Using as a framework the "theory of careers" developed by John L. Holland, the authors of this volume examine the patterns of student stability and change inherent in the college experience, as well as the variations in professional attitudes and behaviors of college faculty. Their goal is to learn more about what colleges and universities might do to facilitate the retention, satisfaction, and learning of their students.

For example, why should faculties split over student-oriented teaching strategies, one group favoring the formal, structured classroom, the other a freer, more spontaneous environment? Why do some undergraduates become independent thinkers with strong analytical, mathematical, and scientific competencies while others develop powerful interpersonal and group leadership skills?

Holland's theory--at its core a person-environment fit theory--assumes that there are six personality types and six analogous academic environments and that the educational persistence, satisfaction, and achievement of students are a function of the congruence or "fit" between students and their academic environments. The authors also assume that there are circumstances under which the environments of the major field exert more influence on students than do the students' own personality traits. Applying Holland's theory to distinctive clusters of academic disciplines, the authors have found that the answers to such fundamental questions as those asked above emanate from a basic understanding of the influences of academic disciplines and the manner by which they shape the patterns of thought and behavior of both college students and faculty.

Academic Disciplines will benefit researchers and graduate students who study college students and faculty, as well as administrators and policymakers responsible for the performance of colleges and universities.

Donald E. Hall offers a self-help book designed for academics, from graduate students to tenured faculty. He helps readers engage in an active process of career management, goal setting, prioritization, and reflection on the norms that constitute what he calls “academic selfhood.” Drawing broadly on the insights of Anthony Giddens’ notions of reflexivity and self-identity, Hall encourages new and seasoned scholars to “own up to” the behaviors, attitudes, and complicities that compromise their professional identities. This book couples all its exhortations with clear, concrete, and practical strategies for responding productively to the many uncertainties of academic life.

Separate chapters of the book examine the textuality of the academic self, profession, academic processes and collegiality. Among the topics candidly discussed are careerism, burnout, procrastination, and insecurity. Throughout the book readers will find anecdotes, real-life examples, and concrete tips for constructing and maintaining a successful career defined on their own terms.

The Academic Self: An Owner’s Manual opens up a new and frank discussion on academic life and academics’ basic responsibility for their own actions and attitudes.

In The Academic Tribes, an English professor who has survived stints as a dean and a vice-chancellor "takes a gentle, satiric sideswipe at academia, its foibles, follies, and myths" (ALA Booklist). Hazard Adams' parody of anthropological analysis describes the principles and antinomies of academic politics, campus stereotypes, the various tribes divided by discipline, the agonies accompanying each stage on the way to full professorship, and, of course, the power struggle between faculties and academic administrators. This first paperback edition also includes a new preface looking back at the decade since the book's original publication and an appendix that adds three relevant essays.

In recent years, the academy has undergone significant changes: a more competitive and volatile job market has led to widespread precarity, teaching and service loads have become more burdensome, and higher education is becoming increasingly corporatized. In this revised and expanded edition of The Academic's Handbook, more than fifty contributors from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds offer practical advice for academics at every career stage, whether they are first entering the job market or negotiating the post-tenure challenges of leadership and administrative roles. Contributors affirm what is exciting and fulfilling about academic work while advising readers about how to set and protect boundaries around their energy and labor. In addition, the contributors tackle topics such as debates regarding technology, social media, and free speech on campus; publishing and grant writing; attending to the many kinds of diversity among students, staff, and faculty; and how to balance work and personal responsibilities. A passionate and compassionate volume, The Academic's Handbook is an essential guide to navigating life in the academy.

Contributors. Luis Alvarez, Steven Alvarez, Eladio Bobadilla, Genevieve Carpio, Marcia Chatelain, Ernesto Chávez, Miroslava Chávez-García, Nathan D. B. Connolly, Jeremy V. Cruz, Cathy N. Davidson, Sarah Deutsch, Brenda Elsey, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Michelle Falkoff, Kelly Fayard, Matthew W. Finkin, Lori A. Flores, Kathryn J. Fox, Frederico Freitas, Neil Garg, Nanibaa’ A. Garrison, Joy Gaston Gayles, Tiffany Jasmin González, Cynthia R. Greenlee, Romeo Guzmán, Lauren Hall-Lew, David Hansen, Heidi Harley, Laura M. Harrison, Sonia Hernández, Sharon P. Holland, Elizabeth Q. Hutchison, Deborah Jakubs, Bridget Turner Kelly, Karen Kelsky, Stephen Kuusisto, Magdalena Maczynska, Sheila McManus, Cary Nelson, Jocelyn H. Olcott, Rosanna Olsen, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Charles Piot, Bryan Pitts, Sarah Portnoy, Laura Portwood-Stacer, Yuridia Ramirez, Meghan K. Roberts, John Elder Robison, David Schultz, Lynn Stephen, James E. Sutton, Antar A. Tichavakunda, Keri Watson, Ken Wissoker, Karin Wulf

Adapting VALUEs traces the use of the American Association of Colleges and Universities' VALUE rubric for written communication at two small universities. Through the lens of institutional ethnography, Jennifer Grouling examines how faculty and administrators adapted the rubric for their own purposes and writing programs. Throughout the book, Grouling explores the ways in which faculty members' interactions on committees, views of the classroom, disciplinary affiliation, and racial privilege impacted their views of this national rubric. Overall, Adapting VALUEs offers valuable insights into the power of the rubric as both a national and a local text that dictates pedagogical and administrative practice.
 

