Campusland

"This high-spirited, richly imagined, and brave novel is a delight to read... Smart and hilarious." — Kirkus Reviews Joyous, fast and funny, Scott Johnston’s Campusland is a satiric howl at today’s elite educational institutions—from safe spaces to tribal infighting to the sheer sanctimony. A wickedly delightful novel that may remind you of Tom Wolfe and David Lodge. Her room sucks. Her closet isn’t big enough for two weeks’-worth of outfits, much less her new Rag & Bone for fall. And there’s nothing worth posting. Cruel. To Lulu Harris—It Girl-in-the-Making—her first year at the ultra-competitive Ivy-like Devon University is a dreary impediment. If she’s fabulous and no one sees it, what’s the point? To Eph Russell, who looks and sounds like an avatar of privilege (shh!–he’s anything but) Devon is heaven. All day to think and read and linger over a Welsh rarebit at The Faculty Club, not to mention teach English 240 where he gets to discuss all his 19th Century favorites, like Mark Twain. If Eph could just get tenure, he could stay forever, but there are landmines everywhere. In his seventh year at Devon, Red Wheeler is the alpha dog on top of Devon’s progressive hierarchy, the most woke guy on campus. But when his position is challenged, Red is forced to take measures. Before first term is halfway finished, Lulu bungles her social cache with her clubbable upperclass peers, and is forced to reinvent herself. Shedding her designer clothes, she puts on flannel and a brand-new persona: campus victim. For Lulu to claw her way back to the top, she’ll build a pyre and roast anyone in her way. Presiding over this ferment is Milton Strauss, Devon’s feckless president, who spends his days managing perpetually aggrieved students, scheming administrators, jealous professors, billionaire donors, and bumptious frat boys. He just can’t say yes fast enough. And what to do with Martika Malik-Adams? Isn’t her giant salary as vice-president of Diversity & Inclusion enough? All paths converge as privileged, marginalized, and radical students form identity alliances, sacrifice education for outrage, and push varied agendas of political correctness that drags every free thought of higher learning into the lower depths of an entitled underclass. Campusland is a riotous, subversive and fresh read.

The American University of Avezzano, Italy, must create a curriculum that promotes physical education. Its geographic location makes it an ideal place to help a variety of people of different nationalities. If done correctly, a focus of this kind would establish an American school of physical education, health, recreation, camping, and outdoor activity, thus improving quality of life for both students and the community in general. In this scholarly work, author Aspr Surd provides insights on strategy and organizational structure based on comparative physical education programs; details on the functions studied and how administrators at American schools integrate physical education into curriculums; information from surveys of American colleges and universities in the East and Midwest that provide strategies on how to organize such a campus. By studying innovation in an array of curriculums, schools throughout Italy can change their daily routines and help their students. Studying the forms and methods implemented in the creation of a new school points to urgent needs and compelling opportunities both inside and outside centers of learning.

From citrus trees to spring breakers, Transforming the Irvine Ranch tells the story of Orange County’s metamorphosis from 93,000 acres of farmland into an iconic Southern California landscape of beaches and modernist architecture. Drawing on decades of archival research and their own years at the famed Irvine Company, the authors bring a collection of colorful characters responsible for the transformation to life, including: Ray Watson, whose nearly century-long life took him from an Oakland boarding house to the Irvine and Walt Disney Company boardrooms Joan Irvine Smith, a much-married heiress who waged war against the US government and the Irvine Foundation's reactionary board and won William Pereira, the visionary architect whose work became synonymous with the LA cityscape. Spanning the history of modern California from its Gold Rush past to the late 1970s, Transforming the Irvine Ranch chronicles a storied family’s largely successful attempts to remake the vast Irvine Ranch in its own image.