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Activist Archives
Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia
Doreen Lee
Duke University Press, 2016
In Activist Archives Doreen Lee tells the origins, experiences, and legacy of the radical Indonesian student movement that helped end the thirty-two-year dictatorship in May 1998. Lee situates the revolt as the most recent manifestation of student activists claiming a political and historical inheritance passed down by earlier generations of politicized youth. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis of "Generation 98," Lee offers rich depictions of the generational structures, nationalist sentiments, and organizational and private spaces that bound these activists together. She examines the ways the movement shaped new and youthful ways of looking, seeing, and being—found in archival documents from the 1980s and 1990s; the connections between politics and place; narratives of state violence; activists' experimental lifestyles; and the uneven development of democratic politics on and off the street. Lee illuminates how the interaction between official history, collective memory, and performance came to define youth citizenship and resistance in Indonesia’s transition to the post-Suharto present. 
 
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After Tears
Niq Mhlongo
Ohio University Press, 2011
Bafana Kuzwayo is a young man with a weight on his shoulders. After flunking his law studies at the University of Cape Town, he returns home to Soweto, where he must decide how to break the news to his family. But before he can confess, he is greeted as a hero by family and friends. His uncle calls him “Advo,” short for Advocate, and his mother wastes no time recruiting him to solve their legal problems. In a community that thrives on imagined realities, Bafana decides that it’s easiest to create a lie that allows him to put off the truth indefinitely. Soon he’s in business with Yomi, a Nigerian friend who promises to help him solve all his problems by purchasing a fake graduation document. One lie leads to another as Bafana navigates through a world that readers will find both funny and grim.
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All In
Expanding Access through Nationally Competitive Awards
Suzanne McCray
University of Arkansas Press, 2013
The world of national and international scholarships is more competitive than ever. Top students from across the county vie for a limited number of awards that provide the funding needed to participate in elite programs that can help launch the careers of those who receive the recognition. Scholarship foundation leaders have an insider’s view of the selection process, and experienced advisors prepare students to navigate applications and interviews. Both perspectives are represented here in this new collection emphasizing the importance of engaging a diverse group of students, institutions, and programs in the process as well as expanding the educational experience for students as they apply so that everyone benefits, no matter what the outcome.
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All the Campus Lawyers
Litigation, Regulation, and the New Era of Higher Education
Louis H. Guard and Joyce P. Jacobsen
Harvard University Press, 2024

How colleges and universities can respond to legal pressures while remaining true to their educational missions.

Not so long ago, colleges and universities had little interaction with the law. In the 1970s, only a few well-heeled universities even employed in-house legal counsel. But now we live in the age of tenure-denial lawsuits, free speech battles, and campus sexual assault investigations. Even athletics rules violations have become a serious legal matter. The pressures of regulation, litigation, and legislation, Louis Guard and Joyce Jacobsen write, have fostered a new era in higher education, and institutions must know how to respond.

For many higher education observers and participants, including most administrators and faculty, the maze of legal mandates and potential risks can seem bewildering. Guard, a general counsel with years of higher education law experience, and Jacobsen, a former college president, map this unfamiliar terrain. All the Campus Lawyers provides a vital, up-to-date assessment of the impact of legal concerns on higher education and helps readers make sense of the most pressing trends and issues, including civil rights; free speech and expression; student life and wellness; admissions, advancement, and community relations; governance and oversight; the higher education business model; and on-campus crises, from cyberattacks to pandemics.

As well as informing about the latest legal and regulatory developments affecting higher education, Guard and Jacobsen offer practical guidance to those in positions of campus authority. There has never been a more crucial time for college and university boards, presidents, inside and outside counsel, and other higher education leaders to know the law and prepare for legal challenges.

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An American Girl, and Her Four Years in a Boys' College
Olive San Louie Anderson
University of Michigan Press, 2006
In 1870, the University of Michigan-one of the oldest, largest, and most prestigious public universities in the United States-admitted its first woman student. An American Girl, and Her Four Years in a Boys' College, written by one of the first woman graduates from the University of Michigan and published pseudonymously in 1878, describes what it was like to be a member of this tiny group of brave coeds. The story is told through the eyes of Wilhelmine Elliot, an untraditional girl who enrolls at the fictional University of Ortonville, a thinly disguised stand-in for the University of Michigan.

Will's challenges mirror those of other women college students of the era, including the reactions of male faculty and students, relationships with other women students and with family and friends back home, and social attitudes toward the women's movement and liberal religious values. The editors' engaging introduction places the novel in its relevant historical and literary contexts, as do helpful annotations throughout the text.

"The 1870s were an important moment of debate over women's roles and responsibilities. What's here is very interesting not only about higher education, and 'strong-minded women,' but about religion, domesticity, independence, marriage, and homosocial bonding."
--Carol Lasser, Oberlin College

Olive San Louie Anderson (ca. 1852-86) graduated from the University of Michigan in 1875 and published An American Girl in 1878 under the name SOLA. Elisabeth Israels Perry is John Francis Bannon Professor of History, Saint Louis University. Jennifer Ann Price is a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Saint Louis University.
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Becoming American Becoming Ethnic
edited by Thomas Dublin
Temple University Press, 1996

More than at any time since the 1920's the issues of immigration and ethnicity have become central to discussions of American society and identity. Becoming American, Becoming Ethnic addresses this contemporary debate, bringing together essays written over the past eighteen years by college students exploring their ethnic roots—from the experiences of their forbears to the place of ethnicity in their lives.

The students range from descendants of Europeans whose families immigrated several generations ago to Asian and Latin American immigrants of more recent decades to African-Americans and Hispanics—some have more than one ethnic heritage to grapple with, while others have migrated from one place to another within the United States. Together their voices create a dialogue about the interplay of ethnic traditions and values with American culture.

These are moving personal reflections on the continuities and changes in the ethnic experience in the United States and on the evolving meaning of ethnicity over time and across generations. Despite vocal concerns in recent years about ethnic divisiveness, these student writings show how much many young Americans share even in their differences.


In the series Critical Perspectives on the Past, edited by Susan Porter Benson, Stephen Brier, and Roy Rosenzweig.

 

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Before Fidel
The Cuba I Remember
By Francisco José Moreno
University of Texas Press, 2007

Before Fidel Castro seized power, Cuba was an ebullient and chaotic society in a permanent state of turmoil, combining a raucous tropical nature with the evils of arbitrary and corrupt government. Yet this fascinating period in Cuban history has been largely forgotten or misrepresented, even though it set the stage for Castro's dramatic takeover in 1959. To reclaim the Cuba that he knew—and add color and detail to the historical record—distinguished political scientist Francisco José Moreno here offers his recollections of the Cuba in which he came of age personally and politically.

Moreno takes us into the little-known world of privileged, upper-middle-class, white Cubans of the 1930s through the 1950s. His vivid depictions of life in the family and on the streets capture the distinctive rhythms of Cuban society and the dynamics between parents and children, men and women, and people of different races and classes. The heart of the book describes Moreno's political awakening, which culminated during his student years at the University of Havana. Moreno gives a detailed, insider's account of the anti-Batista movement, including the Ortodoxos and the Triple A. He recaptures the idealism and naiveté of the movement, as well as its ultimate ineffectiveness as it fell before the juggernaut of the Castro Revolution. His own disillusionment and wrenching decision to leave Cuba rather than accept a commission in Castro's army poignantly closes the book.

