front cover of Dangerous Ideas on Campus
Dangerous Ideas on Campus
Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK
Matthew C. Ehrlich
University of Illinois Press, 2021

In 1960, University of Illinois professor Leo Koch wrote a public letter condoning premarital sex. He was fired. Four years later, a professor named Revilo Oliver made white supremacist remarks and claimed there was a massive communist conspiracy. He kept his job.

Matthew Ehrlich revisits the Koch and Oliver cases to look at free speech, the legacy of the 1960s, and debates over sex and politics on campus. The different treatment of the two men marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of academic freedom. Their cases also embodied the stark divide over beliefs and values--a divide that remains today. Ehrlich delves into the issues behind these academic controversies and places the events in the context of a time rarely associated with dissent, but in fact a harbinger of the social and political upheavals to come.

An enlightening and entertaining history, Dangerous Ideas on Campus illuminates how the university became a battleground for debating America's hot-button issues.

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The Dean's List
Leading a Modern Business School
Matthew A. Waller
University of Arkansas Press, 2021
In The Dean’s List, Matthew A. Waller provides a roadmap for anyone who leads or aspires to lead a business college. Waller, dean of the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas since 2015, offers a variety of practical tools and insights for leading effectively and confidently in the challenging, ever-evolving landscape of collegiate administration. Waller provides a field-tested framework for leadership as he explores twelve areas that are critical for leading a successful business college, including institutionalizing innovation, operating as the communicator in chief, managing the college’s finances, and delivering appreciation.

The role of a dean has changed dramatically in the last few decades. In addition to managing up, down, and sideways while dealing with students, staff, and faculty, there’s a growing demand for deans to work with parents, alumni, and donors as well as business and community leaders. The Dean’s List highlights examples from Waller’s career to illustrate practical advice for dealing with the specific challenges deans regularly face. The result is a handbook for shortening the learning curve for anyone who is, or aspires to be, the dean of a business college.
 
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dear elia
Letters from the Asian American Abyss
Mimi Khúc
Duke University Press, 2024
In dear elia Mimi Khúc revolutionizes how we understand mental health. Khúc traces the contemporary Asian American mental health crisis from the university into the maw of the COVID-19 pandemic, reenvisioning mental health through a pedagogy of unwellness—the recognition that we are all differentially unwell. In an intimate series of letters, she bears witness to Asian American unwellness up close and invites readers to recognize in it the shapes and sources of their own unwellness. Khúc draws linkages between student experience, the Asian immigrant family, the adjunctification of the university, and teaching methods pre- and post-COVID-19 to illuminate hidden roots of our collective unwellness: shared investments in compulsory wellness and meritocracy. She reveals the university as a central node and engine of unwellness and argues that we can no longer do Asian American studies without Asian American mental health—and vice versa. Interspersed throughout the book are reflective activities, including original tarot cards, that enact the very pedagogy Khúc advances, offering readers alternative ways of being that divest from structures of unwellness and open new possibilities for collective care.
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Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019
Matthew K. Gold
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

The latest installment of a digital humanities bellwether
 

Contending with recent developments like the shocking 2016 U.S. Presidential election, the radical transformation of the social web, and passionate debates about the future of data in higher education, Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019 brings together a broad array of important, thought-provoking perspectives on the field’s many sides. With a wide range of subjects including gender-based assumptions made by algorithms, the place of the digital humanities within art history, data-based methods for exhuming forgotten histories, video games, three-dimensional printing, and decolonial work, this book assembles a who’s who of the field in more than thirty impactful essays.

