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An A to W of Academic Literacy
Key Concepts and Practices for Graduate Students
Mary Jane Curry, Fangzhi He, Weijia Li, Ting Zhang, Yanhong Zuo, Mahmoud Altalouli, and Jihan Ayesh
University of Michigan Press, 2021
An A to W of Academic Literacy is designed for graduate students of all language backgrounds and at any level of study. It is created as a comprehensive reference for graduate students. As a glossary of terms, it can also be used as a supplemental textbook for graduate workshops and seminars and by writing consultants and instructors across the disciplines.
 
The guide includes 65 common academic literacy terms and explores how they relate to genres, writing conventions, and language use. Each entry briefly defines the term, identifies variations and tensions about its use across disciplines, provides examples, and includes reflection questions. An appendix lists further readings for each entry.
 
Unique to this volume are comments featuring the experiences of the graduate students who wrote the entries, comments that bring each entry to life and build a bridge to graduate student readers. 
 
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Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University
William Clark
University of Chicago Press, 2005
Tracing the transformation of early modern academics into modern researchers from the Renaissance to Romanticism, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University uses the history of the university and reframes the "Protestant Ethic" to reconsider the conditions of knowledge production in the modern world.

William Clark argues that the research university—which originated in German Protestant lands and spread globally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—developed in response to market forces and bureaucracy, producing a new kind of academic whose goal was to establish originality and achieve fame through publication. With an astonishing wealth of research, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University investigates the origins and evolving fixtures of academic life: the lecture catalogue, the library catalog, the grading system, the conduct of oral and written exams, the roles of conversation and the writing of research papers in seminars, the writing and oral defense of the doctoral dissertation, the ethos of "lecturing with applause" and "publish or perish," and the role of reviews and rumor. This is a grand, ambitious book that should be required reading for every academic.
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Academic Freedom in the Wired World
Political Extremism, Corporate Power, and the University
Robert O'Neil
Harvard University Press, 2008

In this passionately argued overview, a longtime activist-scholar takes readers through the changing landscape of academic freedom. From the aftermath of September 11th to the new frontier of blogging, Robert O'Neil examines the tension between institutional and individual interests. Many cases boil down to a hotly contested question: who has the right to decide what is taught in the classroom?

O'Neil shows how courts increasingly restrict professorial judgment, and how the feeble protection of what is posted on the Internet and written in email makes academics more vulnerable than ever. Even more provocatively, O'Neil argues, the newest threats to academic freedom come not from government, but from the private sector. Corporations increasingly sponsor and control university-based research, while self-appointed watchdogs systematically harass individual teachers on websites and blogs. Most troubling, these threats to academic freedom are nearly immune from legal recourse.

Insisting that new concepts of academic freedom, and new strategies for maintaining it are needed, O'Neil urges academics to work together--and across rigid and simplistic divisions between "left" and "right."

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Academic Interactions
Communicating on Campus
Christine B. Feak, Susan M. Reinhart, and Theresa N. Rohlck
University of Michigan Press, 2018

This version of the book matches 9780472033324 except it is not packaged with a DVD. All references to the DVD in the text have been replaced with "videos." Video access sold separately at https://www.press.umich.edu/10057494/videos_to_accompany_academic_interactions

The ability to understand and be understood when communicating with professors and with native speakers is crucial to academic success. Academic Interactions focuses on actual academic speaking events, particularly classroom interactions and office hours, and gives students practice improving the ways that they communicate in a college/university setting.

Academic Interactions addresses skills like using names and names of locations correctly on campus, giving directions, understanding instructors and their expectations, interacting during office hours, participating in class and in seminars, and delivering formal and informal presentations. In addition, advice is provided for communicating via email with professors and working in groups with native speakers (including negotiating tasks in groups).

The text uses transcripts from MICASE (the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) to ensure that students learn the vocabulary and communication strategies that will be most effective in their academic pursuits. Units also feature language use issues like ellipsis, hedging, and apologies. 

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THE ACADEMIC SELF
AN OWNER'S MANUAL
DONALD HALL
The Ohio State University Press, 2002

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.

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Academic Skills for Interdisciplinary Studies
Revised Edition
Koen van der Gaast
Amsterdam University Press, 2019
What’s a theoretical framework for? How do you effectively present your data in a figure? What’s the secret to a good presentation?As an interdisciplinary student, you delve into theories and research methodsfrom a whole range of disciplines. Academic skills are the tools that you can use to take in, develop, integrate and question knowledge. This guide provides specific instructions, tips and examples to help students develop these skills, both during and after their studies.As academic education focuses on research, the empirical cycle forms a keytheme of the book, including when discussing the following skills:- Searching for, critically reading and analysing scholarly texts- Formulating research questions- Making concepts measurable, qualitatively and quantitatively- Organizing literature and data- Analysing and formulating an argument- Academic writing- Collaborating- Reflecting- Presenting
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Academic Tribes
Hazard Adams
University of Illinois Press, 1988
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.
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Academically Adrift
Limited Learning on College Campuses
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
University of Chicago Press, 2010

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?

For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.

Academically Adrift
holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.

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The Academic's Handbook
A. Leigh DeNeef and Craufurd D. Goodwin, eds.
Duke University Press, 2006
This new, revised, and expanded edition of the popular Academic’s Handbook is an essential guide for those planning or beginning an academic career.

Faculty members, administrators, and professionals with experience at all levels of higher education offer candid, practical advice to help beginning academics understand matters including:
— The different kinds of institutions of higher learning and expectations of faculty at each.
— The advantages and disadvantages of teaching at four-year colleges instead of research universities.
— The ins and outs of the job market.
— Alternatives to tenure-track, research-oriented positions.
— Salary and benefits.
— The tenure system.
— Pedagogy in both large lecture courses and small, discussion-based seminars.
— The difficulties facing women and minorities within academia.
— Corporations, foundations, and the federal government as potential sources of research funds.
— The challenges of faculty mentoring.
— The impact of technology on contemporary teaching and learning.
— Different types of publishers and the publishing process at university presses.
— The modern research library.
— The structure of university governance.
— The role of departments within the university.

