Launching my new book, Peak Higher Ed

Greetings from the darkest week of the year in the northern hemisphere. As winter solstice draws nigh I’m preparing some end-of-year posts.  But first, this month Johns Hopkins University Press is publishing my new book, Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis. and I’m very excited.  Go, little book!

On Thursday we held a Future Trends Forum session officially launching Peak.  For fun we switched up the usual arrangement, as I became a guest, not the host, and friends Wesson Radomsky and Brent Anders ran the show.

I wanted to write about it here to share the news, but also because this book grew out of a blog post.  Let me explain.

A dozen years ago I was doing some environmental scanning and was struck by some data which surprised me.  In 2012-13 American higher ed enrollment had declined slightly and this got me thinking.  As far as I knew student numbers had always been rising, at least in my experience.  What might a reversal mean?  If this one year’s decline wasn’t an aberration, what might a further decrease look like? If higher ed was starting to slide down past its peak, what could happen to colleges and universities? I did some futures analysis then jotted down thoughts in a blog post.

In the ways blogs worked back then, this post stirred some comments and interest.  I reflected and noodled at the idea, next writing up the idea as an Inside Higher Ed column. Josh Kim wrote a riposte which helped develop things further. People wrote me offline and approached me in person, worried about what post-peak academia might become. I developed peak higher ed into a future scenario and started presenting on it to in-person and virtual audiences, adjusting it as feedback rolled in, while continuing to blog about it as new data appeared.  For example, in 2018 I noted that enrollment was still declining, as per the peak model. Again, Josh Kim responded. In 2019 I turned in the book manuscript for Academia Next and it included a peak higher ed scenario chapter.  That book covered a lot of ground, dwelling on many trends and multiple scenarios.

Time passed. I continued to track and analyze trends reshaping higher education, including those which formed the peak model. I bounced the idea around with many people (see the book’s acknowledgements). I published a second Hopkins book, Universities on Fire, which focused on one single trend, climate change.

In 2023 I wanted to change from writing about a trend to focusing on a scenario at length and pitched a book proposal to Johns Hopkins University Press. In my offer I worked in many issues besides the core peak idea to see how they might intersect. The publisher agreed to a contract.  Being a pro-open person, I quickly blogged my proposal and plan in 2024 then set to work. I actually followed the plan closely, developing each chapter in the proposed sequence, and now the book is in the world.  As a lifelong science fiction fan, I’m delighted to have a trilogy in print.

That’s quite a journey starting from a single blog post.

Let me say a bit more about what the book contains.  The first two chapters sketch out the scenario in some detail, describing how enrollment and the number of post-secondary institutions rose, peak, and fell.  Next, “After the Consensus Shattered” examines that story in light of the call for “college for everyone,” which has fallen on hard time (as I blogged).  A major and open question is: what collective understanding of higher education will succeed it?

The next three chapters engage with three major forces or problems in the world and how they might intersect with post-peak academia. “Automation Comes for the Campus” focuses on AI and ends up offering several scenarios for how that technology might impact colleges and universities.  “The Anthropocene Is Here, Ready or Not” addresses climate change, the subject of my previous book, and explores several ways higher ed might engage that enormous force.  Then “Academia and the Struggle for Humanity’s Future” picks up my hypermodern/demodern idea to ponder how post-secondary education could grapple with emerging ideologies of human progress.

The book concludes with two visions of the academy’s next phase.  One, “Managed Descent,” imagines the sector continuing to slide down away from peak.  The last, “Climbing Back to Peak,” offers some ways by which academics might reverse course and transform our institutions.  We could, if we dream boldly and with care, realize “peak” as in “peak performance.”

There’s a little website for the book, where you can learn more about it, and which includes ordering links from Amazon, Bookshop.org, and Johns Hopkins.  I’m so grateful to the many people who helped me realize this book.  And as always, I’d love to hear from readers.