Contributors: Rafael Alvarado, U of Virginia; Taylor Arnold, U of Richmond; James Baker, U of Sussex; Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; David M. Berry, U of Sussex; Claire Bishop, The Graduate Center, CUNY; James Coltrain, U of Nebraska–Lincoln; Crunk Feminist Collective; Johanna Drucker, U of California–Los Angeles; Jennifer Edmond, Trinity College; Marta Effinger-Crichlow, New York City College of Technology–CUNY; M. Beatrice Fazi, U of Sussex; Kevin L. Ferguson, Queens College–CUNY; Curtis Fletcher, U of Southern California; Neil Fraistat, U of Maryland; Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State U; Michael Gavin, U of South Carolina; Andrew Goldstone, Rutgers U; Andrew Gomez, U of Puget Sound; Elyse Graham, Stony Brook U; Brian Greenspan, Carleton U; John Hunter, Bucknell U; Steven J. Jackson, Cornell U; Collin Jennings, Miami U; Lauren Kersey, Saint Louis U; Kari Kraus, U of Maryland; Seth Long, U of Nebraska, Kearney; Laura Mandell, Texas A&M U; Rachel Mann, U of South Carolina; Jason Mittell, Middlebury College; Lincoln A. Mullen, George Mason U; Trevor Muñoz, U of Maryland; Safiya Umoja Noble, U of Southern California; Jack Norton, Normandale Community College; Bethany Nowviskie, U of Virginia; Élika Ortega, Northeastern U; Marisa Parham, Amherst College; Jussi Parikka, U of Southampton; Kyle Parry, U of California, Santa Cruz; Brad Pasanek, U of Virginia; Stephen Ramsay, U of Nebraska–Lincoln; Matt Ratto, U of Toronto; Katie Rawson, U of Pennsylvania; Ben Roberts, U of Sussex; David S. Roh, U of Utah; Mark Sample, Davidson College; Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, New York U; Tim Sherratt, U of Canberra; Bobby L. Smiley, Vanderbilt U; Lauren Tilton, U of Richmond; Ted Underwood, U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Megan Ward, Oregon State U; Claire Warwick, Durham U; Alban Webb, U of Sussex; Adrian S. Wisnicki, U of Nebraska–Lincoln. 

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Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023
Matthew K. Gold
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

A cutting-edge view of the digital humanities at a time of global pandemic, catastrophe, and uncertainty

Where do the digital humanities stand in 2023? Debates in the Digital Humanities 2023 presents a state-of-the-field vision of digital humanities amid rising social, political, economic, and environmental crises; a global pandemic; and the deepening of austerity regimes in U.S. higher education. Providing a look not just at where DH stands but also where it is going, this fourth volume in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series features both established scholars and emerging voices pushing the field’s boundaries, asking thorny questions, and providing space for practitioners to bring to the fore their research and their hopes for future directions in the field. Carrying forward the themes of political and social engagement present in the series throughout, it includes crucial contributions to the field—from a vital forum centered on the voices of Black women scholars, manifestos from feminist and Latinx perspectives on data and DH, and a consideration of Indigenous data and artificial intelligence, to essays that range across topics such as the relation of DH to critical race theory, capital, and accessibility.

Contributors: Harmony Bench, Ohio State U; Christina Boyles, Michigan State U; Megan R. Brett, George Mason U; Michelle Lee Brown, Washington State U; Patrick J. Burns, New York U; Kent K. Chang, U of California, Berkeley; Rico Devara Chapman, Clark Atlanta U; Marika Cifor, U of Washington; María Eugenia Cotera, U of Texas; T. L. Cowan, U of Toronto; Marlene L. Daut, U of Virginia; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Kate Elswit, U of London; Nishani Frazier, U of Kansas; Kim Gallon, Brown U; Patricia Garcia, U of Michigan; Lorena Gauthereau, U of Houston; Masoud Ghorbaninejad, University of Victoria; Abraham Gibson, U of Texas at San Antonio; Nathan P. Gibson, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich; Kaiama L. Glover, Barnard College; Hilary N. Green, Davidson College; Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist U; Matthew N. Hannah, Purdue U Libraries; Jeanelle Horcasitas, DigitalOcean; Christy Hyman, Mississippi State U; Arun Jacob, U of Toronto; Jessica Marie Johnson, Johns Hopkins U and Harvard U; Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins U; Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Duke U; Mills Kelly, George Mason U; Spencer D. C. Keralis, Digital Frontiers; Zoe LeBlanc, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Jason Edward Lewis, Concordia U; James Malazita, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Alison Martin, Dartmouth College; Linda García Merchant, U of Houston Libraries; Rafia Mirza, Southern Methodist U; Mame-Fatou Niang, Carnegie Mellon U; Jessica Marie Otis, George Mason U; Marisa Parham, U of Maryland; Andrew Boyles Petersen, Michigan State U Libraries; Emily Pugh, Getty Research Institute; Olivia Quintanilla, UC Santa Barbara; Jasmine Rault, U of Toronto Scarborough; Anastasia Salter, U of Central Florida; Maura Seale, U of Michigan; Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe, Normandale Community College; Astrid J. Smith, Stanford U Libraries; Maboula Soumahoro, U of Tours; Mel Stanfill, U of Central Florida; Tonia Sutherland, U of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Gabriela Baeza Ventura, U of Houston; Carolina Villarroel, U of Houston; Melanie Walsh, U of Washington; Hēmi Whaanga, U of Waikato; Bridget Whearty, Binghamton U; Jeri Wieringa, U of Alabama; David Joseph Wrisley, NYU Abu Dhabi.



