“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… Public universities nationally are in broad agreement that the revolution in downtown Atlanta points the way to all their futures.”
— from Won’t Lose This Dream
Andrew’s latest book, Won’t Lose This Dream: How an Upstart Urban University Rewrote the Rules of a Broken System, 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. It 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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I also contributed an essay to an exciting book, published in 2020, that examines the prospects for American democracy in the age of Trump and other populist demagogues, titled Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People. The book, on which I was also a co-editor, features a veritable who’s who of some of the brightest, most incisive political thinkers in this country, among them Yascha Mounk, Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, Bill McKibben, Jessica Mathews, Michael Eric Dyson, and Ganesh Sitaraman. The book is the brainchild of David Orr, who organized a remarkable conference on the state of American democracy at Oberlin in 2017. The other editors are Bill Becker and Bakari Kitwana.
My piece is titled When Democracy Becomes Something Else: The Problem of Elections and What To Do About It. A brief extract:
The problem with seeking to repair America’s electoral system in the midst of a crisis is that it was never fully functional in the first place. This is not the same as saying that the system can’t function, or never has. [But]… the tools of democracy we have are unable to deliver the strong system most of us want.
The book is available here.
LATEST JOURNALISM:
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.
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A review of Richard Thompson’s memoir Beeswing, which is also an excuse to salute one of more consequential musicians of the past half-century.
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A two-part investigation in Los Angeles magazine, plus a follow-up column in the city’s daily paper, exploring how Santa Monica, one of the best-resourced cities in the country, could have lost control of public order at the height of the George Floyd protests in May 2020. While the police concentrated woefully inadequate resources on a largely peaceful demonstration near the oceanfront, organized gangs of looters ransacked hundreds of businesses with impunity. The city council and the public soon clamored for an explanation and some accountability, but the initial investigation was first watered down, then suppressed. An official report appeared in May 2021, which I discuss in this podcast, but failed to sort out who in the police department’s top leadership was to blame for what — to the frustration and fury of many officers at different ranks who felt they had done all they could in the face of massive incompetence at the top.
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.