With the inclusion of eight new chapters, this edition of The Academic’s Handbook is designed to ease the transition from graduate school to a well-rounded and rewarding career.

Contributors. Judith K. Argon, Louis J. Budd, Ronald R. Butters, Norman L. Christensen, Joel Colton, Paul L. Conway, John G. Cross, Fred E. Crossland, Cathy N. Davidson, A. Leigh DeNeef, Beth A. Eastlick, Matthew W. Finkin, Jerry G. Gaff, Edie N. Goldenberg, Craufurd D. Goodwin, Stanley M. Hauerwas, Deborah L. Jakubs, L. Gregory Jones, Nellie Y. McKay, Patrick M. Murphy, Elizabeth Studley Nathans, A. Kenneth Pye, Zachary B. Robbins, Anne Firor Scott, Sudhir Shetty, Samuel Schuman, Philip Stewart, Boyd R. Strain, Emily Toth, P. Aarne Vesilind, Judith S. White, Henry M. Wilbur, Ken Wissoker

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The Academic's Handbook, Fourth Edition
Revised and Expanded
Lori A. Flores and Jocelyn H. Olcott, editors
Duke University Press, 2020
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
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Access for All
Expanding Opportunity and Programs to Support Successful Student Outcomes at University of Nevada, Reno
Melisa N. Choroszy
University of Nevada Press, 2019
For many students in Nevada and throughout the nation, they are the first in their family to go to college—these students are identified as “first-generation.” The population of first-generation students continues to increase year-over-year and their unique needs have shaped the way education practitioners must approach serving future students effectively.

This collection of essays, written by University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) faculty and students, is an examination of the programs and strategies created to support first-generation and other underrepresented student populations. In addition, it serves as a dedication to the families and students whose hopes and dreams include the attainment of a college degree. Readers will gain insight into the framework needed to provide accessible programs and services to a large and diverse student population before, during, and after college graduation as well as first-hand success stories from the students themselves.

Each generation hopes for a better life for their children. Higher education, in particular, has been a dream for many in this country that has been made possible through public and private financial support. Every new generation of college-bound students faces new and evolving challenges, but the fierce dedication and commitment demonstrated in these pages define the key to developing a thriving and diverse institution that helps all students succeed.
 
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An Accidental Triumph
The Improbable History of American Higher Education
Sol Gittleman
Vesto Books, 2023

The story of American higher education, written with insight and humor, by an acclaimed educator.
“There’s no more important story to be told at this moment in America then why higher education matters. And there’s no more adept and engaging storyteller than Sol Gittleman.” —Larry Tye, New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Demagogue


“Hardly a day passes without reference to some scandal, fraud, intellectual or moral failure, or other ill associated with American academic institutions,” writes Sol Gittleman in his bracing new book, An Accidental Triumph. “If American higher education is such a failure, why are students and scholars from all over the world still so eager to secure a place in one of these institutions? Is American higher education a disaster or the envy of the world?”

Gittleman confronts this contradiction in this dynamic mix of history, analysis, and personal reflection. An Accidental Triumph tells the engaging story of how American higher education evolved from a patchwork of seminaries in the early nineteenth century into the world’s leader in research by the middle of the twentieth. Gittleman links this fascinating story to his own fifty-year academic career, which coincided with an explosive rise in enrollment, spurred by the GI Bill, and an unparalleled postwar boom in faculty hiring, prompted by massive new federal support for academic research from organizations such as the National Science Foundation.

Writing with authority, frankness, and unfailing wry good humor, Gittleman surveys the triumphs, tragedies, and tensions of the history of American higher education. Despite the relentless criticism, Gittleman finds good reason to remain optimistic about the future of teaching and research at the college and university level in the United States. 

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Acres Of Diamonds
Russell Conwell
Temple University Press, 2002
Considered by many to be one of the finest speeches ever written, Acres of Diamonds offers a multitude of lessons about the rewards of work, education, and finding the riches of life in one's own back yard.In an era when many Americans would pack public halls to hear speeches given by the greatest citizens of their day, Russell Conwell read his world-famous lecture hundreds of times, and used the income he earned delivering it to found a small seminary to train Baptist ministers. That school soon grew into Temple University, one of the first universities to offer affordable education to working-class Americans: it stands today as the most visible example of Russell Conwell's legacy and vision.There are a multitude of gems to mine from Russell Conwell's words, no matter what your walk of life. Acres of Diamonds remains a significant—and inspirational—lesson about where the true riches of life may be found.
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Action versus Contemplation
Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters
Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule
University of Chicago Press, 2018
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal wrote in 1654. But then there’s Walt Whitman, in 1856: “Whoever you are, come forth! Or man or woman come forth! / You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house.”
 
It is truly an ancient debate: Is it better to be active or contemplative? To do or to think? To make an impact, or to understand the world more deeply? Aristotle argued for contemplation as the highest state of human flourishing. But it was through action that his student Alexander the Great conquered the known world. Which should we aim at? Centuries later, this argument underlies a surprising number of the questions we face in contemporary life. Should students study the humanities, or train for a job? Should adults work for money or for meaning? And in tumultuous times, should any of us sit on the sidelines, pondering great books, or throw ourselves into protests and petition drives? 
 
With Action versus Contemplation, Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule address the question in a refreshingly unexpected way: by refusing to take sides. Rather, they argue for a rethinking of the very opposition. The active and the contemplative can—and should—be vibrantly alive in each of us, fused rather than sundered. Writing in a personable, accessible style, Summit and Vermeule guide readers through the long history of this debate from Plato to Pixar, drawing compelling connections to the questions and problems of today. Rather than playing one against the other, they argue, we can discover how the two can nourish, invigorate, and give meaning to each other, as they have for the many writers, artists, and thinkers, past and present, whose examples give the book its rich, lively texture of interplay and reference.
 
