Race, Gender and Education Desire Book

Highly descriptive and dense case study of SUNY Buffalo and its attempt to create 14 experimental colleges. The first two chapters are helpful for org theorists, however, he does caveat that this theory is not empirically tested. His one case study is not enough to generalize across other universities and colleges (although David Yamane used Levine’s organizational framework for his 2001 case studies of UW-Madison and UC Berkeley).

The middle chapters are hard to understand what was going on, who was who, and what exactly were the 14 innovations. I ended up skimming the middle chapters because trying to make sense of every single detail became pure drudgery. I think this book should have been trimmed down more featuring the most salient case study details. The book could have also been a high-quality journal article.