Cover alt text: A text-based cover with the main title repeating right-side up and upside down. The leftmost iteration appears in black ink; all others are white.

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Debating Moral Education
Rethinking the Role of the Modern University
Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben, eds.
Duke University Press, 2009
After decades of marginalization in the secularized twentieth-century academy, moral education has enjoyed a recent resurgence in American higher education, with the establishment of more than 100 ethics centers and programs on campuses across the country. Yet the idea that the university has a civic responsibility to teach its undergraduate students ethics and morality has been met with skepticism, suspicion, and even outright rejection from both inside and outside the academy. In this collection, renowned scholars of philosophy, politics, and religion debate the role of ethics in the university, investigating whether universities should proactively cultivate morality and ethics, what teaching ethics entails, and what moral education should accomplish. The essays quickly open up to broader questions regarding the very purpose of a university education in modern society.

Editors Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben survey the history of ethics in higher education, then engage with provocative recent writings by Stanley Fish in which he argues that universities should not be involved in moral education. Stanley Hauerwas responds, offering a theological perspective on the university’s purpose. Contributors look at the place of politics in moral education; suggest that increasingly diverse, multicultural student bodies are resources for the teaching of ethics; and show how the debate over civic education in public grade-schools provides valuable lessons for higher education. Others reflect on the virtues and character traits that a moral education should foster in students—such as honesty, tolerance, and integrity—and the ways that ethical training formally and informally happens on campuses today, from the classroom to the basketball court. Debating Moral Education is a critical contribution to the ongoing discussion of the role and evolution of ethics education in the modern liberal arts university.

Contributors. Lawrence Blum, Romand Coles, J. Peter Euben, Stanley Fish, Michael Allen Gillespie, Ruth W. Grant, Stanley Hauerwas, David A. Hoekema, Elizabeth Kiss, Patchen Markell, Susan Jane McWilliams, Wilson Carey McWilliams, J. Donald Moon, James Bernard Murphy, Noah Pickus, Julie A. Reuben, George Shulman, Elizabeth V. Spelman

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Decolonizing American Spanish
Eurocentrism and the Limits of Foreignness in the Imperial Ecosystem
Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022

Despite a pronounced shift away from Eurocentrism in Spanish and Hispanic studies departments in US universities, many implicit and explicit vestiges of coloniality remain firmly in place. While certain national and linguistic expressions are privileged, others are silenced with predictable racial and gendered results. Decolonizing American Spanish challenges not only the hegemony of Spain and its colonial pedagogies, but also the characterization of Spanish as a foreign language in the United States. By foregrounding Latin American cultures and local varieties of Spanish and reconceptualizing the foreign as domestic, Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera works to create new conceptual maps, revise inherited ones, and institutionalize marginalized and silenced voices and their stories. Considering the University of Puerto Rico as a point of context, this book brings attention to how translingual solidarity and education, a commitment to social transformation, and the engagement of student voices in their own languages can reinvent colonized education.