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Beyond the Barricades
The Sixties Generation Grows Up
Jack Whalen
Temple University Press, 1990
"'The Big Chill' told only half the story of where Sixties activists ended up. Whalen and Flacks... honestly chronicle the other half." --Abbie Hoffman "What happens to youthful idealism as people leave their youth behind? ...Where do young revolutionaries go when the revolution doesn't happen?" Amid the social and political turmoil of the late 1960s, student demonstrations on college campuses and in nearby communities looked like a prelude to apocalypse. By 1970 radical students at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), were involved in burning the Bank of America branch in Isla Vista and a series of riots and demonstrations that culminated in hundreds of arrests, numerous injuries, and one student death. To some campus observers, the violence and property damage were nothing more than a meaningless rampage--privileged students running amok. To those actively involved in the student movement and the Radical Union, the second American revolution was at hand. The disparate views of these events persist some twenty years later. In Beyond the Barricades, Whalen and Flacks challenge the conventional wisdom, which holds that the Sixties Generation soon outgrew their political ideals and channeled their energies into building lucrative careers and accumulating material goods. For nine years, the authors have maintained contact with eighteen men and women who participated in the UCSB student movement, asking probing questions about the long-term significance of political commitment to individual lives. They have also tracked fourteen former students who were part of the sorority/fraternity subculture in an attempt to discern whether the paths of the two student groups tend to converge as they grow older. This study grows out of the student activists' own assessments of the events at UCSB and the lives they have shaped in subsequent years. It demonstrates that student activists did not abandon their beliefs or become disillusioned with the prospects for social change as they left the university and ventured into the adult world. Indeed, their present political convictions and vocational commitments are largely consistent with their past views--even as they have had to adapt to changes in their personal needs and in the social climate. In asking where the students are now, the authors illuminate something about how our society has been affected--culturally, institutionally, psychologically--by the movements and conflicts of the sixties. Whalen and Flacks "offer these stories in the same spirit that apparently guided [the] respondents: as contributions to the ongoing discourse on how we might live according to our dreams!" "Whalen and Flacks are true Sixties sociologists--hip white knights who ride out to slay the ideal-crushing dragon of ‘The Big Chill.' In all, a heart-on-the-sleeve, hopeful study that should appeal to social psychologists and Sixties sympathizers." --Kirkus Reviews "In the first systematic study of the sequels to New Left radicalism, Whalen and Flacks bring alive the real choices of real activists. This is a lucid and enlightening book, full of stimulating ideas about continuities and fragilities in American radicalism." --Todd Gitlin, author of The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage "As Whalen and Flacks know, ‘The Big Chill' was a lie. The earthquake called the Sixties changed lives--and this pioneering study explains why, showing how the generation schooled in activism has been struggling to keep faith with the ideal of social justice and democracy." --James Miller, author of Democracy is in the Streets "Beyond the Barricades...is, in short, very good sociology of the intimate close-up sort. And it helps us to understand that most of the so-called yuppies are not (as we have cynically been led to believe) ex-hippies or student radicals, but rather very probably come from that majority of 1960s students who were never either." --Bennett M. Berger, University of California, San Diego
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Beyond Winning
National Scholarship Competitions and the Student Experience
Suzanne McCray
University of Arkansas Press, 2005
Each year thousands of students apply for competitive national and international scholarships such as the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates Cambridge, and Fulbright. The competition for these awards is intense, and students look to scholarship advisors for support. Many universities have created an office or designated part of an office to assist these students, which has provided greater access for students who may not have applied previously or successfully. It has also increased the competition. The twelve essays in this collection from the 2003 National Association of Fellowships Advisors Conference held at the University of Denver. Essays by the heads of the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates, and Truman Scholarship foundations provide a sense of the philosophy and direction of their programs. The essays provide information on new initiatives, insights into the history and significance of the programs, and insider tips for application and interview preparation. Other essays focus on the advising and application process from successful advisors at various universities, how the U.K. higher educational system differs from that in the United States, and the key issue of ethics in the application process. All the essays demonstrate that the scholarship application experience itself is a valuable one that is more about learning and service than it is about winning.
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Black Power in the Bluff City
African American Youth and Student Activism in Memphis, 1965–1975
Shirletta Kinchen
University of Tennessee Press, 2016
During the civil rights era, Memphis gained a reputation for having one of the South’s strongest NAACP branches. But that organization, led by the city’s black elite, was hardly the only driving force in the local struggle against racial injustice. In the late sixties, Black Power proponents advocating economic, political, and cultural self-determination effectively mobilized Memphis’s African American youth, using an array of moderate and radical approaches to protest and change conditions on their campuses and in the community.
            While Black Power activism on the coasts and in the Midwest has attracted considerable scholarly attention, much less has been written about the movement’s impact outside these hotbeds. In Black Power in the Bluff City, Shirletta J. Kinchen helps redress that imbalance by examining how young Memphis activists, like Coby Smith and Charles Cabbage, dissatisfied by the pace of progress in a city emerging from the Jim Crow era, embraced Black Power ideology to confront such challenges as gross disparities in housing, education, and employment as well as police brutality and harassment. Two closely related Black Power organizations, the Black Organizing Project and the Invaders, became central to the local black youth movement in the late 1960s. Kinchen traces these groups’ participation in the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike—including the controversy over whether their activities precipitated events that culminated in Martin Luther King’s assassination—and their subsequent involvement in War on Poverty programs. The book also shows how Black Power ideology drove activism at the historically black LeMoyne-Owen College, scene of a 1968 administration-building takeover, and at the predominately white Memphis State University, where African American students transformed the campus by creating parallel institutions that helped strengthen black student camaraderie and consciousness in the face of marginalization.
            Drawing on interviews with activists, FBI files, newspaper accounts from the period, and many other sources, the author persuasively shows not only how an emerging generation helped define the black freedom struggle in Memphis but also how they applied the tenets of Black Power to shape the broader community.
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Bright College Years
Inside the American College Today
Anne Matthews
University of Chicago Press, 1998
As the price of higher education escalates and the number of Americans seeking a college degree steadily rises, it is now more important then ever to think about higher education in a different way. In Bright College Years, Anne Matthews paints a provocative yet evenhanded portrait of the American campus. With each chapter dedicated to sections of the academic year, Matthews puts students, professors, and administrators under the magnifying glass. She conducts her investigation in four-year universities all across the country, from enormous state schools like the University of Texas to specialized colleges like Cal Tech. Bright College Years is a fascinating look at the changing face of the American university that will be of interest to prospective students, their parents, and anyone interested in higher education.

"Matthews writes with sympathy and substantial understanding of the dilemmas colleges face these days."—Tara Fitzpatrick, Chicago Tribune

"A wide-ranging, well-written and lively account of contemporary academia."—Christian Wiman, Dallas Morning News

"Notable Book of the Year." New York Times

"An eye-opening, startling exposé;. . . . Matthews' energetic and well-written report provides a dismal yet concise insider portrait of college life."—Booklist
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Campus Life
Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz
University of Chicago Press, 1988
"Based on subtle, imaginative readings of autobiographies, memoirs, fiction and secondary sources, [Campus Life] tells the story of the changing mentalities of American undergraduates over two centuries."—Michael Moffatt, New York Times Book Review
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The Channels of Student Activism
How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today
Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder
University of Chicago Press, 2022
 An eye-opening analysis of collegiate activism and its effects on the divisions in contemporary American politics. 

The past six years have been marked by a contentious political atmosphere that has touched every arena of public life, including higher education. Though most college campuses are considered ideologically progressive, how can it be that the right has been so successful in mobilizing young people even in these environments?

As Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder show in this surprising analysis of the relationship between political activism on college campuses and the broader US political landscape, while liberal students often outnumber conservatives on college campuses, liberal campus organizing remains removed from national institutions that effectively engage students after graduation. And though they are usually in the minority, conservative student groups have strong ties to national right-leaning organizations, which provide funds and expertise, as well as job opportunities and avenues for involvement after graduation. Though the left is more prominent on campus, the right has built a much more effective system for mobilizing ongoing engagement. What’s more, the conservative college ecosystem has worked to increase the number of political provocations on campus and lower the public’s trust in higher education.
 
 In analyzing collegiate activism from the left, right, and center, The Channels of Student Activism shows exactly how politically engaged college students are channeled into two distinct forms of mobilization and why that has profound consequences for the future of American politics.  
 
 
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College Libraries and Student Culture
What We Now Know
Lynda M. Duke
American Library Association, 2012

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Coming of Age in New Jersey
College and American Culture
Moffatt, Michael
Rutgers University Press, 1989
Coming of Age is about college as students really know it and--often--love it. To write this remarkable account, Michael Moffatt did what anthropologists usually do in more distant cultures: he lived among the natives. His findings are sometimes disturbing, potentially controversial, but somehow very believable. Coming of Age is a vivid slice of life of what Moffatt saw and heard in the dorms of a typical state university, Rutgers, in the 1980s. It is full of student voices: naive and worldy-wise, vulgar and polite, cynical, humorous, and sometimes even idealistic. But it is also about American culture more generally: individualism, friendship, community, bureaucracy, diversity, race, sex, gender, intellect, work, and play. As an example of an ethnography written about an anthropologist's own culture, this book is an uncommon one. As a new and revealing perspective on the much-studied American college student, it is unique.
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Connecting in College
How Friendship Networks Matter for Academic and Social Success
Janice M. McCabe
University of Chicago Press, 2016
We all know that good study habits, supportive parents, and engaged instructors are all keys to getting good grades in college. But as Janice M. McCabe shows in this illuminating study, there is one crucial factor determining a student’s academic success that most of us tend to overlook: who they hang out with. Surveying a range of different kinds of college friendships, Connecting in College details the fascinatingly complex ways students’ social and academic lives intertwine and how students attempt to balance the two in their pursuit of straight As, good times, or both.
           
As McCabe and the students she talks to show, the friendships we forge in college are deeply meaningful, more meaningful than we often give them credit for. They can also vary widely. Some students have only one tight-knit group, others move between several, and still others seem to meet someone new every day. Some students separate their social and academic lives, while others rely on friendships to help them do better in their coursework. McCabe explores how these dynamics lead to different outcomes and how they both influence and are influenced by larger factors such as social and racial inequality. She then looks toward the future and how college friendships affect early adulthood, ultimately drawing her findings into a set of concrete solutions to improve student experiences and better guarantee success in college and beyond.
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The Cost of Inclusion
How Student Conformity Leads to Inequality on College Campuses
Blake R. Silver
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Young people are told that college is a place where they will “find themselves” by engaging with diversity and making friendships that will last a lifetime. This vision of an inclusive, diverse social experience is a fundamental part of the image colleges sell potential students. But what really happens when students arrive on campus and enter this new social world? The Cost of Inclusion delves into this rich moment to explore the ways students seek out a sense of belonging and the sacrifices they make to fit in.

Blake R. Silver spent a year immersed in student life at a large public university. He trained with the Cardio Club, hung out with the Learning Community, and hosted service events with the Volunteer Collective. Through these day-to-day interactions, he witnessed how students sought belonging and built their social worlds on campus. Over time, Silver realized that these students only achieved inclusion at significant cost. To fit in among new peers, they clung to or were pushed into raced and gendered cultural assumptions about behavior, becoming “the cool guy,” “the nice girl,” “the funny one,” “the leader,” “the intellectual,” or “the mom of the group.” Instead of developing dynamic identities, they crafted and adhered to a cookie-cutter self, one that was rigid and two-dimensional. Silver found that these students were ill-prepared for the challenges of a diverse college campus, and that they had little guidance from their university on how to navigate the trials of social engagement or the pressures to conform. While colleges are focused on increasing the diversity of their enrolled student body, Silver’s findings show that they need to take a hard look at how they are failing to support inclusion once students arrive on campus.
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Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure
Jeffrey Berman
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
Cutting, a form of self-mutilation, is a growing problem in the United States, especially among adolescent females. It is regarded as self-destructive behavior, yet paradoxically, people who cut themselves generally do not wish to die but to find relief from unbearable psychological pain.

Cutting and the Pedagogy of Self-Disclosure is the first book to explore how college students write about their experiences as cutters. The idea behind the book arose when Patricia Hatch Wallace, a high school English teacher, wrote a reader-response diary for a graduate course taught by Professor Jeffrey Berman in which she revealed for the first time that she had cut herself twenty years earlier. At Berman's suggestion, Wallace wrote her Master's thesis on cutting. Not long after she finished her thesis, two students in Berman's expository writing course revealed their own experiences as cutters. Their disclosures encouraged several students in another writing class to share their own cutting stories with classmates. Realizing that so many students were writing about the same phenomenon, Berman and Wallace decided to write a book about a subject that is rarely discussed inside or outside the classroom.

In Part 1, Wallace discusses clinical and theoretical aspects of cutting and then applies these insights to several memoirs and novels, including Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, Caroline Kettlewell's Skin Game, and Patricia McCormick's Cut. The motivation behind Wallace's research was the desire to learn more about herself, and she reads these stories through her own experience as a cutter. In Part 2, Berman focuses on the pedagogical dynamics of cutting: how undergraduate students write about cutting, how their writings affect classmates and teachers, and how students who cut themselves can educate everyone in the classroom about a problem that has personal, psychological, cultural, and educational significance.
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Dangerous Ideas on Campus
Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK
Matthew C. Ehrlich
University of Illinois Press, 2021

In 1960, University of Illinois professor Leo Koch wrote a public letter condoning premarital sex. He was fired. Four years later, a professor named Revilo Oliver made white supremacist remarks and claimed there was a massive communist conspiracy. He kept his job.

