Jason Wingard

This book is an embarrassment both for the publisher (an imprint of Stanford University Press), for University of Pennslyvania (where Wingard got his PhD) and for Temple University, where Wingard was president for two years. Essentially this is a collection of press releases for organizations involved in alternative forms of adult vocational education, along with Wingard's fawning interviews with the leaders of these efforts (as well as cheesy first-person vignettes of "customers" of these models, which have the same writing style and clearly were written by Wingard or some other person providing ghost-writing assistance). He expresses no curiosity about how these alternative education models actually work, opting instead to take the organization's word at face value that these models are working out great. I would not mind a serious investigation into the failures of traditional higher education, but this is far from that.… (mais)