They’re not the students strolling across the bucolic liberal arts campuses where their grandfathers played football. They are first-generation college students—children of immigrants and blue-collar workers—who know that their hopes for success hinge on a degree.

But college is expensive, unfamiliar, and intimidating. Inexperienced students expect tough classes and demanding, remote faculty. They may not know what an assignment means, what a score indicates, or that a single grade is not a definitive measure of ability. And they certainly don’t feel entitled to be there. They do not presume success, and if they have a problem, they don’t expect to receive help or even a second chance.

Rebecca D. Cox draws on five years of interviews and observations at community colleges. She shows how students and their instructors misunderstand and ultimately fail one another, despite good intentions. Most memorably, she describes how easily students can feel defeated—by their real-world responsibilities and by the demands of college—and come to conclude that they just don’t belong there after all.

Eye-opening even for experienced faculty and administrators, The College Fear Factor reveals how the traditional college culture can actually pose obstacles to students’ success, and suggests strategies for effectively explaining academic expectations.

Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you're lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You've taught Kant for twenty years, but now you're team-teaching a new course on “Ethics and the Internet.” The personality theorist retired and wasn't replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the "Sexual Identity" course. Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don't know very well. The challenges are even greater when students don't share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom.

In this practical and funny book, an experienced teaching consultant offers many creative strategies for dealing with typical problems. How can you prepare most efficiently for a new course in a new area? How do you look credible? And what do you do when you don't have a clue how to answer a question?

Encouraging faculty to think of themselves as learners rather than as experts, Therese Huston points out that authority in the classroom doesn't come only, or even mostly, from perfect knowledge. She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students' understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, for maintaining discussions when they seem to stop dead, and -yes- for dealing with those impossible questions.

Original, useful, and hopeful, this book reminds you that teaching what you don't know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job. It's an adventure.

Once upon a time, virtually no one in the academy thought to sue over campus disputes, and, if they dared, judges bounced the case on grounds that it was no business of the courts. Tenure decisions, grading curves, course content, and committee assignments were the stuff of faculty meetings, not lawsuits.

Not so today. As Amy Gajda shows in this witty yet troubling book, litigation is now common on campus, and perhaps even more commonly feared. Professors sue each other for defamation based on assertions in research articles or tenure review letters; students sue professors for breach of contract when an F prevents them from graduating; professors threaten to sue students for unfairly criticizing their teaching.

Gajda’s lively account introduces the new duo driving the changes: the litigious academic who sees academic prerogative as a matter of legal entitlement and the skeptical judge who is increasingly willing to set aside decades of academic deference to pronounce campus rights and responsibilities.

This turn to the courts is changing campus life, eroding traditional notions of academic autonomy and confidentiality, and encouraging courts to micromanage course content, admissions standards, exam policies, graduation requirements, and peer review.

This book explores the origins and causes of the litigation trend, its implications for academic freedom, and what lawyers, judges, and academics themselves can do to limit the potential damage.