Matthew Ehrlich revisits the Koch and Oliver cases to look at free speech, the legacy of the 1960s, and debates over sex and politics on campus. The different treatment of the two men marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of academic freedom. Their cases also embodied the stark divide over beliefs and values--a divide that remains today. Ehrlich delves into the issues behind these academic controversies and places the events in the context of a time rarely associated with dissent, but in fact a harbinger of the social and political upheavals to come.

An enlightening and entertaining history, Dangerous Ideas on Campus illuminates how the university became a battleground for debating America's hot-button issues.

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Dangerous Writing
Understanding the Political Economy of Composition
Tony Scott
Utah State University Press, 2009
Building on recent work in rhetoric and composition that takes an historical materialist approach, Dangerous Writing outlines a political economic theory of composition. The book connects pedagogical practices in writing classes to their broader political economic contexts, and argues that the analytical power of students’ writing is prevented from reaching its potential by pressures within the academy and without, that tend to wed higher education with the aims and logics of “fast-capitalism.”

Since the 1980s and the “social turn” in composition studies and other disciplines, scholars in this field have conceived writing in college as explicitly embedded in socio-rhetorical situations beyond the classroom. From this conviction develops a commitment to teach writing with an emphasis on analyzing the social and political dimensions of rhetoric.

Ironically, though a leftist himself, Tony Scott’s analysis finds the academic left complicit with the forces in American culture that tend, in his view, to compromise education. By focusing on the structures of labor and of institutions that enforce those structures, Scott finds teachers and administrators are too easily swept along with the inertia of a hyper-commodified society in which students---especially working class students---are often positioned as commodities, themselves. Dangerous Writing, then, is a critique of the field as much as it is a critique of capitalism. Ultimately, Scott’s eye is on the institution and its structures, and it is these that he finds most in need of transformation.
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Degrees of Risk
Navigating Insecurity and Inequality in Public Higher Education
Blake R. Silver
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An ethnographic analysis of how insecurity is at the heart of contemporary higher education.

Institutions of higher education are often described as “ivory towers,” places of privilege where students exist in a “campus bubble,” insulated from the trials of the outside world. These metaphors reveal a widespread belief that college provides young people with stability and keeps insecurity at bay. But for many students, that’s simply not the case.

Degrees of Risk reveals how insecurity permeates every facet of college life for students at public universities. Sociologist Blake Silver dissects how these institutions play a direct role in perpetuating uncertainty, instability, individualism, and anxiety about the future. Silver examined interviews with more than one hundred students who described the risks that surrounded every decision: which major to choose, whether to take online classes, and how to find funding. He expertly identified the ways the college experience played out differently for students from different backgrounds. For students from financially secure families with knowledge of how college works, all the choices and flexibility of college felt like an adventure or a wealth of opportunities. But for many others, especially low-income, first-generation students, their personal and family circumstances meant that that flexibility felt like murkiness and precarity. In addition, he discovered that students managed insecurity in very different ways, intensifying inequality at the intersections of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other sociodemographic dimensions. Drawing from these firsthand accounts, Degrees of Risk presents a model for a better university, one that fosters success and confidence for a diverse range of students.
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Democracy Is in the Streets
From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, With a New Preface by the Author
James Miller
Harvard University Press, 1994
On June 12, 1962, sixty young student activists drafted a manifesto for their generation—The Port Huron Statement—that ignited a decade of dissent. Democracy Is in the Streets is the definitive history of the major people and ideas that shaped the New Left in America during that turbulent decade. Because the 1960s generation is now moving into positions of power in politics, education, the media, and business, their early history is crucial to our understanding. James Miller, in his new Preface, puts the 1960s and them into a context for our time, claiming that something of value did happen: “Most of the large questions raised by that moment of chaotic openness—political questions about the limits of freedom, and cultural questions, too, about the authority of the past and the anarchy of the new—are with us still.”
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The Diversity Bargain
And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities
Natasha Warikoo
University of Chicago Press, 2016
We’ve heard plenty from politicians and experts on affirmative action and higher education, about how universities should intervene—if at all—to ensure a diverse but deserving student population. But what about those for whom these issues matter the most? In this book, Natasha K. Warikoo deeply explores how students themselves think about merit and race at a uniquely pivotal moment: after they have just won the most competitive game of their lives and gained admittance to one of the world’s top universities.
           
What Warikoo uncovers—talking with both white students and students of color at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford—is absolutely illuminating; and some of it is positively shocking. As she shows, many elite white students understand the value of diversity abstractly, but they ignore the real problems that racial inequality causes and that diversity programs are meant to solve. They stand in fear of being labeled a racist, but they are quick to call foul should a diversity program appear at all to hamper their own chances for advancement. The most troubling result of this ambivalence is what she calls the “diversity bargain,” in which white students reluctantly agree with affirmative action as long as it benefits them by providing a diverse learning environment—racial diversity, in this way, is a commodity, a selling point on a brochure. And as Warikoo shows, universities play a big part in creating these situations. The way they talk about race on campus and the kinds of diversity programs they offer have a huge impact on student attitudes, shaping them either toward ambivalence or, in better cases, toward more productive and considerate understandings of racial difference.
           
Ultimately, this book demonstrates just how slippery the notions of race, merit, and privilege can be. In doing so, it asks important questions not just about college admissions but what the elite students who have succeeded at it—who will be the world’s future leaders—will do with the social inequalities of the wider world.  
 
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Dog Eat Dog
A Novel
Niq Mhlongo
Ohio University Press, 2012
Dog Eat Dog is a remarkable record of being young in a nation undergoing tremendous turmoil, and provides a glimpse into South Africa’s pivotal kwaito (South African hip-hop) generation and life in Soweto. Set in 1994, just as South Africa is making its postapartheid transition, Dog Eat Dog captures the hopes—and crushing disappointments—that characterize such moments in a nation’s history. Raucous and darkly humorous, Dog Eat Dog is narrated by Dingamanzi Makhedama Njomane, a college student in South Africa who spends his days partying, skipping class, and picking up girls. But Dingz, as he is known to his friends, is living in charged times, and his discouraging college life plays out against the backdrop of South Africa’s first democratic elections, the spread of AIDS, and financial difficulties that threaten to force him out of school.
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Doing Style
Youth and Mass Mediation in South India
Constantine V. Nakassis
University of Chicago Press, 2016
In Doing Style, Constantine V. Nakassis explores the world of youth and mass media in South India, where what Tamil youth call “style” anchors their day-to-day lives and media worlds. Through intimate ethnographic descriptions of college life in Tamil Nadu, Nakassis explores the complex ways that acts and objects of style such as brand fashion, English slang, and film representations express the multiple desires and anxieties of this generation, who live in the shadow of the promise of global modernity.
           
As Nakassis shows, while signs of the global, modern world are everywhere in post-liberalization India, for most of these young people this world is still very distant—a paradox that results in youth’s profound sense of being in between. This in-betweenness manifests itself in the ambivalent quality of style, the ways in which stylish objects are necessarily marked as counterfeit, mixed, or ironical. In order to show how this in-betweenness materializes in particular media, Nakassis explores the entanglements between youth peer groups and the sites where such stylish media objects are produced, arguing that these entanglements deeply condition the production and circulation of the media objects themselves. The result is an important and timely look at the tremendous forces of youth culture, globalization, and mass media as they interact in the vibrancy of a rapidly changing India. 
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Educated in Romance
Women, Achievement, and College Culture
Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret A. Eisenhart
University of Chicago Press, 1990
Is romance more important to women in college than grades are? Why do so many women enter college with strong academic backgrounds and firm career goals but leave with dramatically scaled-down ambitions? Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret A. Eisenhart expose a pervasive "culture of romance" on campus: a high-pressure peer system that propels women into a world where their attractiveness to men counts most.
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Financial Basics
A Money-Management Guide for Students, 2nd Edition
Susan Knox
The Ohio State University Press, 2016
Students are confronted with major financial decisions as they enter college, and yet they have little experience with personal finance. Their decisions, if not well made, could adversely affect them throughout their lives. This book is meant to empower students at the beginning of their financial lives with basic, straightforward information on managing bank accounts, creating spending plans, determining how much they can afford to pay for college, making student-loan decisions, establishing a credit history, and other money-management options.
This 2nd edition updates changes in online banking, smartphone apps, credit cards, and student loans but retains basic financial information that ensures students won’t learn about money the hard way. A chapter for parents has been added so they can help their students become financially knowledgeable, and it includes advice for parents about making decisions related to college costs. In addition, a chapter for grandparents contains suggestions on how to help college-bound grandchildren—financially and in other ways—without endangering their own financial security. A basic investments chapter is included for first-time investors.
 
The intent of Financial Basics is to enhance student readers’ financial knowledge and provide money-management options for finding their own best way to become masters of their money.
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Fine Boys
A Novel
Eghosa Imasuen
Ohio University Press, 2021

A coming-of-age tale told from the perspective of Nigeria’s Generation X, caught amid the throes of a nascent pro-democracy movement, demoralizing corruption, and campus violence.

Ewaen is a Nigerian teenager, bored at home in Warri and eager to flee from his parents’ unhappy marriage and incessant quarreling. When Ewaen is admitted to the University of Benin, he makes new friends who, like him, are excited about their newfound independence. They hang out in parking lots, trading gibes in pidgin and English and discovering the pleasures that freedom affords them. But when university strikes begin and ruthlessly violent confraternities unleash mayhem on their campus, Ewaen and his new friends must learn to adapt—or risk becoming the confras' next unwilling recruits.

In his trademark witty, colloquial style, critically acclaimed author Eghosa Imasuen presents everyday Nigerian life against the backdrop of the pro-democracy riots of the 1980s and 1990s, the lost hopes of June 12 (Nigeria’s Democracy Day), and the terror of the Abacha years. Fine Boys is a chronicle of time, not just in Nigeria, but also for its budding post-Biafran generation.