This is not a self-help book. It won’t give you instructions on how to live your life. Instead, it will do something better: it will remind you of the richness of a life that embraces action and contemplation, company and solitude, living in the moment and planning for the future. Which is better? Readers of this book will discover the answer: both.
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Activist WPA, The
Changing Stories About Writing and Writers
Linda Adler-Kassner
Utah State University Press, 2008
One wonders if there is any academic field that doesn’t suffer from the way it is portrayed by the media, by politicians, by pundits and other publics. How well scholars in a discipline articulate their own definition can influence not only issues of image but the very success of the discipline in serving students and its other constituencies. The Activist WPA is an effort to address this range of issues for the field of English composition in the age of the Spellings Commission and the No Child Left Behind Act.

Drawing on recent developments in framing theory and the resurgent traditions of progressive organizers, Linda Adler-Kassner calls upon composition teachers and administrators to develop strategic programs of collective action that do justice to composition’s best principles. Adler-Kassner argues that the “story” of college composition can be changed only when writing scholars bring the wonders down, to articulate a theory framework that is pragmatic and intelligible to those outside the field--and then create messages that reference that framework. In The Activist WPA, she makes a case for developing a more integrated vision of outreach, English education, and writing program administration.
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Adapting the Past to Reimagine Possible Futures
Celebrating and Critiquing WAC at 50
Megan J. Kelly
University Press of Colorado, 2024
Developed from presentations at the Fifteenth International Writing Across the Curriculum Conference, this edited collection celebrates the 50th anniversary of the WAC movement while also identifying innovative directions for writing pedagogies, program building and impact, and program mobilization. Contributors reflect on the evolution of WAC as an educational movement as well as the challenges and possibilities facing WAC programs as they respond to the shifting contexts of higher education. The chapters in this collection—found in sections on faculty development, classroom implications, and institutional considerations—offer a range of practices, pedagogies, frameworks, and models for readers who are invested in building and sustaining WAC programs that impact their college and university campuses through cultures of writing. Adapting the Past to Reimagine Possible Futures engages topics such as program assessment, professionalization, and interdisciplinary collaborations, and connections with creative writing. Its 17 chapters testify to WAC’s persistence, resilience, and impact in a dynamic educational landscape.
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Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses
Catherine Kaukinen
Temple University Press, 2017

Violence against women on college campuses has remained underreported and often under addressed by both campus security and local law enforcement, as well as campus administrators. The researchers, practitioners, and activists who contribute to this pertinent volume Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses examine the extent, nature, dynamic and contexts of violence against women at institutions of higher education.

This book is designed to facilitate an ongoing discussion and provide direction on how best to prevent and investigate violence against women, and intervene to assist victims while reducing the impact of these crimes. Chapters detail the necessary changes and implications that are part of Title IX and other federal legislation and initiatives as well as the effect these changes have had for higher education actors, including campus administrators, victim advocates, and student activists. The contributors also explore the importance of campus efforts to estimate the extent of violence against women; educating young men and women on the nature of sexual and dating violence; and shifting efforts to both make offenders accountable for their crimes and prompt all bystanders to act. 

Addressing Violence Against Women on College Campuses urgently argues to make violence prevention is not separate from but rather an integral part of the student experience.   

Contributors include: Antonia Abbey, Joanne Belknap, Ava Blustein, Stephanie Bonnes, Alesha Cameron, Sarah L. Cook, Walter S. DeKeseredy. Helen Eigenberg, Kate Fox, Christopher P. Krebs, Jennifer Leili, Christine Lindquist, Sarah McMahon, Caitlyn Meade, Christine Mouton, Matt R. Nobles, Callie Marie Rennison, Meredith M. Smith, Carmen Suarez, and the editors.

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The Adjunct Underclass
How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission
Herb Childress
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Class ends. Students pack up and head back to their dorms. The professor, meanwhile, goes to her car . . . to catch a little sleep, and then eat a cheeseburger in her lap before driving across the city to a different university to teach another, wholly different class. All for a paycheck that, once prep and grading are factored in, barely reaches minimum wage.
 
Welcome to the life of the mind in the gig economy. Over the past few decades, the job of college professor has been utterly transformed—for the worse. America’s colleges and universities were designed to serve students and create knowledge through the teaching, research, and stability that come with the longevity of tenured faculty, but higher education today is dominated by adjuncts. In 1975, only thirty percent of faculty held temporary or part-time positions. By 2011, as universities faced both a decrease in public support and ballooning administrative costs, that number topped fifty percent. Now, some surveys suggest that as many as seventy percent of American professors are working course-to-course, with few benefits, little to no security, and extremely low pay.
 
In The Adjunct Underclass, Herb Childress draws on his own firsthand experience and that of other adjuncts to tell the story of how higher education reached this sorry state. Pinpointing numerous forces within and beyond higher ed that have driven this shift, he shows us the damage wrought by contingency, not only on the adjunct faculty themselves, but also on students, the permanent faculty and administration, and the nation. How can we say that we value higher education when we treat educators like desperate day laborers?
 
Measured but passionate, rooted in facts but sure to shock, The Adjunct Underclass reveals the conflicting values, strangled resources, and competing goals that have fundamentally changed our idea of what college should be. This book is a call to arms for anyone who believes that strong colleges are vital to society.
 
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The African Experience with Higher Education
J. F. Ade Ajayi
Ohio University Press, 1996

There have been institutions of higher learning for centuries in Africa, but the phenomenal growth has taken place in the last fifty years, first in the later days of colonialism and then in the heady days of independence and commodity boom. Without them, there would have been no development.

The three highly distinguished authors have written the first comprehensive assessment of universities and higher education in Africa south of the Sahara. As can be seen from their biographies, they draw on experience from both francophone and anglophone Africa and from teaching in both the sciences and the arts.