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Deconstruction
An American Institution
Gregory Jones-Katz
University of Chicago Press, 2021
The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform the broader understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities.

Deconstruction begins well before Jacques Derrida’s initial American presentation of his deconstructive work in a famed lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and continues through several decades of theoretic growth and tumult. While much of the subsequent story remains focused, inevitably, on Yale University and the personalities and curriculum that came to be lumped under the “Yale school” umbrella, Deconstruction makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory, and gender studies also were to the lifeblood of this mode of thought. Ultimately, Jones-Katz shows that deconstruction in the United States—so often caricatured as a French infection—was truly an American phenomenon, rooted in our preexisting political and intellectual tensions, that eventually came to influence unexpected corners of scholarship, politics, and culture.
 
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Degrees of Difference
Reflections of Women of Color on Graduate School
Edited by Kimberly D. McKee and Denise A. Delgado
University of Illinois Press, 2020
University commitments to diversity and inclusivity have yet to translate into support for women of color graduate students. Sexism, classism, homophobia, racial microaggressions, alienation, disillusionment, a lack of institutional and departmental support, limited help from family and partners, imposter syndrome, narrow reading lists—all remain commonplace. Indifference to the struggles of women of color in graduate school and widespread dismissal of their work further poisons an atmosphere that suffocates not only ambition but a person's quality of life.

In Degrees of Difference, women of color from diverse backgrounds give frank, unapologetic accounts of their battles—both internal and external—to navigate grad school and fulfill their ambitions. At the same time, the authors offer strategies for surviving the grind via stories of their own hard-won successes with self-care, building supportive communities, finding like-minded mentors, and resisting racism and unsupportive faculty and colleagues.

Contributors: Aeriel A. Ashlee, Denise A. Delgado, Nwadiogo I. Ejiogu, Delia Fernández, Regina Emily Idoate, Karen J. Leong, Kimberly D. McKee, Délice Mugabo, Carrie Sampson, Arianna Taboada, Jenny Heijun Wills, and Soha Youssef

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Degrees of Risk
Navigating Insecurity and Inequality in Public Higher Education
Blake R. Silver
University of Chicago Press, 2024
An ethnographic analysis of how insecurity is at the heart of contemporary higher education.

Institutions of higher education are often described as “ivory towers,” places of privilege where students exist in a “campus bubble,” insulated from the trials of the outside world. These metaphors reveal a widespread belief that college provides young people with stability and keeps insecurity at bay. But for many students, that’s simply not the case.

Degrees of Risk reveals how insecurity permeates every facet of college life for students at public universities. Sociologist Blake Silver dissects how these institutions play a direct role in perpetuating uncertainty, instability, individualism, and anxiety about the future. Silver examined interviews with more than one hundred students who described the risks that surrounded every decision: which major to choose, whether to take online classes, and how to find funding. He expertly identified the ways the college experience played out differently for students from different backgrounds. For students from financially secure families with knowledge of how college works, all the choices and flexibility of college felt like an adventure or a wealth of opportunities. But for many others, especially low-income, first-generation students, their personal and family circumstances meant that that flexibility felt like murkiness and precarity. In addition, he discovered that students managed insecurity in very different ways, intensifying inequality at the intersections of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other sociodemographic dimensions. Drawing from these firsthand accounts, Degrees of Risk presents a model for a better university, one that fosters success and confidence for a diverse range of students.
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Democracy and Higher Education
Traditions and Stories of Civic Engagement
Scott J. Peters
Michigan State University Press, 2010

How are we to understand the nature and value of higher education's public purposes, mission, and work in a democratic society? How do-and how should-academic professionals contribute to and participate in civic life in their practices as scholars, scientists, and educators?
     Democracy and Higher Education addresses these questions by combining an examination of several normative traditions of civic engagement in American higher education with the presentation and interpretation of a dozen oral history profiles of contemporary practitioners. In his analysis of these profiles, Scott Peters reveals and interprets a democratic-minded civic professionalism that includes and interweaves expert, social critic, responsive service, and proactive leadership roles. 
     Democracy and Higher Education contributes to a new line of research on the critically important task of strengthening and defending higher education's positive roles in and for a democratic society.