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Five Lives at Harvard
Personality Change During College
Stanley H. King
Harvard University Press, 1973

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Generation at the Crossroads
Apathy and Action on the American Campus
Loeb, Paul R
Rutgers University Press, 1994

Challenging prevailing media stereotypes, Generation at the Crossroads explores the beliefs and choices of the students who came of age in the 1980s and 1990s. For seven years, at over a hundred campuses in thirty states, Paul Loeb asked students about the values they held. He examines their concepts of responsibility, the links they draw between present and future, and how they view themselves in relation to the larger human community in which they live. He brings us a range of voices, from "I'm not that kind of person," to "I had to take a stand." Loeb looks at how the rest of us can serve young people as better role models, and give them courage and vision to help build a better world.

This insightful book explores the culture of withdrawal that dominated American campuses through most of the eighties. He locates its roots in historical ignorance, relentless individualism, mistrust of social movements, and a general isolation from urgent realities. He examines why a steadily increasing minority has begun to take on critical public issues, whether environmental activism, apartheid, hunger and homelessness, affordable education, or racial and sexual equity. Loeb looks at individuals who have overcome precisely the barriers he has described, and how their journeys can become models. The generational choices he explores will shape our common future.

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Generation Vet
Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University
Sue Doe
Utah State University Press, 2014

Institutions of higher education are experiencing the largest influx of enrolled veterans since World War II, and these student veterans are transforming post-secondary classroom dynamics. While many campus divisions like admissions and student services are actively moving to accommodate the rise in this demographic, little research about this population and their educational needs is available, and academic departments have been slower to adjust. In Generation Vet, fifteen chapters offer well-researched, pedagogically savvy recommendations for curricular and programmatic responses to student veterans for English and writing studies departments.

In work with veterans in writing-intensive courses and community contexts, questions of citizenship, disability, activism, community-campus relationships, and retention come to the fore. Moreover, writing-intensive courses can be sites of significant cultural exchanges—even clashes—as veterans bring military values, rhetorical traditions, and communication styles that may challenge the values, beliefs, and assumptions of traditional college students and faculty.

This classroom-oriented text addresses a wide range of issues concerning veterans, pedagogy, rhetoric, and writing program administration. Written by diverse scholar-teachers and written in diverse genres, the essays in this collection promise to enhance our understanding of student veterans, composition pedagogy and administration, and the post-9/11 university.

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Getting In
The Essential Guide to Finding a STEMM Undergrad Research Experience
Paris H. Grey and David G. Oppenheimer
University of Chicago Press, 2023
An empowering guide for students in STEMM that demystifies the process of securing undergraduate research experiences.
 
Conducting research is an important foundation for many undergraduates on STEMM career paths. But landing an extremely competitive research spot that is also an enriching experience involves knowing how to present yourself effectively and an awareness of your goals and expectations. In this book, an expert lab manager and a longtime principal investigator share their secrets for obtaining these coveted positions.
 
Offering advice to students in a wide variety of STEMM fields at both research-intensive universities and primarily undergraduate institutions, Getting In helps students navigate the hidden curriculum of academia, unofficial rules that disproportionately affect first-generation college students and those from low-income backgrounds and communities historically underrepresented in science. The authors provide not only an overview of STEMM research and lab opportunities but also specific strategies for the entire application process—including how to write emails that get noticed by busy professors, how to ask for a research position during office hours, and interview questions to prepare for—so students can claim their place in research settings.
 
With its emphasis on the many interpersonal and professional benefits of research experiences, Getting In equips all STEMM undergrads with the tools they need both to secure these valued positions and to develop habits that will build productive relationships with their future research mentors.

As an undergrad, Getting In will help you:
 
  • determine how much time you can spend on research by evaluating your current activity level and goals.
  • find the time to do research without giving up your social life or risking your GPA.
  • avoid common mistakes in the search, application, or interview that make it harder to find a research experience.
  • write emails that get you noticed by busy professors by customizing the included templates.
  • prepare for tough interview questions so you’ll impress the interviewer with your answers, and be able to determine if the position is right for you.

As a research mentor, Getting In will help your students:
 
  • navigate the hidden curriculum of finding a research experience in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine (STEMM).
  • set realistic expectations for their research experience.
  • understand why conducting research requires effort and will include some failure and other challenges.
  • be active participants in their success in the lab.
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The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading
Ellen C. Carillo
Utah State University Press, 2021

Current Arguments in Composition Series

The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading intervenes in the increasingly popular practice of labor-based grading by expanding the scope of this assessment practice to include students who are disabled and multiply marginalized. Through the lens of disability studies, the book critiques the assumption that labor is a neutral measure by which to assess students and explores how labor-based grading contracts put certain groups of students at a disadvantage. Ellen C. Carillo offers engagement-based grading contracts as an alternative that would provide a more equitable assessment model for students of color, those with disabilities, and students who are multiply marginalized.
 
This short book explores the history of labor-based grading contracts, reviews the scholarship on this assessment tool, highlights the ways in which it normalizes labor as an unbiased tool, and demonstrates how to extend the conversation in new and generative ways both in research and in classrooms. Carillo encourages instructors to reflect on their assessment practices by demonstrating how even assessment methods that are designed through a social-justice lens may unintentionally privilege some students over others.
 

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Hillel at Michigan, 1926/27-1945
Struggles of Jewish Identity in a Pivotal Era
Andrei S. Markovits and Kenneth Garner
Michigan Publishing Services, 2016
This book provides the very first in-depth analysis of the founding decades of a major Hillel chapter in the United States. Hillel at the University of Michigan was founded in 1926 as the fourth such chapter in the United States following its establishment at three other public universities in the Midwest: Illinois (1923); Wisconsin (1924); Ohio State (1925).
 
The study analyzes Hillel's challenges as a big-tent, catch-all institution trying to represent all Jewish students on campus regardless of their religious orientation, cultural preferences, and ideological predilections. It looks at Hillel's interactions with the then powerful Jewish fraternities and sororities that provided the main locus of Jewish life on campus at the time, as well as its relations with the University's leadership and many of its cultural and political constituencies. Most of these activities occurred at a time when anti-Semitism was rife in the United States, particularly in the larger Detroit area, home to Henry Ford and Father Charles Edward Coughlin.
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How College Works
Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs
Harvard University Press, 2013

A Chronicle of Higher Education “Top 10 Books on Teaching” Selection
Winner of the Virginia and Warren Stone Prize

Constrained by shrinking budgets, can colleges do more to improve the quality of education? And can students get more out of college without paying higher tuition? Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs conclude that the limited resources of colleges and students need not diminish the undergraduate experience. How College Works reveals the surprisingly decisive role that personal relationships play in determining a student's collegiate success, and puts forward a set of small, inexpensive interventions that yield substantial improvements in educational outcomes.

“The book shares the narrative of the student experience, what happens to students as they move through their educations, all the way from arrival to graduation. This is an important distinction. [Chambliss and Takacs] do not try to measure what students have learned, but what it is like to live through college, and what those experiences mean both during the time at school, as well as going forward.”
—John Warner, Inside Higher Ed

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Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom
Robert Eaton
West Virginia University Press, 2023

How teachers can help combat higher education’s mental health crisis.

Mental health challenges on college campuses were a huge problem before COVID-19, and now they are even more pronounced. But while much has been written about higher education’s mental health crisis, very little research focuses on the role played by those on campus whose influence on student well-being may well be greatest: teachers. Drawing from interviews with students and the scholarship of teaching and learning, this book helps correct the oversight, examining how faculty can—instead of adding to their own significant workloads or duplicating counselors’ efforts—combat student stress through adjustments to the work they already do as teachers.

Improving Learning and Mental Health in the College Classroom provides practical tips that reduce unnecessary discouragement. It demonstrates how small improvements in teaching can have great impacts in the lives of students with mental health challenges, while simultaneously boosting learning for all students.

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Intellectual Property on Campus
Students' Rights and Responsibilities
TyAnna K. Herrington
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

What issues arise when students’ uses of intellectual materials are legally challenged, and how does the academic context affect them? What happens when users of intellectual property, either within or outside the academic structure, violate students’ rights to their intellectual products? In Intellectual Property on Campus, TyAnna K. Herrington addresses these concerns and more, clearing up the confusion often surrounding intellectual property law and its application in an academic setting. Filled with practical information and simple yet thorough explanations, this enlightening volume provides educators and students with a solid basis for understanding the broader impacts of legal and ethical dilemmas involving intellectual materials.

Herrington provides insight for students into how complex concepts such as patent, trademark, copyright, fair use, and plagiarism affect their work. She outlines the potential effects of the choices students make, as well as the benefits and limitations of legal protection for intellectual property, including the thorny issues of authorship and authority under the 1976 Copyright Act. Herrington also explores the topic of student collaboration—now very common on college campuses—and how it affects intellectual property issues and legal relationships, as well as the impact of new technologies, such as blogs, on student work in educational environments.
            Intellectual Property on Campus also provides useful information for administrators and educators. In particular, Herrington investigates the possible ramifications of their pedagogical and policy choices, and examines in depth the responsibility of instructors to treat students’ intellectual property legally, ethically, and conscientiously. Cautioning educators about the limitations on their control over intellectual materials in an academic setting, Herrington encourages teachers to minimize their influence over student works, instead giving pupils more freedom to control their own creations.
            The volume also investigates the rights, responsibilities, and limitations for users of intellectual property, as opposed to creators, especially as related to student or instructor use of copyrighted materials. Discussed in detail are such issues as fair use and the TEACH Act, as well as the often-intertwined areas of plagiarism, authorship, and copyright. In addition, Herrington addresses recent cultural developments regarding the use and creation of intellectual property by students and instructors.
            Written in a jargon-free style that is easy to understand, Intellectual Property on Campus gives students, instructors, and administrators the information they need to navigate the intricate landscape of law and integrity in the realm of academic creation.

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Japan’s First Student Radicals
Henry DeWitt Smith
Harvard University Press, 1972
Long obscured by the more dramatic activities of post–World War II student activists, the history of the Japanese left-wing student movement during its formative period from 1918 until its suppression in the 1930s is analyzed here in detail for the first time. Focusing on the Shinjinkai (New Man Society) of Tokyo Imperial University, the leading prewar student group, Henry DeWitt Smith describes the origins and evolution of student radicalism in the period between the two World Wars. He concludes with an analysis of the careers of the Shinjinkai members after graduation and with an explanation of the importance of the prewar tradition to the postwar student movement.
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Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms
The Militarization of Aesthetics in Japanese History
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
University of Chicago Press, 2002
Why did almost one thousand highly educated "student soldiers" volunteer to serve in Japan's tokkotai (kamikaze) operations near the end of World War II, even though Japan was losing the war? In this fascinating study of the role of symbolism and aesthetics in totalitarian ideology, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney shows how the state manipulated the time-honored Japanese symbol of the cherry blossom to convince people that it was their honor to "die like beautiful falling cherry petals" for the emperor.

