“The time could not be riper for universities to push back against decades of inequality, exclusionary policy-making, and skyrocketing costs that have worn away at the very core of their mission and the meritocratic promise of the American Dream.”
— from Won’t Lose This Dream
Andrew’s book, Won’t Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System, now out in paperback with a new afterword, tells the remarkable story of Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta, which has overturned the received wisdom that lower-income, minority, and first-generation college students are doomed to fail in large numbers — they are not — and transformed the national conversation about what universities owe to their students. At a time when universities are being sucked into the national political conversation and facing considerable upheaval, the Georgia State model provides a vital corrective to many of the assumptions circulating in Washington about the reality of higher education for most Americans.
The book is available from Amazon , BookShop.org, and many other booksellers.
More on the book, plus glowing reviews, an award, and press coverage, here. And here is a list of favorite books inspired by my work on Won’t Lose This Dream.
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LATEST JOURNALISM:
In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, I traveled to Youngstown, Ohio, a depressed Rust Belt city that has been let down by Donald Trump — as it has by many politicians — but has become a bastion of MAGA support nonetheless. Here‘s my report on how people there think and why Trump managed to win. In The Observer.
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I also traveled to Kalispell, a small, conservative city in northwestern Montana that is waging war on its own homeless population, to the point where dog whistles from the political leadership have 
led to acts of violence including the brutal murder of a homeless man in a parking lot. The city has also scapegoated a privately run emergency cold-weather shelter — only the shelter has found effective ways to fight back. In the Guardian.
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A two-part series in Red Canary magazine blowing the lid off pervasive discrimination in many U.S. fire departments that holds back women and African Americans, sometimes in staggering ways. In fire stations where everyone on shift eats, sleeps and washes under the same roof, it doesn’t take a lot for the dominant male firefighters to make the lives of their junior colleagues a living hell. The pieces also profile some of the brave individuals speaking out and pushing back against the culture. Part one is called Houses on Fire. Part two, which looks at the failure of the firefighters’ union to represent and protect its own members, is called Holly versus Goliath.
A lot more of Andrew’s journalism here.
Andrew Gumbel is a British-born author and journalist, based in Los Angeles, who has won awards for his work as an investigative reporter, political columnist, and feature writer. He writes frequently about politics, education, the criminal justice system and many other subjects, mostly for the Guardian.