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Uncertainties Of Knowledge
Immanuel Wallerstein
Temple University Press, 2004
The Uncertainties of Knowledge extends Immanuel Wallerstein's decade-long work of elucidating the crisis of knowledge in current intellectual thought. He argues that the disciplinary divisions of academia have trapped us in a paradigm that assumes knowledge is a certainty and that it can help us explain the social world. This is wrong, he suggests. Instead, Wallerstein offers a new conception of the social sciences, one whose methodology allows for uncertainties.
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Understanding Virtual Universities
Roy Rada
Intellect Books, 2013

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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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Unequal Higher Education
Wealth, Status, and Student Opportunity
Barrett J. Taylor
Rutgers University Press, 2019
American higher education is often understood as a vehicle for social advancement. However, the institutions at which students enroll differ widely from one another. Some enjoy tremendous endowment savings and/or collect resources via research, which then offsets the funds that students contribute. Other institutions rely heavily on student tuition payments. These schools may struggle to remain solvent, and their students often bear the lion’s share of educational costs. Unequal Higher Education identifies and explains the sources of stratification that differentiate colleges and universities in the United States. Barrett J. Taylor and Brendan Cantwell use quantitative analysis to map the contours of this system. They then explain the mechanisms that sustain it and illustrate the ways in which rising institutional inequality has limited individual opportunity, especially for students of color and low-income individuals. 
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Universities and the Future of America
Derek Bok
Duke University Press, 1990
Since World War II, says the author, industrialized nations have come to depend so heavily on expert knowledge, scientific discovery, and highly trained personnel that universities have become “the central institution in postindustrial society.”
“If universities are so important to society and if ours are so superior, one might have thought that America would be flourishing in comparison to other industrialized countries of the world. Yet this is plainly not the case. . . . Our economic position in the world has deteriorated [and] we have climbed to the top, or near the top, of all advanced countries in the percentage of population who live in poverty, commit crimes, become addicted to drugs, have illegitimate children, or are classified as functionally illiterate.” In light of these results, “it is fair to ask whether our universities are doing all they can and should to help America surmount the obstacles that sap our economic strength and blight the lives of millions of our people.”
Having posed this question, Derek Bok reviews what science can do to bring about greater productivity, what professional schools can do to improve the effectiveness of corporations, government, and public education, and what all parts of the university are doing to help students acquire higher levels of ethical and social responsibility. He concludes that Universities are contributing much less than the should to help the nation address its most urgent social problems. “A century after the death of Cardinal Newman, many university officials and faculty members continue to feel ambivalent about deliberate efforts to address practical problems of society. And though competition drives university leaders and their faculties to unremitting effort, what competition rewards is chiefly success in fields that command academic prestige rather than success in responding to important social needs.”
Bok urges academic leaders, trustees, foundations, and government agencies to work together to help universities realign their priorities “so that they will be ready to make their full contribution when the nation turns its attention again to the broad agenda of reform. . . . Observing our difficulties competing abroad, our millions of people in poverty, our drug-ridden communities, our disintegrating families, our ineffective schools, those who help to shape our universities have reason to ask whether they too have any time to lose.”
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Universities in the Age of Corporate Science
The UC Berkeley-Novartis Controversy
Alan P. Rudy, Dawn Coppin, Jason Konefal, Bradley T. Shaw, Toby Ten Eyck, Craig Harris and Lawrence Busch
Temple University Press, 2007
As a result of widespread financial pressures, U.S. research universities increasingly stress the pursuit of funding beyond that available from government grants and contracts. Concomitantly, recent legal changes have encouraged universities to develop closer ties to the private business sector.This book represents the most thorough review ever undertaken of a major collaboration between industry and academe. A professional evaluation team obtained authorization for unprecedented access to those associated with the landmark $25 million contract entered into by the Plant and Microbial Biology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Novartis Agricultural Discovery Institute, a subsidiary of Novartis, an international pharmaceutical and agribusiness conglomerate.This model study presents the inside story of the partnership itself, places it in the context of contemporary university-industry relationships, and provides a larger theoretical framework for evaluating such collaborations in the future.
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The University in Ruins
Bill Readings
Harvard University Press, 1996

It is no longer clear what role the University plays in society. The structure of the contemporary University is changing rapidly, and we have yet to understand what precisely these changes will mean. Is a new age dawning for the University, the renaissance of higher education under way? Or is the University in the twilight of its social function, the demise of higher education fast approaching?We can answer such questions only if we look carefully at the different roles the University has played historically and then imagine how it might be possible to live, and to think, amid the ruins of the University. Tracing the roots of the modern American University in German philosophy and in the work of British thinkers such as Newman and Arnold, Bill Readings argues that historically the integrity of the modern University has been linked to the nation-state, which it has served by promoting and protecting the idea of a national culture. But now the nation-state is in decline, and national culture no longer needs to be either promoted or protected. Increasingly, universities are turning into transnational corporations, and the idea of culture is being replaced by the discourse of "excellence." On the surface, this does not seem particularly pernicious.

The author cautions, however, that we should not embrace this techno-bureaucratic appeal too quickly. The new University of Excellence is a corporation driven by market forces, and, as such, is more interested in profit margins than in thought. Readings urges us to imagine how to think, without concession to corporate excellence or recourse to romantic nostalgia within an institution in ruins. The result is a passionate appeal for a new community of thinkers.

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U.S. Power in International Higher Education
Jenny J. Lee
Rutgers University Press, 2021
2021 ASHE/CIHE Award for Significant Research on International Higher Education

U.S. Power in International Higher Education explores how internationalization in higher education is not just an educational endeavor, but also a geopolitical one. By centering and making explicit the role of power, the book demonstrates the United States’s advantage in international education as well as the changing geopolitical realities that will shape the field in the future. The chapter authors are leading critical scholars of international higher education, with diverse scholarly ties and professional experiences within the country and abroad. Taken together, the chapters provide broad trends as well as in-depth accounts about how power is evident across a range of key international activities. This book is intended for higher education scholars and practitioners with the aim of raising greater awareness on the unequal power dynamics in internationalization activities and for the purposes of promoting more just practices in higher education globally.

 
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The Uses of the University
Fifth Edition
Clark Kerr
Harvard University Press, 1982

America's university president extraordinaire adds a new chapter and preface to The Uses of the University, probably the most important book on the modern university ever written. This summa on higher education brings the research university into the new century.

The multiversity that Clark Kerr so presciently discovered now finds itself in an age of apprehension with few certainties. Leaders of institutions of higher learning can be either hedgehogs or foxes in the new age. Kerr gives five general points of advice on what kinds of attitudes universities should adopt. He then gives a blueprint for action for foxes, suggesting that a few hedgehogs need to be around to protect university autonomy and the public weal.

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The Uses of the University
Fourth Edition
Clark Kerr
Harvard University Press, 1995

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The Uses of the University
Third Edition with a new Preface and Postscript
Clark Kerr
Harvard University Press, 1982

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The Uses of the University
With a "Postscript -- 1972", Second edition
Clark Kerr
Harvard University Press

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Using Servant Leadership
How to Reframe the Core Functions of Higher Education
Letizia, Angelo J.
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Using Servant Leadership provides an instructive guide for how faculty members can engage in servant leadership with administrators, students, and community members. By utilizing a wide range of research and through a series of case studies, Angelo J. Letizia demonstrates how, with a bit of creative thinking, the ideals of servant leadership can work even in the fractious, cash-strapped world of contemporary higher education. Furthermore, he considers how these concepts can be implemented in pedagogy, research, strategic planning, accountability, and assessment. This book points the way to a more humane university, one that truly serves the public good.
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