“There is no drama like the drama of history,” wrote the great Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James in The Black Jacobins (1938). During the last few years, we have lived a drama in the university that seems unlike few chapters in the history of American higher education.

My upcoming book, Birds Up Close: An Engineer Explores Their Hidden Wonders, will be published by MIT Press on April 28. How did I get from my research on the mechanical behavior of cellular materials . . . to writing a book about how birds work? It’s been a journey.

Not so many weeks have elapsed in academic-semester time since my first column, but the interim has been eventful.