"This book is recommended for anyone interested in understanding, questioning, articulating, and acting on the basis of their own and others' perspectives on sexism, racism, and affirmative action in American higher education." --Choice While equal opportunity for all candidates is widely recognized as a goal within academia, the implementation of specific procedures to achieve equality has resulted in vehement disputes regarding both the means and ends. To encourage a reexamination of this issue, Cahn asked three prominent American social philosophers--Leslie Pickering Francis, Robert L. Simon, and Lawrence C. Becker--who hold divergent views about affirmative action, to write extended essays presenting their views. Twenty-two other philosophers then respond to these three principal essays. While no consensus is reached, the resulting clash of reasoned judgments will serve to revitalize the issues raised by affirmative action. Contents Introduction - Steven M. Cahn Part I 1. In Defense of Affirmative Action - Leslie Pickering Francis 2. Affirmative Action and the University: Faculty Appointment and Preferential Treatment - Robert L. Simon 3. Affirmative Action and Faculty Appointments - Lawrence C. Becker Part II 4. What Good Am I? - Laurence Thomas 5. Who "Counts" on Campus? - Ann Hartle 6. Reflections on Affirmative Action in Academia - Robert G. Turnbull 7. The Injustice of Strong Affirmative Action - John Kekes 8. Preferential Treatment Versus Purported Meritocratic Rights - Richard J. Arneson 9. Faculties as Civil Societies: A Misleading Model for Affirmative Action - Jeffrie G. Murphy 10. Facing Facts and Responsibilities - The White Man's Burden and the Burden of Proof - Karen Hanson 11. Affirmative Action: Relevant Knowledge and Relevant Ignorance - Joel J. Kupperman 12. Remarks on Affirmative Action - Andrew Oldenquist 13. Affirmative Action and the Multicultural Ideal - Philip L. Quinn 14. "Affirmative Action" in the Cultural Wars - Frederick A. Olafson 15. Quotas by Any Name: Some Problems of Affirmative Action in Faculty Appointments - Tom L. Beauchamp 16. Are Quotas Sometimes Justified? - James Rachels 17. Proportional Representation of Women and Minorities - Celia Wolf-Devine 18. An Ecological Concept of Diversity - La Verne Shelton 19. Careers Open to Talent - Ellen Frankel Paul 20. Some Sceptical Doubts - Alasdair MacIntyre 21. Affirmative Action and Tenure Decisions - Richard T. De George 22. Affirmative Action and the Awarding of Tenure - Peter J. Markie 23. The Case for Preferential Treatment - James P. Sterba 24. Saying What We Think - Fred Sommers 25. Comments on Compromise and Affirmative Action - Alan H. Goldman About the Authors Index About the Author(s) Steven M. Cahn is Professor of Philosophy and former Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has published numerous other books, including Morality, Responsibility, and the University (Temple). Contributors: Laurence Thomas, Ann Hartle, Robert G. Turnbull, John Kekes, Richard J. Arneson, Jeffrie G. Murphy, Karen Hanson, Joel J. Kupperman, Andrew Oldenquist, Philip L. Quinn, Frederick A. Olafson, Tom L. Beauchamp, James Rachels, Celia Wolf-Devine, La Verne Shelton, Ellen Frankel Paul, Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard T. De George, Peter J. Markie, James P. Sterba, Fred Sommers, Alan H. Goldman, and the editor.

Drawing inspiration and urgency from the storied Goethe Oak tree at Buchenwald concentration camp—and from the leaf as symbol of all change, growth, and renewal—award-winning essayist John Price explores a multitude of dramatic transformations, in his life and in the fragile world beyond: “the how of the organism—that keeps your humanity alive.”

He employs an array of forms and voices, whether penning a break-up letter to America or a literary rock-n-roll road song dedicated to prairie scientists, or giving pregame pep talks to his son’s losing football team. Here, too, are moving portrayals of his father’s last effort as a small-town lawyer to defend the rights of abused women, and his own efforts as a writing teacher to honor the personal stories of his students.

From his Iowa backyard to the edge of the Arctic Circle, from the forgotten recesses of the body to the far reaches of the solar system, this book demonstrates the ways imagination and informed compassion can, as Price describes it, expand thousandfold the boundaries of what we might “have naïvely considered an individual self.”  
 

An audacious transformation in prose of fourteen Modernist films

From film to film, Jeffrey DeShell follows a forty-something failed film studies academic—The Professor. While The Professor is reinvented with each new chapter (or film), what remains is DeShell’s inventive deconstruction and representation of modern cinema. At times borrowing imagery, plot, or character elements, and at times rendering lighting, rhythm, costuming, or shot sequences into fictional language, The Professor’s journey sends him from the Southwestern town of Pueblo, Colorado, into the role of rescuer as he aids an attempted-rape victim, and finally to Italy. Ultimately though, The Professor is left alone, struggling to reconcile the real world with his life in cinema.