BiblioVault - Books about Education, Higher

Schools into Fields and Factories

Anarchists, the Guomindang, and the National Labor University in Shanghai, 1927–1932

Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik

Duke University Press, 1991

In this collaborative effort by two leading scholars of modern Chinese history, Ming K. Chan and Arif Dirlik investigate how the short-lived National Labor University in Shanghai was both a reflection of the revolutionary concerns of its time and a catalyst for future radical experiments in education. Under the slogan “Turn schools into fields and factories, fields and factories into schools,” the university attempted to bridge the gap between intellectual and manual labor that its founders saw as a central problem of capitalism, and which remains a persistent theme in Chinese revolutionary thinking.
During its five years of existence, Labor University was the most impressive institutional embodiment in twentieth-century China of the labor-learning ideal, which was introduced by anarchists in the first decade of the century and came to be shared by a diverse group of revolutionaries in the 1920s. This detailed study places Labor University within the broad context of anarchist social ideals and educational experiments that inspired it directly, as well as comparable socialist experiments within labor education in Europe that Labor University’s founders used as models. The authors bring to bear the perspectives of institutional and intellectual history on their examination of the structure and operation of the University, presenting new material on its faculty, curriculum, physical plant, and history.

[more]

Service-Learning as a New Paradigm in Higher Education of China

Carol Ma Hok-ka

Michigan State University Press, 2018

The first reference book to introduce the concept and development of service-learning in China, Service-Learning as a New Paradigm in Higher Education of China provides a full picture of the infusion of service-learning into the Chinese educational system and describes this new teaching experience using case studies, empirical data, and educational and institutional policies within Chinese context. The text demonstrates how students learn outside the classroom through service-learning with valuable feedback and reflection from faculty members and fellow students about the meaning of education in China. Though service-learning was initially developed in the United States, the concept is rooted in Chinese literatures and values. This book will help readers understand how service-learning is being used as a pedagogy with Chinese values and philosophy in Chinese education, filling a niche within the worldwide literature of service-learning.

[more]

Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line

The Marketing of Higher Education

David L. Kirp

Harvard University Press, 2003

How can you turn an English department into a revenue center? How do you grade students if they are "customers" you must please? How do you keep industry from dictating a university's research agenda? What happens when the life of the mind meets the bottom line? Wry and insightful, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line takes us on a cross-country tour of the most powerful trend in academic life today--the rise of business values and the belief that efficiency, immediate practical usefulness, and marketplace triumph are the best measures of a university's success.

With a shrewd eye for the telling example, David Kirp relates stories of marketing incursions into places as diverse as New York University's philosophy department and the University of Virginia's business school, the high-minded University of Chicago and for-profit DeVry University. He describes how universities "brand" themselves for greater appeal in the competition for top students; how academic super-stars are wooed at outsized salaries to boost an institution's visibility and prestige; how taxpayer-supported academic research gets turned into profitable patents and ideas get sold to the highest bidder; and how the liberal arts shrink under the pressure to be self-supporting.

Far from doctrinaire, Kirp believes there's a place for the market--but the market must be kept in its place. While skewering Philistinism, he admires the entrepreneurial energy that has invigorated academe's dreary precincts. And finally, he issues a challenge to those who decry the ascent of market values: given the plight of higher education, what is the alternative?

[more]

Skim, Dive, Surface

Teaching Digital Reading

Jenae Cohn

West Virginia University Press, 2021

Students are reading on screens more than ever—how can we teach them to be better digital readers?

Smartphones, laptops, tablets: college students are reading on-screen all the time, and digital devices shape students’ understanding of and experiences with reading. In higher education, however, teachers rarely consider how digital reading experiences may have an impact on learning abilities, unless they’re lamenting students’ attention spans or the distractions available to students when they’re learning online.

Skim, Dive, Surface offers a corrective to these conversations—an invitation to focus not on losses to student learning but on the spectrum of affordances available within digital learning environments. It is designed to help college instructors across the curriculum teach digital reading in their classes, whether they teach face-to-face, fully online, or somewhere in between. Placing research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, learning science, and composition in dialogue with insight from the scholarship of teaching and learning, Jenae Cohn shows how teachers can better frame, scaffold, and implement effective digital reading assignments. She positions digital reading as part of a cluster of literacies that students should develop in order to communicate effectively in a digital environment.

[more]

Sound Pedagogy

Radical Care in Music

Edited by Colleen Renihan, John Spilker, and Trudi Wright. Foreword by William Cheng

University of Illinois Press, 2024

Music education today requires an approach rooted in care and kindness that coexists alongside the dismantling of systems that fail to serve our communities in higher education. But, as the essayists in Sound Pedagogy show, the structural aspects of music study in higher education present obstacles to caring and kindness like the entrenched master-student model, a neoliberal individualist and competitive mindset, and classical music’s white patriarchal roots. The editors of this volume curate essays that use a broad definition of care pedagogy, one informed by interdisciplinary scholarship and aimed at providing practical strategies for bringing transformative learning and engaged pedagogies to music classrooms. The contributors draw from personal experience to address issues including radical kindness through universal design; listening to non-human musicality; public musicology as a forum for social justice discourse; and radical approaches to teaching about race through music.