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After Admission
From College Access to College Success
James E. Rosenbaum
Russell Sage Foundation, 2006
Enrollment at America's community colleges has exploded in recent years, with five times as many entering students today as in 1965. However, most community college students do not graduate; many earn no credits and may leave school with no more advantages in the labor market than if they had never attended. Experts disagree over the reason for community colleges' mixed record. Is it that the students in these schools are under-prepared and ill-equipped for the academic rigors of college? Are the colleges themselves not adapting to keep up with the needs of the new kinds of students they are enrolling? In After Admission, James Rosenbaum, Regina Deil-Amen, and Ann Person weigh in on this debate with a close look at this important trend in American higher education. After Admission compares community colleges with private occupational colleges that offer accredited associates degrees. The authors examine how these different types of institutions reach out to students, teach them social and cultural skills valued in the labor market, and encourage them to complete a degree. Rosenbaum, Deil-Amen, and Person find that community colleges are suffering from a kind of identity crisis as they face the inherent complexities of guiding their students towards four-year colleges or to providing them with vocational skills to support a move directly into the labor market. This confusion creates administrative difficulties and problems allocating resources. However, these contradictions do not have to pose problems for students. After Admission shows that when colleges present students with clear pathways, students can effectively navigate the system in a way that fits their needs. The occupational colleges the authors studied employed close monitoring of student progress, regular meetings with advisors and peer cohorts, and structured plans for helping students meet career goals in a timely fashion. These procedures helped keep students on track and, the authors suggest, could have the same effect if implemented at community colleges. As college access grows in America, institutions must adapt to meet the needs of a new generation of students. After Admission highlights organizational innovations that can help guide students more effectively through higher education.
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Agile Faculty
Practical Strategies for Managing Research, Service, and Teaching
Rebecca Pope-Ruark
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Digital tools have long been a transformative part of academia, enhancing the classroom and changing the way we teach. Yet there is a way that academia may be able to benefit more from the digital revolution: by adopting the project management techniques used by software developers.

Agile work strategies are a staple of the software development world, developed out of the need to be flexible and responsive to fast-paced change at times when “business as usual” could not work. These techniques call for breaking projects into phases and short-term goals, managing assignments collectively, and tracking progress openly.

Agile Faculty is a comprehensive roadmap for scholars who want to incorporate Agile practices into all aspects of their academic careers, be it research, service, or teaching. Rebecca Pope-Ruark covers the basic principles of Scrum, one of the most widely used models, and then through individual chapters shows how to apply that framework to everything from individual research to running faculty committees to overseeing student class work. Practical and forward-thinking, Agile Faculty will help readers not only manage their time and projects but also foster productivity, balance, and personal and professional growth.
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The Aims of Higher Education
Problems of Morality and Justice
Edited by Harry Brighouse and Michael McPherson
University of Chicago Press, 2015
In this book, philosopher Harry Brighouse and Spencer Foundation president Michael McPherson bring together leading philosophers to think about some of the most fundamental questions that higher education faces. Looking beyond the din of arguments over how universities should be financed, how they should be run, and what their contributions to the economy are, the contributors to this volume set their sights on higher issues: ones of moral and political value. The result is an accessible clarification of the crucial concepts and goals we so often skip over—even as they underlie our educational policies and practices.
           
The contributors tackle the biggest questions in higher education: What are the proper aims of the university? What role do the liberal arts play in fulfilling those aims? What is the justification for the humanities? How should we conceive of critical reflection, and how should we teach it to our students? How should professors approach their intellectual relationship with students, both in social interaction and through curriculum? What obligations do elite institutions have to correct for their historical role in racial and social inequality? And, perhaps most important of all: How can the university serve as a model of justice? The result is a refreshingly thoughtful approach to higher education and what it can, and should, be doing. 
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Air & Light & Time & Space
How Successful Academics Write
Helen Sword
Harvard University Press, 2017

From the author of Stylish Academic Writing comes an essential new guide for writers aspiring to become more productive and take greater pleasure in their craft. Helen Sword interviewed one hundred academics worldwide about their writing background and practices. Relatively few were trained as writers, she found, and yet all have developed strategies to thrive in their publish-or-perish environment.

So how do these successful academics write, and where do they find the “air and light and time and space,” in the words of poet Charles Bukowski, to get their writing done? What are their formative experiences, their daily routines, their habits of mind? How do they summon up the courage to take intellectual risks and the resilience to deal with rejection?

Sword identifies four cornerstones that anchor any successful writing practice: Behavioral habits of discipline and persistence; Artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care; Social habits of collegiality and collaboration; and Emotional habits of positivity and pleasure. Building on this “BASE,” she illuminates the emotional complexity of the writing process and exposes the lack of writing support typically available to early-career academics. She also lays to rest the myth that academics must produce safe, conventional prose or risk professional failure. The successful writers profiled here tell stories of intellectual passions indulged, disciplinary conventions subverted, and risk-taking rewarded. Grounded in empirical research and focused on sustainable change, Air & Light & Time & Space offers a customizable blueprint for refreshing personal habits and creating a collegial environment where all writers can flourish.

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All before Them
Student Opportunities and Nationally Competitive Fellowships
Suzanne McCray
University of Arkansas Press, 2015
Advisors face quite a challenge as they sort through the daunting and ever-changing world of nationally competitive undergraduate and graduate fellowships in order to assist talented students searching for funding for exceptional academic opportunities.

This collection of essays helps advisors by providing information about major changes in the fellowship and scholarship landscape. Included is guidance on the new Schwarzman scholarship for study in China, the recently added video interview for the Mitchell scholarship, and the new rules for the Rhodes personal statement (an advisor’s take). Additionally, seasoned advisors share practical advice, ranging from workshops that engage students and faculty to helpful technological tools to personal statements and office assessments. Keeping the focus on the scholar in the scholarship process is a central theme. All before Them is an important addition to any faculty mentor’s or scholarship advisor’s toolkit.
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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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All the Essential Half-Truths about Higher Education
George Dennis O'Brien
University of Chicago Press, 1997
In this refreshing and original exploration, George Dennis O'Brien looks at higher education in America. O'Brien argues that to debate intelligently the future of education we must stop focusing on its ideals and look instead at its institutions. He does this by addressing nine half-truths, such as whether "low cost public education benefits the least advantaged in society," and goes on to examine how accurately they reflect the true state of higher education. The result is a thought-provoking discussion of the present challenges and future prospects of American higher education.