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Department and Discipline
Chicago Sociology at One Hundred
Andrew Abbott
University of Chicago Press, 1999
In this detailed history of the Chicago School of Sociology, Andrew Abbott investigates central topics in the emergence of modern scholarship, paying special attention to "schools of science" and how such schools reproduce themselves over time. What are the preconditions from which schools arise? Do they exist as rigid rules or as flexible structures? How do they emerge from the day-to-day activities of academic life such as editing journals and writing papers?

Abbott analyzes the shifts in social scientific inquiry and discloses the intellectual rivalry and faculty politics that characterized different stages of the Chicago School. Along the way, he traces the rich history of the discipline's main journal, the American Journal of Sociology.

Embedded in this analysis of the school and its practices is a broader theoretical argument, which Abbott uses to redefine social objects as a sequence of interconnected events rather than as fixed entities. Abbott's theories grow directly out of the Chicago School's insistence that social life be located in time and place, a tradition that has been at the heart of the school since its founding one hundred years ago.
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Designing Interdisciplinary Education
A Practical Handbook for University Teachers
Linda de Greef, Ger Post, Christianne Vink, and Lucy Wenting
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
Now, more than ever, higher education faces the challenge of educating students to see beyond the limits of their own discipline and to come up with innovative integrated solutions to our contemporary problems. Designing Interdisciplinary Education serves as a foothold for interdisciplinary initiatives in higher education, whether it be programmes, minors, courses or extra-curricular activities. It offers accessible guidance and practical advice for university teachers and curriculum leaders who aim to develop, implement and sustain a successful interdisciplinary approach to their teaching at the classroom, course or programme level.The book’s ‘how to’ approach addresses several important topics such as formulating and assessing interdisciplinary learning outcomes, embedding integration in the programme design, the features of an interdisciplinary teacher, interdisciplinary teaching in practice, and didactic methods that nurture interdisciplinary understanding. This handbook incorporates numerous case studies, key advices, and exercises from a variety of interdisciplinary programmes in diverse countries. The ideas elaborated in this handbook are based on the theories and practices used at the I0nstitute for Interdisciplinary Studies, the University of Amsterdam’s knowledge centre for interdisciplinary learning and teaching.
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Developing Faculty in Liberal Arts Colleges
Aligning Individual Needs and Organizational Goals
Baker, Vicki L.
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Developing Faculty Members in Liberal Arts Colleges analyzes the career stage challenges these faculty members must overcome, such as a lack of preparation for teaching, limited access to resources and mentors, and changing expectations for excellence in teaching, research, and service to become academic leaders in their discipline and at these distinctive institutions.

Drawing on research conducted at the thirteen institutions of the Great Lakes Colleges Association, Vicki L. Baker, Laura Gail Lunsford, and Meghan J. Pifer propose a compelling Alignment Framework for Faculty Development in Liberal Arts Colleges to show how these colleges succeed—or sometimes fail—in providing their faculties with the right support to be successful.  
 
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Digital Me
Trans Students Exploring Future Possible Selves Online
Z Nicolazzo
Rutgers University Press, 2023
The internet is where trans people have come to become. Creating an identity in digital space can be important for how trans people learn about themselves, their communities, and the possibilities available to them. While the internet and digital space is not the only way of coming to understand oneself in a community, it is a space of liberatory possibility and creativity. There is room to invent what may not yet exist for gender on the edges of what many consider to be “real.” For many, digital life can be the site of play, joy, and connection –even while the internet is not a harm-free space nor universally available. This book seeks to understand the complexities at play in the digital realm and the implications that have for gender, digital life, and higher education.
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Digital Sound Studies
Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, and Whitney Trettien, editors
Duke University Press, 2018
The digital turn has created new opportunities for scholars across disciplines to use sound in their scholarship. This volume’s contributors provide a blueprint for making sound central to research, teaching, and dissemination. They show how digital sound studies has the potential to transform silent, text-centric cultures of communication in the humanities into rich, multisensory experiences that are more inclusive of diverse knowledges and abilities. Drawing on multiple disciplines—including rhetoric and composition, performance studies, anthropology, history, and information science—the contributors to Digital Sound Studies bring digital humanities and sound studies into productive conversation while probing the assumptions behind the use of digital tools and technologies in academic life. In so doing, they explore how sonic experience might transform our scholarly networks, writing processes, research methodologies, pedagogies, and knowledges of the archive. As they demonstrate, incorporating sound into scholarship is thus not only feasible but urgently necessary.