Drawing on diaries never before published in English, Ohnuki-Tierney describes these young men's agonies and even defiance against the imperial ideology. Passionately devoted to cosmopolitan intellectual traditions, the pilots saw the cherry blossom not in militaristic terms, but as a symbol of the painful beauty and unresolved ambiguities of their tragically brief lives. Using Japan as an example, the author breaks new ground in the understanding of symbolic communication, nationalism, and totalitarian ideologies and their execution.
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The Krzyzewskiville Tales
Aaron Dinin
Duke University Press, 2005
Recent Duke University graduate Aaron Dinin has produced an entertaining, imaginative look at Krzyzewskiville, the tent city named after Duke University's head men's basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski (Sha-shef-ski). A unique Duke tradition, Krzyzewskiville is used to determine which students are admitted into key games. Taking Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as his model, Dinin has created characters who narrate their semifictionalized tales—by turns reverent, bawdy, and humorous—to enlighten readers about this cherished institution.

So the story begins. On a wintry night in Durham, North Carolina, writes Dinin, twelve students huddle under the meager protection of a nylon tent. They have little in common except the sacrosanct tradition that has brought them together for the past month. Before the sun next sets, they will anoint themselves in blue and white paint and enter nearby Cameron Indoor Stadium to worship at the altar of Blue Devils basketball. In the meantime, they abide in Krzyzewskiville.

A stranger enters the tent, a respected sportswriter, and suggests that the tenters pass the hours until the next tent check by telling stories of Krzyzewskiville. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims, the students compete to tell the best tale. They report on ribald tenting exploits, relate a dream in which Duke basketball players and coaches test a fan’s loyalty, debate the rationality of tenting as a way of allocating students’ tickets, and describe the spontaneous tent city that sprang up one summer when their beloved “Coach K” was offered a job elsewhere. This storytelling competition creates a loving portrait of the complex rules and tribal customs that make up the rich community and loyal fans that are Krzyzewskiville.

Mickie Krzyzewski, Coach K’s wife and a familiar courtside figure at Duke basketball games, has contributed a foreword praising the “love, commitment, and ownership” of the citizens of Krzyzewskiville.

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Labor-Based Grading Contracts
Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Classroom
Asao B. Inoue
University Press of Colorado, 2023
In the second edition of Labor-Based Grading Contracts, Asao B. Inoue refines his exploration of labor-based grading contracts in the writing classroom. Drawing on antiracist teaching practices, he argues that labor-based grading contracts offer a compassionate approach that is strongly grounded in social justice work. Updated with a new foreword and revised chapters, the book offers a meditation on how Inoue’s use of Freirean problem-posing led him to experiment with grading contracts. The result is a robust Marxian theory of labor that considers Hannah Arendt’s theory of labor-work-action and Barbara Adam’s concept of “timescapes.” The heart of the book details the theoretical and practical ways labor-based grading contracts can be used and assessed for effectiveness in classrooms and programs. Inoue concludes his exploration of labor-based grading by moving outside the classroom, considering how assessing writing in the socially just ways he offers in the book may provide a way to address the violence and discord seen in the world today.
 
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Labor-Based Grading Contracts
Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom
Asao B. Inoue
University Press of Colorado, 2019
In Labor-Based Grading Contracts, Asao B. Inoue argues for the use of labor-based grading contracts along with compassionate practices to determine course grades as a way to do social justice work with students. He frames this practice by considering how Freirean problem-posing led him to experiment with grading contracts and explore the literature on grading contracts. Inoue offers a robust Marxian theory of labor that considers Hannah Arendt's theory of labor-work-action and Barbara Adam's concept of "timescapes." The heart of the book details the theoretical and practical ways labor-based grading contracts can be used and assessed for effectiveness in classrooms and programs. Inoue concludes the book by moving outside the classroom, considering how assessing writing in the socially just ways he offers in the book may provide a way to address the violence and discord seen in the world today.
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Latin American University Students
A Six Nation Study
Arthur Liebman, Kenneth F. Walker, and Myron Glazer
Harvard University Press, 1972
Why does the interaction between young people and the university produce a number of Latin American students opposed to their governments and to the existing social structure? The authors of this study of student political attitudes and behavior explored this question with students in Colombia, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, and Uruguay.
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Leading the Way
Student Engagement and Nationally Competitive Awards
Suzanne McCray
University of Arkansas Press, 2009
Here are eleven essays addressing various aspects of the application process: building an office, engaging students in research, connecting them to internships and other special opportunities, embracing diversity, defining leadership, involving faculty, and preparing for an interview. There are also realistic assessments of the odds of winning a scholarship. Three of the essays are by directors or presidents of the Ron Brown Scholar Program, the Senator George J. Mitchell Scholarship Research Institute, and the Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation. The essays are a result of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors conference, NAFA in Washington: Scholarships in a National Context, held in Washington, D.C., in July of 2007. The collection is a valuable resource for faculty, advisors, and administrators who want to provide opportunities for student engagement and to use the process to help shape tomorrow’s leaders. The book also includes two appendices: “NAFA Foundation and Institutional Membership” and “Competitive Scholarships, Opportunities, Internships, and Programs at a Glance.”
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The Lost Promise
American Universities in the 1960s
Ellen Schrecker
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The Lost Promise is a magisterial examination of the turmoil that rocked American universities in the 1960s, with a unique focus on the complex roles played by professors as well as students.

The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia’s golden age, when universities—well-funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility—embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions’ calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy. In The Lost Promise, Ellen Schrecker—our foremost historian of both the McCarthy era and the modern American university—delivers a far-reaching examination of how and why it happened.

Schrecker illuminates how US universities’ explosive growth intersected with the turmoil of the 1960s, fomenting an unprecedented crisis where dissent over racial inequality and the Vietnam War erupted into direct action. Torn by internal power struggles and demonized by conservative voices, higher education never fully recovered, resulting in decades of underfunding and today’s woefully inequitable system. As Schrecker’s magisterial history makes blazingly clear, the complex blend of troubles that disrupted the university in that pivotal period haunts the ivory tower to this day.
 
 
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Mad at School
Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life
Margaret Price
University of Michigan Press, 2011

"A very important study that will appeal to a disability studies audience as well as scholars in social movements, social justice, critical pedagogy, literacy education, professional development for disability and learning specialists in access centers and student counseling centers, as well as the broader domains of sociology and education."
---Melanie Panitch, Ryerson University

"Ableism is alive and well in higher education. We do not know how to abandon the myth of the 'pure (ivory) tower that props up and is propped up by ableist ideology.' . . . Mad at School is thoroughly researched and pathbreaking. . . . The author's presentation of her own experience with mental illness is woven throughout the text with candor and eloquence."
---Linda Ware, State University of New York at Geneseo

Mad at School explores the contested boundaries between disability, illness, and mental illness in the setting of U.S. higher education. Much of the research and teaching within disability studies assumes a disabled body but a rational and energetic (an "agile") mind. In Mad at School, scholar and disabilities activist Margaret Price asks: How might our education practices change if we understood disability to incorporate the disabled mind?

Mental disability (more often called "mental illness") is a topic of fast-growing interest in all spheres of American culture, including popular, governmental, aesthetic, and academic. Mad at School is a close study of the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture. Investigating spaces including classrooms, faculty meeting rooms, and job searches, Price challenges her readers to reconsider long-held values of academic life, including productivity, participation, security, and independence. Ultimately, she argues that academic discourse both produces and is produced by a tacitly privileged "able mind," and that U.S. higher education would benefit from practices that create a more accessible academic world.

Mad at School is the first book to use a disability-studies perspective to focus on the ways that mental disabilities impact academic culture at institutions of higher education. Individual chapters examine the language used to denote mental disability; the role of "participation" and "presence" in student learning; the role of "collegiality" in faculty work; the controversy over "security" and free speech that has arisen in the wake of recent school shootings; and the marginalized status of independent scholars with mental disabilities.

Margaret Price is Associate Professor of English at Spelman College.

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Meaningful Grading
A Guide for Faculty in the Arts
Hoag Holmgren
West Virginia University Press, 2018

College and university faculty in the arts (visual, studio, language, music, design, and others) regularly grade and assess undergraduate student work but often with little guidance or support. As a result, many arts faculty, especially new faculty, adjunct faculty, and graduate student instructors, feel bewildered and must “reinvent the wheel” when grappling with the challenges and responsibilities of grading and assessing student work.

Meaningful Grading: A Guide for Faculty in the Arts enables faculty to create and implement effective assessment methodologies—research based and field tested—in traditional and online classrooms. In doing so, the book reveals how the daunting challenges of grading in the arts can be turned into opportunities for deeper student learning, increased student engagement, and an enlivened pedagogy.

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A Mother's Kisses
Bruce Jay Friedman
University of Chicago Press, 2000
A Mother's Kisses is the story of Joseph, a tall, scattered looking boy of seventeen and his wonderfully indomitable mother, Meg, who is resolved, in the summer after her son's high-school graduation to start arranging his life for him, even going so far as to accompany him to college. A work of roaring comedy and emotional honesty, A Mother's Kisses is a classic of modern fiction.
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Nationally Competitive Scholarships
Serving Students and the Public Good
Suzanne McCray
University of Arkansas Press, 2007
Guidance for students applying for national scholarships Nationally competitive scholarship programs attract thousands of applicants every year for a relatively small number of awards. Providing informed and dedicated support to applicants is the critical and fundamental goal of the National Association of Fellowships Advisors (NAFA). The thirteen essays in this volume are a direct result of the 2005 NAFA conference held in Louisville. Contributors include both scholarship advisors and representatives of the Truman and Marshall foundations as well as the former executive director of the US-UK Fulbright Commission. These essays provide practical information ranging from helping faculty write persuasive letters of recommendation to serving international students effectively to negotiating the British and Irish high-educational systems. In addition to providing the students with useful tips, these essays also reflect on the broader impact of the application process. They address the successes of students who do not win as well as the public-service involvement of those who do as they give back to their campus, local, and global communities.
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On the Cusp
The Yale College Class of 1960 and a World on the Verge of Change
Daniel Horowitz
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
How did the 1950s become "The Sixties"? This is the question at the heart of Daniel Horowitz's On the Cusp. Part personal memoir, part collective biography, and part cultural history, the book illuminates the dynamics of social and political change through the experiences of a small, and admittedly privileged, generational cohort.