"O'Brien's historical overview of the transition from 19th-century denominational colleges to 20th-century research-driven and largely secular ones is provocative. Cleverly written and well-focused, the book addresses the financial pressures facing higher education and asks vital questions about cutbacks and curricula."—Publishers Weekly

"Lively, engaging, and richly suggestive." —Francis Oakley, Commonweal
"O'Brien employs calm, powerful reason, without sensationalism. His perspective is illuminating. . . . All the Essential Half-Truths About Higher Education is one of the wisest and most useful treatments of American higher education." —John Attarian, Detroit News
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Allies and Rivals
German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University
Emily J. Levine
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The first history of the ascent of American higher education told through the lens of German-American exchange.

During the nineteenth century, nearly ten thousand Americans traveled to Germany to study in universities renowned for their research and teaching. By the mid-twentieth century, American institutions led the world. How did America become the center of excellence in higher education? And what does that story reveal about who will lead in the twenty-first century?

Allies and Rivals is the first history of the ascent of American higher education seen through the lens of German-American exchange. In a series of compelling portraits of such leaders as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Martha Carey Thomas, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Emily J. Levine shows how academic innovators on both sides of the Atlantic competed and collaborated to shape the research university. Even as nations sought world dominance through scholarship, universities retained values apart from politics and economics. Open borders enabled Americans to unite the English college and German PhD to create the modern research university, a hybrid now replicated the world over.

In a captivating narrative spanning one hundred years, Levine upends notions of the university as a timeless ideal, restoring the contemporary university to its rightful place in history. In so doing she reveals that innovation in the twentieth century was rooted in international cooperation—a crucial lesson that bears remembering today.
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Alternative Models of Sports Development in America
Solutions to a Crisis in Education and Public Health
B. David Ridpath
Ohio University Press, 2017

In the United States, the entanglement of sports and education has persisted for over a century. Multimillion-dollar high school football stadiums, college coaches whose salaries are many times those of their institutions’ presidents, psychological and educational tolls on student-athletes, and high-profile academic scandals are just symptoms of a system that has come under increasing fire. Institutions large and small face persistent quandaries: which do they value more, academic integrity or athletic success? Which takes precedence: prioritizing elite teams and athletes, or making it possible for all students to participate in sports? How do we create opportunities for academic—not just athletic—development for players?

In Alternative Models of Sports Development in America, B. David Ridpath—a leading sports development researcher who has studied both the US system and the European club model—offers clear steps toward creating a new status quo. He lays out four possible alternative models that draw various elements from academic, athletic, and European approaches. His proposals will help increase access of all young people to the benefits of sports and exercise, allow athletes to also thrive as students, and improve competitiveness. The result is a book that will resonate with sports development professionals, academic administrators, and parents.

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America, Compromised
Lawrence Lessig
University of Chicago Press, 2018
“There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are.”
 
So begins Lawrence Lessig's sweeping indictment of contemporary American institutions and the corruption that besets them. We can all see it—from the selling of Congress to special interests to the corporate capture of the academy. Something is wrong. It’s getting worse.
 
And it’s our fault. What Lessig shows, brilliantly and persuasively, is that we can’t blame the problems of contemporary American life on bad people, as our discourse all too often tends to do. Rather, he explains, “We have allowed core institutions of America’s economic, social, and political life to become corrupted. Not by evil souls, but by good souls. Not through crime, but through compromise.” Every one of us, every day, making the modest compromises that seem necessary to keep moving along, is contributing to the rot at the core of American civic life. Through case studies of Congress, finance, the academy, the media, and the law, Lessig shows how institutions are drawn away from higher purposes and toward money, power, quick rewards—the first steps to corruption.
 
Lessig knows that a charge so broad should not be levied lightly, and that our instinct will be to resist it. So he brings copious, damning detail gleaned from years of research, building a case that is all but incontrovertible: America is on the wrong path. If we don’t acknowledge our own part in that, and act now to change it, we will hand our children a less perfect union than we were given. It will be a long struggle. This book represents the first steps.
 
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American Academic Cultures
A History of Higher Education
Paul H. Mattingly
University of Chicago Press, 2017
At a time when American higher education seems ever more to be reflecting on its purpose and potential, we are more inclined than ever to look to its history for context and inspiration. But that history only helps, Paul H. Mattingly argues, if it’s seen as something more than a linear progress through time. With American Academic Cultures, he offers a different type of history of American higher learning, showing how its current state is the product of different, varied generational cultures, each grounded in its own moment in time and driven by historically distinct values that generated specific problems and responses.
 
Mattingly sketches out seven broad generational cultures: evangelical, Jeffersonian, republican/nondenominational, industrially driven, progressively pragmatic, internationally minded, and the current corporate model. What we see through his close analysis of each of these cultures in their historical moments is that the politics of higher education, both inside and outside institutions, are ultimately driven by the dominant culture of the time. By looking at the history of higher education in this new way, Mattingly opens our eyes to our own moment, and the part its culture plays in generating its politics and promise.
 
[more]

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American Idyll
Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique
Catherine Liu
University of Iowa Press, 2011
A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, American Idyll argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones.
Throughout most of American history, antielitist sentiment was reserved for attacks against an entrenched aristocracy or rapacious plutocracy, but it has now become a revolt against meritocracy itself, directed against what insurgents see as a ruling class of credentialed elites with degrees from exclusive academic institutions. Catherine Liu reveals that, within the academy and stemming from the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, animosity against expertise has animated much of the Left’s cultural criticism.
By unpacking the disciplinary formation and academic ambitions of American cultural studies, Liu uncovers the genealogy of the current antielitism, placing the populism that dominates headlines within a broad historical context. In the process, she emphasizes the relevance of the historical origins of populist revolt against finance capital and its political influence. American Idyll reveals the unlikely alliance between American pragmatism and proponents of the Frankfurt School and argues for the importance of broad frames of historical thinking in encouraging robust academic debate within democratic institutions. In a bold thought experiment that revives and defends Richard Hofstadter’s theories of anti-intellectualism in American life, Liu asks, What if cultural populism had been the consensus politics of the past three decades?
American Idyll shows that recent antielitism does nothing to redress the source of its discontent—namely, growing economic inequality and diminishing social mobility. Instead, pseudopopulist rage, in conservative and countercultural forms alike, has been transformed into resentment, content merely to take down allegedly elitist cultural forms without questioning the real political and economic consolidation of powers that has taken place in America during the past thirty years.
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American Indian Studies
Native PhD Graduates Gift Their Stories
Edited by Mark L. M. Blair, Mary Jo Tippeconnic Fox, and Kestrel A. Smith
University of Arizona Press, 2022

In American Indian Studies, Native PhD graduates share their personal stories about their educational experiences and how doctoral education has shaped their identities, lives, relationships, and careers.