Contributors. Myron M. Beasley, Regina N. Bradley, Steph Ceraso, Tanya Clement, Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, W. F. Umi Hsu, Michael J. Kramer, Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, Richard Cullen Rath, Liana M. Silva, Jonathan Sterne, Jennifer Stoever, Jonathan W. Stone, Joanna Swafford, Aaron Trammell, Whitney Trettien
 
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Disability Services in Higher Education
An Insider's Guide
Kirsten T. Behling, Eileen H. Bellemore, Lisa B. Bibeau, Andrew S. Cioffi, and Bridget A. McNamee
Temple University Press, 2023
Disability Services in Higher Education is the first comprehensive guide for people working in the field of ADA compliance in higher education. The authors examine how disabilities are supported to ensure students receive appropriate accommodations throughout their collegiate experience as well as provide guidance on overall campus accessibility. 

This volume provides an overview of the responsibilities of a Disabilities Service professional through an examination of relevant literature, laws and regulatory language, case law, and narrative on established practices. It also offers resources that current professionals can modify for use in their day-to-day practice immediately. The authors explore the complexities of accessibility, paying careful attention to the nuances of disability evaluation, accommodation decisions, management of a disability service office, advocating for resources and collaboration within and outside of higher education institutions. 

This practitioner-friendly book will help newcomers and seasoned professionals explore and evaluate best practices in the field through questions, examples, and functional job aids available for immediate use.  
 
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Disciplining Feminism
From Social Activism to Academic Discourse
Ellen Messer-Davidow
Duke University Press, 2002
How was academic feminism formed by the very institutions it originally set out to transform? This is the question Ellen Messer-Davidow seeks to answer in Disciplining Feminism. Launched thirty years ago as a bold venture to cut across disciplines and bridge the gap between scholarly knowledge and social activism, feminism in the academy, the author argues, is now entrenched in its institutional structures and separated from national political struggle.
Working within a firm theoretical framework and drawing on years of both personal involvement and fieldwork in and outside of academe, Messer-Davidow traces the metamorphosis of a once insurgent project in three steps. After illustrating how early feminists meshed their activism with institutional processes to gain footholds on campuses and in disciplinary associations, she turns to the relay between institutionalization and intellectualization, examining the way feminist studies coalesced into an academic field beginning in the mid-1970s. Without denying the successes of this feminist passage into the established system of higher learning, Messer-Davidow nonetheless insists that the process of institutionalization itself necessarily alters all new entrants—no matter how radical. Her final chapters look to the future of feminism in an increasingly conservative environment and to the possibilities for social change in general.
Disciplining Feminism’s interdisciplinary scope and cross-sector analysis will attract a broad range of readers interested in women’s studies, American higher education, and the dynamics of social transformation.
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Discord And Direction
The Postmodern Writing Program Administrator
edited by Sharon James McGee & Carolyn Handa
Utah State University Press, 2005

The argument of this collection is that the cultural and intellectual legacies of postmodernism impinge, significantly and daily, on the practice of the Writing Program Administrator. WPAs work in spaces where they must assume responsibility for a multifaceted program, a diverse curriculum, instructors with varying pedagogies and technological expertise—and where they must position their program in relation to a university with its own conflicted mission, and a state with its unpredictable views of accountability and assessment.