A Jewish "townie" from New Haven when he entered Yale College in fall 1956, Horowitz reconstructs the undergraduate career of the class of 1960 and follows its story into the next decade. He begins by looking at curricular and extracurricular life on the all-male campus, then ranges beyond the confines of Yale to larger contexts, including the local drama of urban renewal, the lingering shadow of McCarthyism, and decolonization movements around the world. He ponders the role of the university in protecting the prerogatives of class while fostering social mobility, and examines the growing significance of race and gender in American politics and culture, spurred by a convergence of the personal and the political. Along the way he traces the political evolution of his classmates, left and right, as Cold War imperatives lose force and public attention shifts to the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam.

Throughout Horowitz draws on a broad range of sources, including personal interviews, writings by classmates, reunion books, issues of the Yale Daily News, and other undergraduate publications, as well as his own letters and college papers. The end product is a work consistent with much of Horowitz's previously published scholarship on postwar America, further exposing the undercurrent of discontent and dissent that ran just beneath the surface of the so-called Cold War consensus.
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Outstanding Books for the College Bound
Titles and Programs for a New Generation
Angela Carstensen
American Library Association, 2011

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Poison in the Ivy
Race Relations and the Reproduction of Inequality on Elite College Campuses
Byrd, W. Carson
Rutgers University Press, 2017
The world of elite campuses is one of rarified social circles, as well as prestigious educational opportunities. W. Carson Byrd studied twenty-eight of the most selective colleges and universities in the United States to see whether elite students’ social interactions with each other might influence their racial beliefs in a positive way, since many of these graduates will eventually hold leadership positions in society. He found that students at these universities believed in the success of the ‘best and the brightest,’ leading them to situate differences in race and status around issues of merit and individual effort.

Poison in the Ivy challenges popular beliefs about the importance of cross-racial interactions as an antidote to racism in the increasingly diverse United States. He shows that it is the context and framing of such interactions on college campuses that plays an important role in shaping students’ beliefs about race and inequality in everyday life for the future political and professional leaders of the nation. Poison in the Ivy is an eye-opening look at race on elite college campuses, and offers lessons for anyone involved in modern American higher education.  
 
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Polished
College, Class, and the Burdens of Social Mobility
Melissa Osborne
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An illuminating look at the emotional costs of mobility faced by first-generation and low-income college students.
 
While college initiates a major transition in all students’ lives, low-income and first-generation students attending elite schools are often entering entirely new worlds. Amid the financial and academic challenges of adapting to college, their emotional lives, too, undergo a transformation. Surrounded by peers from different classes and cultural backgrounds, they are faced with an impossible choice: turn away from their former lives to blend in or stay true to themselves and remain on the outside.

An ethnography that draws on in-depth interviews with one hundred and fifty first-generation and low-income students across eighteen elite institutions, Polished uncovers the hidden consequences of the promise of social mobility in today’s educational landscape. Sociologist Melissa Osborne reveals how the very support designed to propel first-generation students forward can unexpectedly reshape their identities, often putting them at odds with their peers and families. Without direct institutional support, this emotional journey can lead to alienation, mental health challenges, poor academic outcomes, and difficult choices between upward mobility or maintaining authenticity and community. Whether you're an educator, advocate, or student, Polished provides a powerful perspective on the uncharted challenges of social mobility and personal identity during college.
 
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The Politics of Puerto Rican University Students
By Arthur Liebman
University of Texas Press, 1970

In the 1960s, when students everywhere were coming alive politically, and when the Latin American student activist in particular became as archetypal of radicalism as the Latin American dictator was of repression, Puerto Rican students remained strangely silent. With the exception of FUPI, a radical student group with only a small following, student political behavior conformed to that of Puerto Rican society in general—center to conservative.

Historically, Puerto Rico has been economically and politically dominated first by Spain and then by the United States. But unlike other colonial dependencies in Latin America, Puerto Rico has never rebelled. Puerto Rican politics centers on the status issue—independence, statehood, or association for the island. But no legendary victories, no heroic defeats offer a battle cry for nationalists, leftists, and independistas. Overwhelming foreign influence in the Church, the schools, the economy, and eventually the mass media deprived the island of any strong indigenous institutions that might foster nationalism. Militancy lies outside the mainstream of Puerto Rican tradition.

Against this historical and cultural backdrop, Arthur Liebman closely examines the social background and political activity of students at the Rio Piedras campus of the University of Puerto Rico. Based on personal interviews with students, faculty, and administrators, as well as on a survey of the student body, his study reveals the strength of political inheritance among university students in Puerto Rico. The student left is small and weak largely because the left of the parents’ generation is small and weak. To date, Puerto Rican students have been the children of their parents and of their society.

Within a university that emphasizes practicality, the nonmilitant majority of the students study education, business, engineering, and medicine, being trained to participate in and to reap the rewards of the status quo. Student leftists, in the minority, generally study history, economics, sociology, and law—fields that open wider perspectives on their society and its problems and offer no immediate guarantee of its benefits. Brighter, less religious, and more dissatisfied with their role as a student, the student leftists stand apart from their cohort at the University of Puerto Rico. Like their adult counterparts, they are an anomaly in an acquisitive, relatively conservative society.

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Practice for Life
Making Decisions in College
Lee Cuba, Nancy Jennings, Suzanne Lovett, and Joseph Swingle
Harvard University Press, 2016

From the day they arrive on campus, college students spend four years—or sometimes more—making decisions that shape every aspect of their academic and social lives. Whether choosing a major or a roommate, some students embrace decision-making as an opportunity for growth, while others seek to minimize challenges and avoid risk. Practice for Life builds a compelling case that a liberal arts education offers students a complex, valuable process of self-creation, one that begins in college but continues far beyond graduation.

Sifting data from a five-year study that followed over two hundred students at seven New England liberal arts colleges, the authors uncover what drives undergraduates to become engaged with their education. They found that students do not experience college as having a clear beginning and end but as a continuous series of new beginnings. They start and restart college many times, owing to the rhythms of the academic calendar, the vagaries of student housing allocation, and other factors. This dynamic has drawbacks as well as advantages. Not only students but also parents and faculty place enormous weight on some decisions, such as declaring a major, while overlooking the small but significant choices that shape students' daily experience.

For most undergraduates, deep engagement with their college education is at best episodic rather than sustained. Yet these disruptions in engagement provide students with abundant opportunities for reflection and course-correction as they learn to navigate the future uncertainties of adult life.

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The Privileged Poor
How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students
Anthony Abraham Jack
Harvard University Press, 2019

An NPR Favorite Book of the Year

“Breaks new ground on social and educational questions of great import.”
Washington Post

“An essential work, humane and candid, that challenges and expands our understanding of the lives of contemporary college students.”
—Paul Tough, author of Helping Children Succeed

“Eye-opening…Brings home the pain and reality of on-campus poverty and puts the blame squarely on elite institutions.”
Washington Post

“Jack’s investigation redirects attention from the matter of access to the matter of inclusion…His book challenges universities to support the diversity they indulge in advertising.”
New Yorker

The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors—and their coffers—to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In this bracing exposé, Anthony Jack shows that many students’ struggles continue long after they’ve settled in their dorms. Admission, they quickly learn, is not the same as acceptance. This powerfully argued book documents how university policies and campus culture can exacerbate preexisting inequalities and reveals why some students are harder hit than others.

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The Purposeful Graduate
Why Colleges Must Talk to Students about Vocation
Tim Clydesdale
University of Chicago Press, 2015
We all know that higher education has changed dramatically over the past two decades. Historically a time of exploration and self-discovery, the college years have been narrowed toward an increasingly singular goal—career training—and college students these days forgo the big questions about who they are and how they can change the world and instead focus single-mindedly on their economic survival. In The Purposeful Graduate, Tim Clydesdale elucidates just what a tremendous loss this is, for our youth, our universities, and our future as a society. At the same time, he shows that it doesn’t have to be this way: higher education can retain its higher cultural role, and students with a true sense of purpose—of personal, cultural, and intellectual value that cannot be measured by a wage—can be streaming out of every one of its institutions.

The key, he argues, is simple: direct, systematic, and creative programs that engage undergraduates on the question of purpose. Backing up his argument with rich data from a Lilly Endowment grant that funded such programs on eighty-eight different campuses, he shows that thoughtful engagement of the notion of vocational calling by students, faculty, and staff can bring rich rewards for all those involved: greater intellectual development, more robust community involvement, and a more proactive approach to lifelong goals. Nearly every institution he examines—from internationally acclaimed research universities to small liberal arts colleges—is a success story, each designing and implementing its own program, that provides students with deep resources that help them to launch flourishing lives.

Flying in the face of the pessimistic forecast of higher education’s emaciated future, Clydesdale offers a profoundly rich alternative, one that can be achieved if we simply muster the courage to talk with students about who they are and what they are meant to do.
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The Rights of Youth
American Colleges and Student Revolt, 1798–1815
Steven J. Novak
Harvard University Press, 1977

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Rivals
Legendary Matchups That Made Sports History
David K. Wiggins
University of Arkansas Press, 2010
The sixteen original essays in this collection cover influential and famous rivalries from a variety of sports, including track and field, golf, boxing, basketball, tennis, ice skating, baseball, football, soccer, and more. The essays are diverse, but together they illustrate what is common to any rivalry: equally matched opponents that often have decidedly different backgrounds, styles, and personalities. These differences may center on race and culture, political and societal ideologies, personality, geography, or religion—a mix intensified by fans and the media. From highly publicized and emotionally charged individual competitions to bitterly fought team contests, Rivals illuminates what one-of-a-kind opponents and the passion they inspire tell us about ourselves and our society.
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Roads Less Traveled and Other Perspectives on Nationally Competitive Scholarships
Suzanne McCray
University of Arkansas Press, 2017
Applying for nationally competitive scholarships can be a daunting process for students. Thousands apply each year for scholarships with familiar names like the Rhodes, Marshall, Gates Cambridge, Schwarzman, Fulbright, Truman, Goldwater, Udall, and Madison, or for one of many STEM opportunities like National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships or National Defense Science and  Engineering Fellowship.  