This collection of personal narratives from Native graduates of the University of Arizona’s American Indian Studies (AIS) doctoral program, the first such program of its kind, gifts stories of endurance and resiliency, hardship and struggle, and accomplishment and success. It provides insight into the diverse and dynamic experiences of Native graduate students. The narratives address family and kinship, mentorship, and service and giving back. Essayists share the benefits of having an AIS program at a mainstream academic institution—not just for the students enrolled but also for their communities.

This book offers Native students aspiring to a PhD a realistic picture of what it takes. While each student has their own path to walk, these stories provide the gift of encouragement and serve to empower Native students to reach their educational goals, whether it be in an AIS program or other fields of study.

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American Universities in a Global Market
Edited by Charles T. Clotfelter
University of Chicago Press, 2010
In higher education, the United States is the preeminent global leader, dominating the list of the world’s top research universities. But there are signs that America’s position of global leadership will face challenges in the future, as it has in other realms of international competition. American Universities in a Global Market addresses the variety of issues crucial to understanding this preeminence and this challenge. The book examines the various factors that contributed to America’s success in higher education, including openness to people and ideas, generous governmental support, and a tradition of decentralized friendly competition. It also explores the advantages of holding a dominant position in this marketplace and examines the current state of American higher education in a comparative context, placing particular emphasis on how market forces affect universities. By discussing the differences in quality among students and institutions around the world, this volume sheds light on the singular aspects of American higher education.

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The American University
How It Runs, Where It Is Going
Jacques Barzun
University of Chicago Press, 1992
When it was published in 1968, a year noted for historic student protests on campuses across the country, The American University spoke in Jacques Barzun's characteristically wise and lucid voice about what colleges and universities were really meant to do—and how they actually worked. Drawing on a lifetime of extraordinary accomplishment as a teacher, administrator, and scholar, Barzun here describes the immense demands placed on the university by its competing constituencies—students, faculty, administrators, alumni, trustees, and the political world around it all.

"American higher education is fortunate to have had a scholar and intellectual of Jacques Barzun's stature give so many years of service to the daily bread-and-butter details of running a great university and then share his reflections with us in a literate, humane, and engaging book."—Charles Donovan, America
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The American University of Beirut
Arab Nationalism and Liberal Education
By Betty S. Anderson
University of Texas Press, 2011

Since the American University of Beirut opened its doors in 1866, the campus has stood at the intersection of a rapidly changing American educational project for the Middle East and an ongoing student quest for Arab national identity and empowerment. Betty S. Anderson provides a unique and comprehensive analysis of how the school shifted from a missionary institution providing a curriculum in Arabic to one offering an English-language American liberal education extolling freedom of speech and analytical discovery.

Anderson discusses how generations of students demanded that they be considered legitimate voices of authority over their own education; increasingly, these students sought to introduce into their classrooms the real-life political issues raging in the Arab world. The Darwin Affair of 1882, the introduction of coeducation in the 1920s, the Arab nationalist protests of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the even larger protests of the 1970s all challenged the Americans and Arabs to fashion an educational program relevant to a student body constantly bombarded with political and social change. Anderson reveals that the two groups chose to develop a program that combined American goals for liberal education with an Arab student demand that the educational experience remain relevant to their lives outside the school's walls. As a result, in eras of both cooperation and conflict, the American leaders and the students at the school have made this American institution of the Arab world and of Beirut.

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Amherst in the World
Martha Saxton
Amherst College Press, 2020
In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Amherst College, a group of scholars and alumni explore the school’s substantial past in this volume. Amherst in the World tells the story of how an institution that was founded to train Protestant ministers began educating new generations of industrialists, bankers, and political leaders with the decline in missionary ambitions after the Civil War. The contributors trace how what was a largely white school throughout the interwar years begins diversifying its student demographics after World War II and the War in Vietnam. The histories told here illuminate how Amherst has contended with slavery, wars, religion, coeducation, science, curriculum, town and gown relations, governance, and funding during its two centuries of existence. Through Amherst’s engagement with educational improvement in light of these historical undulations, it continually affirms both the vitality and the utility of a liberal arts education.

Contributions by Martha Saxton, Gary J. Kornblith, David W. Wills, Frederick E. Hoxie, Trent Maxey, Nicholas L. Syrett,  Wendy H. Bergoffen, Rick López, Matthew Alexander Randolph, Daniel Levinson Wilk, K. Ian Shin, David S. Reynolds, Jane F. Thrailkill, Julie Dobrow, Richard F. Teichgraeber III, Debby Applegate, Michael E. Jirik, Bruce Laurie, Molly Michelmore, and Christian G. Appy.
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Anthropologists Wanted
Why Organizations Need Anthropology
Laurens Bakker
Amsterdam University Press

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Anthropology at Harvard
A Biographical History, 1790–1940
David L. Browman and Stephen Williams
Harvard University Press, 2013

Anthropology at Harvard recounts the rich and complex history of anthropology at America’s oldest university, beginning with the earliest precursors of the discipline within the study of natural history. The story unfolds through fascinating vignettes about the many individuals—famous and obscure alike—who helped shape the discipline at Harvard College and the Peabody Museum. Lively anecdotes provide in-depth portraits of dozens of key individuals, including Louis and Alexander Agassiz, Frederic Ward Putnam, Mary Hemenway, Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Sylvanus Morley, A. V. Kidder, and Antonio Apache. The text also throws new light on longstanding puzzles and debates, such as Franz Boas’s censure by the American Anthropological Association and the involvement of Harvard archaeologists in espionage work for the U.S. government during World War I.