Contributors: Molly M. Breckling, William A. Everett, Kate Galloway, Sara Haefeli, Eric Hung, Stephanie Jensen-Moulton, Mark Katz, Nathan A. Langfitt, Matteo Magarotto, Mary Natvig, Frederick A. Peterbark, Laura Moore Pruett, Colleen Renihan, Amanda Christina Soto, John Spilker, Reba A. Wissner, and Trudi Wright

[more]

Speaking of Duke

Leading the Twenty-First-Century University

Richard H. Brodhead

Duke University Press, 2017

Over the course of his thirteen years as president of Duke University, Richard H. Brodhead spoke at numerous university ceremonies, community forums, and faculty meetings, and even appeared on The Colbert Report. Speaking of Duke collects dozens of these speeches, in which Brodhead speaks both to the special character and history of Duke University and to the general state of higher education.

In these essays, Brodhead shows a university thinking its way forward through challenges all institutes of higher education have faced in the twenty-first century, including an expanding global horizon, an economic downturn that has left a diminished sense of opportunity and a shaken faith in the value of liberal arts education, and pressure to think more deeply about issues of equity and inclusion. His audiences range from newly arrived freshmen and new graduates—both facing uncertainty about how to build their future lives—to seasoned faculty members. On other occasions, he makes the case to the general public for the enduring importance of the humanities.

What results is a portrait of Duke University in its modern chapter and the social and political climate that it shapes and is shaped by. While these speeches were given on official occasions, they are not impersonal official pronouncements; they are often quite personal and written with grace, humor, and an unwavering belief in the power of education to shape a changing world for the better.

Brodhead notes that it is an underappreciated fact that a great deal of the exercise of power by a university leader is done through speaking: by articulating the aspirations of the school and the reasons for its choices, and by voicing the shared sense of mission that gives a learning community its reality. Speaking of Duke accomplishes each of those and demonstrates Brodhead's conviction that higher education is more valuable now than ever.

[more]

Sport and the Neoliberal University

Profit, Politics, and Pedagogy

King-White, Ryan

Rutgers University Press, 2018

College students are now regarded as consumers, not students, and nowhere is the growth and exploitation of the university more obvious than in the realm of college sports, where the evidence is in the stadiums built with corporate money, and the crowded sporting events sponsored by large conglomerates.

The contributors to Sport and the Neoliberal University examine how intercollegiate athletics became a contested terrain of public/private interests. They look at college sports from economic, social, legal, and cultural perspectives to cut through popular mythologies regarding intercollegiate athletics and to advocate for increased clarity about what is going on at a variety of campuses with regard to athletics. Focusing on current issues, including the NCAA, Title IX, recruitment of high school athletes, and the Penn State scandal, among others, Sport and the Neoliberal University shows the different ways institutions, individuals, and corporations are interacting with university athletics in ways that are profoundly shaped by neoliberal ideologies.

[more]

Studies of Supply and Demand in Higher Education

Edited by Charles T. Clotfelter and Michael Rothschild

University of Chicago Press, 1993

In the United States today, there are some 3,400 separately governed colleges and universities, amounting to a higher education industry with expenditures that constitute 2.8% of the gross national product. Yet, the economic issues affecting this industry have been paid relatively little attention. In this collection of eight essays, experts in economics and education bring economic analysis to bear on such underexamined topics as the nature of competition in higher education, higher education's use of resources, and who chooses to purchase what kind of education and why.

In higher education, supply refers to such issues as government support for public colleges and universities, the means by which graduate programs allocate financial support to students, and the criteria that universities use for investing endowments. Demand pertains to patterns of student enrollment and to the government, business, and individual market for the service and research activities of higher education.

Why are tuitions nearly the same among schools despite differences in prestige? How are institutions with small endowments able to compete successfully with institutions that have huge endowments? How are race and ethnicity reflected in enrollment trends? Where do the best students go? What choices among colleges do young people from low-income backgrounds face? This volume addresses these questions and suggests subjects for further study of the economics of higher education.

[more]

The Synergistic Classroom

Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Small College Setting

Corey Campion

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Among the many challenges confronting the liberal arts today is a fundamental disconnect between the curricula that many institutions offer and the training that many students need. Discipline-specific models of teaching and learning can underprepare students for the kinds of interdisciplinary collaboration that employers now expect. Although aware of these expectations and the need for change, many small colleges and universities have struggled to translate interdisciplinarity into programs and curricula that better serve today’s students.

Written by faculty engaged in the design and delivery of interdisciplinary courses, programs, and experiential learning opportunities in the small college setting, The Synergistic Classroom addresses the many ways faculty can leverage their institutions' small size and openness to pedagogical experimentation to overcome the challenges of limited institutional resources and enrollment concerns and better prepare students for life and work in the twenty-first century. Taken together, the contributions in this volume invite reflection on a variety of important issues that attend the work of small college faculty committed to expanding student learning across disciplinary boundaries.

[more]