For many, the applications present an unfamiliar territory, so students seek out informed advisors who can help them navigate the terrain. This volume of essays is a great way for anyone advising students through an application to become an expert. Roads Less Traveled and Other Perspectives on Nationally Competitive Scholarships provides critical information from scholarship foundations about the best ways to guide students—from considering a career path, to completing the application, to preparing for an interview. Experienced advisors also share helpful tips on practical topics like writing letters of endorsement or assisting those who want to study abroad, and they provide programmatic advice on how to broaden the pool of applicants, address those with financial needs, and make all who apply feel the process has value beyond winning. Roads Less Traveled and Other Perspectives on Nationally Competitive Scholarships is a must for anyone advising students on scholarships.

 
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Rumors of Indiscretion
The University of Missouri's "Sex Questionnaire" Scandal in the Jazz Age
Lawrence J. Nelson
University of Missouri Press, 2003
In March 1929 hundreds of students at the University of Missouri received a questionnaire that asked their opinions of marriage, family, and sexual issues. Several questions were regarded as too intimate for university students, especially females. The so-called Sex Questionnaire, the product of a sociology class project, soon fell into the hands of the university’s president, dean of women, and the local press, which deemed it “A Filthy Questionnaire.” The Missouri legislature soon jumped into the controversy as the ensuing uproar went statewide and attracted national attention; a cry arose for the expulsion of the students and professors responsible. Beyond the questionnaire, rumors also circulated that something “too terrible” to mention had gone on at the university. Investigations followed, including one by the American Association of University Professors.
Although the controversy surrounding the questionnaire was not limited to sharp generational lines, college students—part of the decade’s “modern youth”—challenged Victorian ideas held by those who were frightened by the path American society seemed to be following during the 1920s. Nelson places the episode within the history and development of the University of Missouri as well as the “culture war” in America during the Jazz Age. He argues that the decade was marked by both change and the persistence of tradition. But while many sought change, radicals were few. What was actually lost in the Jazz Age was Victorianism and its rigid requirements for an orderly culture in which each member had a sharply defined role, violations of which carried societal sanctions.
Nelson uses the University of Missouri episode to demonstrate that while Victorianism’s unrealistic notions were lost, tradition and its most basic tenets—decorum, respect for authority, a sense of shame, strong family relationships, and the definition of right and wrong—survived. Employing previously untapped archival and printed material, Rumors of Indiscretion examines sexual attitudes, divorce, the “new woman,” the limits of academic expression, and much more in an exciting but uneasy time in American life.
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Sex and the University
Celebrity, Controversy, and a Student Journalism Revolution
Reimold, Daniel
Rutgers University Press, 2010
Who would think that Monday morning's page-turning sports scores could be trumped by Sex on Tuesday? But, during the last decade or so, college newspaper sex columns and campus sex magazines have revolutionized student journalism and helped define a new sexual generation. They are the ultimate authorities on student social interaction, relationships, and sex at a time when sexual activity, sexual dangers, and sexual ignorance are prevalent and sex has become the wallpaper of students' lives.

Daniel Reimold gives readers of all generations an inside look at this phenomenon. Student sex columnists and sex magazine editors are both celebrities on their home campuses. One columnist, echoing the sentiments of many, said he became an overnight rock star golden child of journalism. But, with celebrity comes controversy. These columns and magazines have sparked contentious and far-reaching legal, religious, and intergenerational debates about sex, the student press, and the place of both within higher education. They are also the most prominent modern student press combatants in the fight for free speech. And they have blurred journalistic boundaries between what is considered public and private, art and pornography, and gossip and news.

Sex and the University
explores the celebrity status that student sex columnists and magazine editors have received, the controversies they have caused, and the sexual generation and student journalism revolution they represent. Complete with a sexicon of slang, this book also dives into the columns and magazines themselves, sharing for the first time what modern students are saying about their sex and love lives, in their own words.
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Speaking of Race and Class
The Student Experience at an Elite College
Elizabeth Aries
Temple University Press, 2012

In Speaking of Race and Class, the follow-up volume to her groundbreaking Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, Elizabeth Aries completes her four-year study of diversity at a prestigious liberal arts college. Here, the 58 students—affluent, lower-income, black, and white—that Aries has interviewed since they were Amherst freshmen provide a complete picture of what and how each group learned about issues of race and class.

Aries presents the students’ personal perceptions of their experiences. She reveals the extent to which learning from diversity takes place on campus, and examines the distinct challenges that arise for students living in this heterogeneous community. Aries also looks more broadly at how colleges and universities across the country are addressing the challenges surrounding diversity. Speaking of Race and Class testifies to the programming and practices that have proven successful.

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Stalinist Confessions
Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University
Igal Halfin
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009

During Stalin's Great Terror, accusations of treason struck fear in the hearts of Soviet citizens-and lengthy imprisonment or firing squads often followed. Many of the accused sealed their fates by agreeing to confessions after torture or interrogation by the NKVD. Some, however, gave up without a fight.

In Stalinist Confessions, Igal Halfin investigates the phenomenon of a mass surrender to the will of the state. He deciphers the skillfully rendered discourse through which Stalin defined his cult of personality and consolidated his power by building a grassroots base of support and instilling a collective psyche in every citizen. By rooting out evil (opposition) wherever it hid, good communists could realize purity, morality, and their place in the greatest society in history. Confessing to trumped-up charges, comrades made willing sacrifices to their belief in socialism and the necessity of finding and making examples of its enemies.

Halfin focuses his study on Leningrad Communist University as a microcosm of Soviet society. Here, eager students proved their loyalty to the new socialism by uncovering opposition within the University. Through their meetings and self-reports, students sought to become Stalin's New Man.

Using his exhaustive research in Soviet archives including NKVD records, party materials, student and instructor journals, letters, and newspapers, Halfin examines the transformation in the language of Stalinist socialism. From an initial attitude that dismissed dissent as an error in judgment and redeemable through contrition to a doctrine where members of the opposition became innately wicked and their reform impossible, Stalin's socialism now defined loyalty in strictly black and white terms. Collusion or allegiance (real or contrived, now or in the past) with “enemies of the people” (Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Germans, capitalists) was unforgivable. The party now took to the task of purging itself with ever-increasing zeal.

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Strategizing against Sweatshops
The Global Economy, Student Activism, and Worker Empowerment
Matthew S. Williams
Temple University Press, 2020

For the past few decades, the U.S. anti-sweatshop movement was bolstered by actions from American college students. United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) effectively advanced the cause of workers’ rights in sweatshops around the world. Strategizing against Sweatshops chronicles the evolution of student activism and presents an innovative model of how college campuses are a critical site for the advancement of global social justice. 

Matthew Williams shows how USAS targeted apparel companies outsourcing production to sweatshop factories with weak or non-existent unions. USAS did so by developing a campaign that would support workers organizing by leveraging their college’s partnerships with global apparel firms like Nike and Adidas to abide by pro-labor codes of conduct. 

Strategizing against Sweatshops exemplifies how organizations and actors cooperate across a movement to formulate a coherent strategy responsive to the conditions in their social environment. Williams also provides a model of political opportunity structure to show how social context shapes the chances of a movement’s success—and how movements can change that political opportunity structure in turn. Ultimately, he shows why progressive student activism remains important.

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Student Activism in Asia
Between Protest and Powerlessness
Meredith L. Weiss
University of Minnesota Press, 2012

Since World War II, students in East and Southeast Asia have led protest movements that toppled authoritarian regimes in countries such as Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. Elsewhere in the region, student protests have shaken regimes until they were brutally suppressed—most famously in China’s Tiananmen Square and in Burma. But despite their significance, these movements have received only a fraction of the notice that has been given to American and European student protests of the 1960s and 1970s. The first book in decades to redress this neglect, Student Activism in Asia tells the story of student protest movements across Asia.

Taking an interdisciplinary, comparative approach, the contributors examine ten countries, focusing on those where student protests have been particularly fierce and consequential: China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. They explore similarities and differences among student movements in these countries, paying special attention to the influence of four factors: higher education systems, students’ collective identities, students’ relationships with ruling regimes, and transnational flows of activist ideas and inspirations.

The authors include leading specialists on student activism in each of the countries investigated. Together, these experts provide a rich picture of an important tradition of political protest that has ebbed and flowed but has left indelible marks on Asia’s sociopolitical landscape.

Contributors: Patricio N. Abinales, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Prajak Kongkirati, Thammasat U, Thailand; Win Min, Vahu Development Institute; Stephan Ortmann, City U of Hong Kong; Mi Park, Dalhousie U, Canada; Patricia G. Steinhoff, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Mark R. Thompson, City U of Hong Kong; Teresa Wright, California State U, Long Beach.

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Students of the World
Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo
Pedro Monaville
Duke University Press, 2022
On June 30, 1960—the day of the Congo’s independence—Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba gave a fiery speech in which he conjured a definitive shift away from a past of colonial oppression toward a future of sovereignty, dignity, and justice. His assassination a few months later showed how much neocolonial forces and the Cold War jeopardized African movements for liberation. In Students of the World, Pedro Monaville traces a generation of Congolese student activists who refused to accept the foreclosure of the future Lumumba envisioned. These students sought to decolonize university campuses, but the projects of emancipation they articulated went well beyond transforming higher education. Monaville explores the modes of being and thinking that shaped their politics. He outlines a trajectory of radicalization in which gender constructions, cosmopolitan dispositions, and the influence of a dissident popular culture mattered as much as access to various networks of activism and revolutionary thinking. By illuminating the many worlds inhabited by Congolese students at the time of decolonization, Monaville charts new ways of writing histories of the global 1960s from Africa.
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Success for All
Programs to Support Students Throughout Their College Experience
Melisa N. Choroszy
University of Nevada Press, 2019
While the most important measure of success for many degree-seeking students is the timely attainment of a Bachelor’s degree, there remains a host of other indicators of student success that vary by student population and students’ personal goals. Many of these smaller successes lead to the ultimate goal of graduation and are significant triumphs throughout the journey through higher education.