The authors take a “cohort” perspective, looking beyond the big names to the larger network of colleagues that formed the dynamic backdrop to the development of ideas. The significant contributions of amateurs and private funders to the early growth of the field are highlighted, as is the active participation of women and of students and scholars of diverse ethnic backgrounds. A monumental achievement, Anthropology at Harvard makes an important contribution to the history of Americanist anthropology.

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Anxious Intellects
Academic Professionals, Public Intellectuals, and Enlightenment Values
John Michael
Duke University Press, 2000
Intellectuals occupy a paradoxical position in contemporary American culture as they struggle both to maintain their critical independence and to connect to the larger society. In Anxious Intellects John Michael discusses how critics from the right and the left have conceived of the intellectual’s role in a pluralized society, weighing intellectual authority against public democracy, universal against particularistic standards, and criticism against the respect of popular movements. Michael asserts that these Enlightenment-born issues, although not “resolvable,” are the very grounds from which real intellectual work must proceed.
As part of his investigation of intellectuals’ self-conceptions and their roles in society, Michael concentrates on several well-known contemporary African American intellectuals, including Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West. To illuminate public debates over pedagogy and the role of university, he turns to the work of Todd Gitlin, Michael Bérubé, and Allan Bloom. Stanley Fish’s pragmatic tome, Doing What Comes Naturally, along with a juxtaposition of Fredric Jameson and Samuel Huntington’s work, proves fertile ground for Michael’s argument that democratic politics without intellectuals is not possible. In the second half of Anxious Intellects, Michael relies on three popular conceptions of the intellectual—as critic, scientist, and professional—to discuss the work of scholars Constance Penley, Henry Jenkins, the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking, and others, insisting that ambivalence, anxiety, projection, identification, hybridity, and various forms of psychosocial complexity constitute the real meaning of Enlightenment intellectuality. As a new and refreshing contribution to the recently emergent culture and science wars, Michael’s take on contemporary intellectuals and their place in society will enliven and redirect these ongoing debates.
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Aquamarine Blue 5
Personal Stories of College Students with Autism
Dawn Prince-Hughes
Ohio University Press, 2002

Rated Outstanding by the American Association of School Libraries

This is the first book to be written by autistic college students about the challenges they face. Aquamarine Blue 5 details the struggle of these highly sensitive students and shows that there are gifts specific to autistic students that enrich the university system, scholarship, and the world as a whole.

Dawn Prince-Hughes presents an array of writings by students who have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism, showing their unique ways of looking at and solving problems. In their own words, they portray how their divergent thinking skills could be put to great use if they were given an opportunity. Many such students never get the chance because the same sensitivity that gives them these insights makes the flicker of fluorescent lights and the sound of chalk on the board unbearable For simple—and easily remedied—reasons, we lose these students, who are as gifted as they are challenged.

Aquamarine Blue 5 is a showcase of the strength and resilient character of individuals with Asperger’s Syndrome. It will be an invaluable resource for those touched by this syndrome, their friends and families, and school administrators.

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The Art, Science, and Magic of the Data Curation Network
A Retrospective on Cross-Institutional Collaboration
Jake Carlson
Michigan Publishing Services, 2023
The Data Curation Network (DCN) is a membership organization of institutional and non-profit data repositories whose vision is to advance open research by making data more ethical, reusable, and understandable. Although initially conceived of and established through grant funding, the DCN transitioned to a sustainable, member-funded organization in July 2021, and is now composed of almost 50 data curators from 17 institutions.

The Art, Science, and Magic of the Data Curation Network: A Retrospective on Cross Institutional Collaboration captures the results of a project retrospective meeting and describes the necessary components of the DCN’s sustained collaboration in the hopes that the insights will be of use to other collaborative efforts. In particular, the authors describe the successes of the community and challenges of launching a cross-institutional network. Additionally, this publication details the administrative, tool-based, and trust-based structures necessary for establishing this community, the “radical collaboration” that is the cornerstone of the DCN, and potential future collaborations to address shared challenges in libraries and research data management. This in-depth case study provides an overview of the critical work of launching a collaborative network and transitioning to sustainability. This publication will be of special interest to research librarians, data curators, and anyone interested in academic community building.
 
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Artistic Research in the Future Academy
Danny Butt
Intellect Books, 2017
The rapid growth of doctoral-level art education challenges traditional ways of thinking about academic knowledge and, yet, as Danny Butt argues in this book, the creative arts may also represent a positive blueprint for the future of the university. Synthesizing institutional history with aesthetic theory, Artistic Research in the Future Academy reconceptualizes the contemporary crisis in university education toward a valuable renewal of creative research.
 
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The Arts and Design in Research Universities
Interdisciplinary Impacts and Practices
Gabriel Harp
A2RU Intervals, 2018
From 2012-2015 (as part of the Mellon-funded SPARC project), the A2RU research team interviewed upper-level administration, faculty, and students at 38 member institutions about the impact of their arts-integration initiatives, including teaching, research, and community projects. We asked about what impact they hoped for and what impact they actually saw. The Impacts Map is a graphic representation of the categories of impact we surfaced, and a framework and logic model for connecting impacts across domains.

This arresting graphic provides a visual overview of the impacts of arts integration and interdisciplinarity in the university. It can be a tool for case-making, communication, and further inquiry.

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The Arts and Design in Research Universities (pack of 12)
Gabriel Harp
A2RU Intervals, 2018
From 2012-2015 (as part of the Mellon-funded SPARC project), the A2RU research team interviewed upper-level administration, faculty, and students at 38 member institutions about the impact of their arts-integration initiatives, including teaching, research, and community projects. We asked about what impact they hoped for and what impact they actually saw. The Impacts Map is a graphic representation of the categories of impact we surfaced, and a framework and logic model for connecting impacts across domains.

This arresting graphic provides a visual overview of the impacts of arts integration and interdisciplinarity in the university. It can be a tool for case-making, communication, and further inquiry.

