doctoral work at Yale led to Rorty's landing a job at Princeton, where his colleagues were primarily analytic philosophers. With a series of publications in the 1960s, Rorty quickly established himself as a strong thinker in that tradition--but by the late 1970s Rorty had eschewed the idea of objective truth altogether, urging philosophers to take a "relaxed attitude" toward the question of logical rigor. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, he argued that philosophers should instead open themselves up to multiple methods of thought and sources of knowledge--an approach that would culminate in the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, one of the most seminal and controversial philosophical works of our time. In clear and compelling fashion, Gross sets that surprising shift in Rorty's thought in the context of his life and social experiences, revealing the many disparate influences that contribute to the making of knowledge. As much a book about the growth of ideas as it is a biography of a philosopher, Richard Rorty will provide readers with a fresh understanding of both the man and the course of twentieth-century thought.

Moving back and forth between the history of philosophy and the contributions of philosophers in his own day, Durkheim takes up topics as diverse as philosophical psychology, logic, ethics, and metaphysics, and seeks to articulate a unified philosophical position. Remarkably, in these lectures, given more than a decade before the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), the 'social realism' that is so characteristic of his later work - where he insists, famously, that social facts cannot be reduced to psychological or economic ones, and that such facts constrain human action in important ways - is totally absent in these early lectures. For this reason, they will be of special interest to students of the history of the social sciences, for they shed important light on the course of Durkheim's intellectual development.

Moving back and forth between the history of philosophy and the contributions of philosophers in his own day, Durkheim takes up topics as diverse as philosophical psychology, logic, ethics, and metaphysics, and seeks to articulate a unified philosophical position. Remarkably, in these lectures, given more than a decade before the publication of his groundbreaking book, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), the 'social realism' that is so characteristic of his later work - where he insists, famously, that social facts cannot be reduced to psychological or economic ones, and that such facts constrain human action in important ways - is totally absent in these early lectures. For this reason, they will be of special interest to students of the history of the social sciences, for they shed important light on the course of Durkheim's intellectual development.

Some observers see American academia as a bastion of leftist groupthink that indoctrinates students and silences conservative voices. Others see a protected enclave that naturally produces free-thinking, progressive intellectuals. Both views are self-serving, says Neil Gross, but neither is correct. Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? explains how academic liberalism became a self-reproducing phenomenon, and why Americans on both the left and right should take notice.Academia employs a higher percentage of liberals than nearly any other profession. But the usual explanations—hiring bias against conservatives, correlations of liberal ideology with high intelligence—do not hold up to scrutiny. Drawing on a range of original research, statistics, and interviews, Gross argues that “political typing” plays an overlooked role in shaping academic liberalism. For historical reasons, the professoriate developed a reputation for liberal politics early in the twentieth century. As this perception spread, it exerted a self-selecting influence on bright young liberals, while deterring equally promising conservatives. Most professors’ political views formed well before they stepped behind the lectern for the first time.Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? shows how studying the political sympathies of professors and their critics can shed light not only on academic life but on American politics, where the modern conservative movement was built in no small part around opposition to the “liberal elite” in higher education. This divide between academic liberals and nonacademic conservatives makes accord on issues as diverse as climate change, immigration, and foreign policy more difficult.