Success for All is a strategic guide for administrators and educators that offers methods for advising students through the myriad of challenges they face. Every bit of success contributes to the accomplishment of a larger goal, and this book highlights success at every level. It provides a specific roadmap to the research, services, and programs at the University of Nevada, Reno and Truckee Meadows Community College that support student success in undergraduate and graduate programs regardless of a student’s social, emotional, or prior academic experiences. Contributors discuss how to make students feel welcome in their social and educational environments and how to directly assist them with the timely completion of their degree. Administrators and educators demonstrate how these programs help make a positive contribution to the students and the institutions they serve while implementing practical solutions to increase graduation rates.
 
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Talks to Teachers on Psychology
And to Students on Some of Life's Ideals
William James
Harvard University Press, 1983

Despite the modesty of its title, the publication of this book in 1899 was a significant event. It marked the first application of the relatively new discipline of psychology, and specifically of James's theses in The Principles of Psychology, to educational theory and classroom practice. The book went through twelve printings in as many years and has never been out of print. Among its innovative features were James's maxims "No reception without reaction" and "No impression without expression"; a new emphasis on the biology of behavior and on the role of instincts; and discussions of the relevance to elementary school education of what is known about will, attention, memory, apperception, and the association of ideas.

Appended to the fifteen talks to schoolteachers were three talks to college students, as pertinent today as when they were written: "The Gospel of Relaxation," "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," and "What Makes a Life Significant?"

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The Thinking Student's Guide to College
75 Tips for Getting a Better Education
Andrew Roberts
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Each fall, thousands of eager freshmen descend on college and university campuses expecting the best education imaginable: inspiring classes taught by top-ranked professors, academic advisors who will guide them to a prestigious job or graduate school, and an environment where learning flourishes outside the classroom as much as it does in lecture halls. Unfortunately, most of these freshmen soon learn that academic life is not what they imagined. Classes are taught by overworked graduate students and adjuncts rather than seasoned faculty members, undergrads receive minimal attention from advisors or administrators, and potentially valuable campus resources remain outside their grasp.

Andrew Roberts’ Thinking Student’s Guide to College helps students take charge of their university experience by providing a blueprint they can follow to achieve their educational goals—whether at public or private schools, large research universities or small liberal arts colleges. An inside look penned by a professor at Northwestern University, this book offers concrete tips on choosing a college, selecting classes, deciding on a major, interacting with faculty, and applying to graduate school. Here, Roberts exposes the secrets of the ivory tower to reveal what motivates professors, where to find loopholes in university bureaucracy, and most importantly, how to get a personalized education. Based on interviews with faculty and cutting-edge educational research, The Thinking Student’s Guide to College is a necessary handbook for students striving to excel academically, creatively, and personally during their undergraduate years.

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Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities
Issues, Examples, Solutions
Will Toor and Spenser W. Havlick
Island Press, 2004

Colleges and universities across North America are facing difficult questions about automobile use and transportation. Lack of land for new parking lots and the desire to preserve air quality are but a few of the factors leading institutions toward a new vision based upon expanded transit access, better bicycle and pedestrian facilities, and incentives that encourage less driving.

Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities presents a comprehensive examination of techniques available to manage transportation in campus communities. Authors Will Toor and Spenser W. Havlick give readers the understanding they need to develop alternatives to single-occupancy vehicles, and sets forth a series of case studies that show how transportation demand management programs have worked in a variety of campus communities, ranging from small towns to large cities. The case studies in Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities highlight what works and what doesn't, as well as describing the programmatic and financial aspects involved.

No other book has surveyed the topic and produced viable options for reducing the parking, pollution, land use, and traffic problems that are created by an over-reliance on automobiles by students, faculty, and staff. Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities is a unique source of information and ideas for anyone concerned with transportation planning and related issues.


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Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity
Charles T. Clotfelter
Harvard University Press, 2017

For decades, leaders in higher education have voiced their intention to expand college education to include disadvantaged groups. Colleges have embraced and defended public policies that push back against discrimination and make college more affordable. And yet, as the economist Charles Clotfelter shows, America’s system of undergraduate education was unequal in 1970 and is even more so today.

In Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity, Clotfelter presents quantitative comparisons across selective and less selective colleges from the 1970s to the present, in exploration of three themes: diversity, competition, and inequality. Diversity shows itself in the variety of colleges’ objectives but also in the disparity of the material and human resources at their disposal. Competition operates through both the supply and the demand sides of the market, with college admissions becoming more meritocratic even as the most desirable colleges choose to contend fiercely for top-tier students rather than accommodate rising numbers of qualified applicants. Clotfelter shows that exclusive colleges have also benefited disproportionately from America’s growing income inequality. As their endowments have ballooned, their students have become more academically advantaged, owing in part to the extraordinary steps affluent families take to groom their children for college admission.

Clotfelter finds that despite a revolution in civil rights, billions spent on financial aid, and the commitment of colleges to greater equality, stratification has grown starker. Top colleges cater largely to children of elites.

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We Made Uranium!
And Other True Stories from the University of Chicago's Extraordinary Scavenger Hunt
Edited by Leila Sales
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Item #176: A fire drill. No, not an exercise in which occupants of a building practice leaving the building safely. A drill which safely emits a bit of fire, the approximate shape and size of a drill bit.
 
Item #74: Enter a lecture class in street clothes. Receive loud phone call. Shout “I NEED TO GO, THE CITY NEEDS ME!” Remove street clothes to reveal superhero apparel. Run out for the good of the land.
 
Item #293: Hypnotizing a chicken seems easy, but if the Wikipedia article on the practice is to be believed, debate on the optimal method is heated. Do some trials on a real chicken and submit a report . . . for science of course.
 
Item #234: A walking, working, people-powered but preferably wind-powered Strandbeest.
 
Item #188: Fattest cat. Points per pound.
 
The University of Chicago’s annual Scavenger Hunt (or “Scav”) is one of the most storied college traditions in America. Every year, teams of hundreds of competitors scramble over four days to complete roughly 350 challenges. The tasks range from moments of silliness to 1,000-mile road trips, and they call on participants to fully embrace the absurd. For students it is a rite of passage, and for the surrounding community it is a chance to glimpse the lighter side of a notoriously serious university.

We Made Uranium! shares the stories behind Scav, told by participants and judges from the hunt’s more than thirty-year history. The twenty-three essays range from the shockingly successful (a genuine, if minuscule, nuclear reaction created in a dorm room) to the endearing failures (it’s hard to build a carwash for a train), and all the chicken hypnotisms and permanent tattoos in between. Taken together, they show how a scavenger hunt once meant for blowing off steam before finals has grown into one of the most outrageous annual traditions at any university. The tales told here are absurd, uplifting, hilarious, and thought-provoking—and they are all one hundred percent true.
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What the Best College Students Do
Ken Bain
Harvard University Press, 2012

The author of the best-selling What the Best College Teachers Do is back with more humane, doable, and inspiring help, this time for students who want to get the most out of college—and every other educational enterprise, too.

The first thing they should do? Think beyond the transcript. The creative, successful people profiled in this book—college graduates who went on to change the world we live in—aimed higher than straight A’s. They used their four years to cultivate habits of thought that would enable them to grow and adapt throughout their lives.

Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a “meta-cognitive” understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn’t achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow.

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WHEN KIDS GO TO COLLEGE
A PARENTS GUIDE TO CHANGING RELATIONSHIP
BARBARA & PHILIP R. NEWMAN & NEWMAN
The Ohio State University Press, 1992

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The Writing Cure
Psychoanalysis, Composition, and the Aims of Education
Mark Bracher
Southern Illinois University Press, 1999

Psychoanalysis and writing instruction have much to offer each other, asserts Mark Bracher. In this book, Bracher examines the intersection between these two fields and proposes pedagogical uses of psychoanalytic technique for writing instruction.

Psychoanalysis reveals that the writing process is profoundly affected by factors that current theories have largely neglected—forces such as enjoyment, desire, fantasy, and anxiety, which, moreover, are often unconscious. Articulating an approach based on the work of Jacques Lacan, Bracher shows how a psychoanalytic perspective can offer useful insights into the nature of the writing process, the sources of writing problems, and the dynamics of writing instruction. He further demonstrates that writing instruction constitutes the most favorable venue outside of individual psychoanalytic treatment for pursuing psychoanalytic research and practice. Like psychoanalytic treatment proper, writing instruction can function as a way of reducing psychological conflict and as a means of pursuing psychoanalytic research into the workings of the mind. Empirical studies and personal testimonies have demonstrated the psychological (and even the physical) benefits of writing about personal conflict in an academic setting; such benefits promise to be enhanced and consolidated through the application of psychoanalytic principles to the teaching of writing.

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Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges
The Pursuit of Equality in Postsecondary Education
Jessica Nastal
University Press of Colorado, 2023
Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges brings together two-year college teacher-scholar-activists from across the U.S. to share stories, strategies, and data about local efforts at reforming writing placement assessment to advance educational access and equity. The chapters in this edited collection help faculty and writing program administrators navigate the shifting landscape of placement in the 2020s. Contributors demonstrate how two-year colleges have addressed local and state-level pressures for reform, especially at a time when the nation has been rocked by the COVID-19 pandemic with its inequitable economic, social, and physical toll.
 
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Yenching University and Sino-Western Relations, 1916–1952
Philip West
Harvard University Press, 1976

Yenching University was perhaps the most impressive example of Sino-Western cooperation in the twentieth century. From its founding in 1916 by Western missionaries until the Communist victory, Yenching mirrored the colorful and frustrating efforts of Chinese and Western liberals to find solutions to China's overriding preoccupation with national salvation. In charting the ebb and flow of university life, this definitive work sheds light on the intellectual, social, and diplomatic forces at work in this transitional period in Chinese history.

Philip West's analysis of the Yenching episode is carefully placed within the political context, both domestic and foreign, of the Republican years (1912–1949). But the author sees intercultural history as being more than an extension of politics and diplomacy. The early bond between Chinese and Westerners at Yenching, despite its fame as an educational institution, was a religious one. Rising national consciousness, student radicalization, and China's unending experience of war weakened that religious tie. And yet religious purposes are a part of the Yenching story to the end.

In his handling of intercultural history, West has a keen appreciation for the interplay of political forces and individuals. The demise of Yenching and the breakdown of Sino-Western relations generally are seen in terms of the individual behavior of Yenching personalities, the pressures of Communist ideology, and also Western diplomacy surrounding the Korean War. Throughout this study major attention is given to the pivotal role of that towering personality in Sino-Western relations, John Leighton Stuart, Yenching's longtime president and the last American Ambassador to China prior to the Communist takeover.

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