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Some time ago, I was happy to receive a review copy of Karin Bodewits 's first novel "You Must Be Very Intelligent" with as subtitle "the PhD Delusion". This book is a hybrid between memoir and work of fiction about Bodewits's years as a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. The short summary of the book is as follows: You Must be Very Intelligent is the author’s account of studying for a PhD in a modern, successful university. Part-memoir and part-exposé, this book is highly entertaining and unusually revealing about the dubious morality and desperate behaviour which underpins competition in twenty-first century academia. This witty, warts-and-all account of Bodewits´ years as a PhD student in the august University of Edinburgh is full of success and failure, passion and pathos, insight, farce and warm-hearted disillusionment. She describes a world of collaboration and backstabbing; nefarious financing and wasted genius; cosmopolitan dreamers and ...

In "The End of Average", Todd Rose explores how "averagerianism" has impacted our society. In this book, he discusses how companies do better when they look at the individual worker instead of the average worker, and he gives ideas for tailoring higher education to the individual student rather than to the average student. You can find interviews with Rose on this topic here and here . This post describes an example of personalized higher education for an accountant. You can find a good summary of the ideas on higher education here. I've been wrestling with the idea of how to accommodate different learning styles in the classroom in the past. When I was a student, there were courses that I preferred to study on my own - I did not attend the lectures, but sat with the material, and then just showed up for the exam. In the traditional view of higher education, that would be considered as "bad" behavior - but I prefer to sit down in silence and ske...