This listing is for a pack of 12 maps.
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front cover of The Arts and Design in Research Universities (pack of 5)
The Arts and Design in Research Universities (pack of 5)
Gabriel Harp
A2RU Intervals, 2018
From 2012-2015 (as part of the Mellon-funded SPARC project), the A2RU research team interviewed upper-level administration, faculty, and students at 38 member institutions about the impact of their arts-integration initiatives, including teaching, research, and community projects. We asked about what impact they hoped for and what impact they actually saw. The Impacts Map is a graphic representation of the categories of impact we surfaced, and a framework and logic model for connecting impacts across domains.

This arresting graphic provides a visual overview of the impacts of arts integration and interdisciplinarity in the university. It can be a tool for case-making, communication, and further inquiry.

This listing is for a pack of 5 maps.
[more]

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Aspiring Adults Adrift
Tentative Transitions of College Graduates
Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Few books have ever made their presence felt on college campuses—and newspaper opinion pages—as quickly and thoroughly as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s 2011 landmark study of undergraduates’ learning, socialization, and study habits, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. From the moment it was published, one thing was clear: no university could afford to ignore its well-documented and disturbing findings about the failings of undergraduate education.
 
Now Arum and Roksa are back, and their new book follows the same cohort of undergraduates through the rest of their college careers and out into the working world. Built on interviews and detailed surveys of almost a thousand recent college graduates from a diverse range of colleges and universities, Aspiring Adults Adrift reveals a generation facing a difficult transition to adulthood. Recent graduates report trouble finding decent jobs and developing stable romantic relationships, as well as assuming civic and financial responsibility—yet at the same time, they remain surprisingly hopeful and upbeat about their prospects.
 
Analyzing these findings in light of students’ performance on standardized tests of general collegiate skills, selectivity of institutions attended, and choice of major, Arum and Roksa not only map out the current state of a generation too often adrift, but enable us to examine the relationship between college experiences and tentative transitions to adulthood. Sure to be widely discussed, Aspiring Adults Adrift will compel us once again to re-examine the aims, approaches, and achievements of higher education.
 
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Aspiring to Greatness
West Virginia University Since World War II
RONALD L. LEWIS
West Virginia University Press, 2013
 Aspiring to Greatness: West Virginia University since World War II chronicles the emergence of WVU as a major land-grant institution. As a continuation of the work of Doherty and Summers in West Virginia University: Symbol of Unity in a Sectionalized State, this book focuses on the modern historical developments that elevated WVU from a small regional institution to one of national prominence.
 
West Virginia University’s growth mirrors the developmental eras that have shaped American higher education since World War II. The University’s history as an innovative, pioneering force within higher education is explored through its major postwar stages of expansion, diversification, and commercialization.
 
Institutions of higher education nationwide experienced a dramatic increase in enrollments between 1945 and 1975 as millions of returning World War II and Korean War veterans took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights. Their children, the “baby boom” generation, continued to supply the growth in college enrollment and the corresponding increase in institutional complexity until the mid-1970s. During this period WVU followed the national trend by growing from a few thousand students to nearly fifteen thousand.
 
From 1975 to the early 1990s, expansion gave way to diversification. The traditional student population stopped growing by 1975, and  “boomers” were replaced by students from nontraditional backgrounds. An unprecedented gender, racial, and ethnic diversification took place on college campuses, a trend encouraged by federal civil rights legislation. To a lesser degree WVU was no exception, although its location in a rural state with a small minority population forced the University to work harder to attract minorities than institutions in proximity to urban areas.
 
The commercialization of higher education became a full-fledged movement by the 1990s. Major changes, such as globalization, demographic shifts, a weak economy, and the triumph of the “market society,” all accelerated the penetration of business values and practices into university life.  Like other public universities, WVU was called upon to generate more of its own revenues. The University’s strategic responses to these pressures reconstructed the state’s leading land grant into the large complex institution of today.
 
As the only modern history of West Virginia University, this text reaches into the archives of the President’s Office and makes exhaustive use of press accounts and interviews with key individuals to produce a detailed resource for alumni, friends, and supporters of WVU, as well as administrators and specialists in higher education. 
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An Athletic Director’s Story and the Future of College Sports in America
Robert E. Mulcahy
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Robert Mulcahy’s chronicle of his decade leading Rutgers University athletics is an intriguing story about fulfilling a vision.  The goal was to expand pride in intercollegiate athletics.  Redirecting a program with clearer direction and strategic purpose brought encouraging results.  Advocating for finer coaching and improved facilities, he and Rutgers achieved national honors in Division I sports.  Unprecedented alumni interest and support for athletics swelled across the Rutgers community.
His words and actions were prominent during a nationally-reported incident involving student athletes.  When the Rutgers Women’s Basketball team players were slandered by racist remarks from a popular radio talk show host, Mulcahy met it head on.  With the coach and players, he set an inspiring example for defending character and values.
Though Mr. Mulcahy left Rutgers in 2009, his memoir reflects continued devotion to intercollegiate athletics and student athletes.  His insights for addressing several leading issues confronting Division I sports today offer guidelines for present and future athletic directors to follow.
 
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The Autocratic Academy
Reenvisioning Rule within America's Universities
Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn
Duke University Press, 2023
Critics of contemporary US higher education often point to the academy’s “corporatization” as one of its defining maladies. However, in The Autocratic Academy Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn argues that American colleges and universities have always been organized as corporations in which the power to rule is legally vested in and monopolized by antidemocratic governing boards. This institutional form, Kaufman-Osborn contends, is antithetical to the free inquiry that defines the purpose of higher education. Tracing the history of the American academy from the founding of Harvard (1636), through the Supreme Court’s Dartmouth v. Woodward ruling (1819), and into the twenty-first century, Kaufman-Osborn shows how the university’s autocratic legal constitution is now yoked to its representation on the model of private property. Explaining why appeals to the cause of shared governance cannot succeed in wresting power from the academy’s autocrats, Kaufman-Osborn argues that American universities must now be reincorporated in accordance with the principles of democratic republicanism. Only then can the academy’s members hold accountable those chosen to govern and collectively determine the disposition of higher education’s unique public goods.
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