The collection further argues that postmodernism offers a useful lens through which to understand the work of WPAs and to examine the discordant cultural and institutional issues that shape their work. Each chapter tackles a problem local to its author’s writing program or experience as a WPA, and each responds to existing discord in creative ways that move toward rebuilding and redirection.

It is a given that accepting the role of WPA will land you squarely in the bind between modernism and postmodernism: while composition studies as a field arguably still reflects a modernist ethos, the WPA must grapple daily with postmodern habits of thought and ways of being. The effort to live in this role may or may not mean that a WPA will adopt a postmodern stance; it does mean, however, that being a WPA requires dealing with the postmodern.

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Discredited
The UNC Scandal and College Athletics' Amateur Ideal
Andy Thomason
University of Michigan Press, 2021

In 2009, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was on top of the world.

Consistently named one of the top universities in the country, it had welcomed a new phenom of a chancellor who promised to lead the public Ivy into the future. In the all-important athletic realm, the Tar Heels were the Coca-Cola of athletic brands. Resting upon the legacy of legendary basketball coach Dean Smith, UNC had carved out a reputation of excellence paired with squeaky-clean adherence to the rules. Supporters had a name for that irresistible ethos: the Carolina Way. The Tar Heels were climbing even higher. That year, they won their fifth national championship in men's basketball and looked poised to climb the ranks in football under a new, high-powered coach.

But within just a few years, it all came crashing down.

The Tar Heels' success, it turned out, was based on a foundation of deceit. Athletes were flocking to a slate of fake classes that advisers deftly used to keep them eligible to play. That revelation and others metastasized into one of the most damaging scandals ever to visit an American college. In Discredited, journalist Andy Thomason provides a gripping and authoritative retelling of the scandal through the eyes of four of its key participants: the secretary who presided over the fake classes, the professor who directed players toward them, the literacy specialist turned whistleblower who sought to expose the system, and the chancellor who found his career suddenly on the line. The heart-stopping narrative reveals the toll of a college's investment in major sports, and the amateurism myth upon which it is based. Based on dozens of original interviews and thousands of pages of documents, Discredited demonstrates just how far a university will go to preserve the athletic status quo: tolerating tarnished careers, ruined reputations, and years of scathing media criticism—all for a shot at competitive glory.

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Disrupting the Center
A Partnership Approach to Writing Across the University
Rebecca Hallman Martini
Utah State University Press, 2021
Strategic partnership offers writing centers a framework for responding to disruptive innovations in higher education. Through partnership, writing centers can simultaneously secure resources and support the practice of tutoring writing in ways that enable moments of resistance, where writing consultants and students can tactically challenge the corporate university through their methods of practice. Disrupting the Center explicates, analyzes, and critiques one particular writing center’s partnership approach to collaboration with disciplinary faculty and upper administrators across the curriculum.
 
Using on-site research and critical ethnographic study from one university writing center, Rebecca Hallman Martini establishes an innovative, cross-disciplinary partnership approach to writing instruction in which peer tutoring plays an integral curricular role. Case studies detail three partnerships that respond directly to existing or potential disruptive innovations in higher education and showcase important concepts: mapping mutual benefit and stakeholder engagement in an online studio/hybrid first-year writing program partnership in response to online education, creating negotiated space to work through ethical issues involved when working with a public-private partnership to develop a required extracurricular portfolio project in a business school, and building transformational partnerships through establishing a writing-in-the-professions curriculum in the College of Engineering in response to career readiness initiatives.
 
Disrupting the Center uses interviews, observations, focus groups, analysis of consultations, meetings, and shared documents such as annual reports, budgets, assessment data, assignments, and syllabi to generate a wide view of how systems work. Writing centers are flexible university-wide service spaces where students go for one-on-one and group writing support that can become dynamic spaces for writing pedagogy by disrupting, revitalizing, and reinventing the epistemic foundations of current rhetoric and composition landscapes and traditional approaches to writing.
 
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Disruptive Stories
Amplifying Voices from the Writing Center Margins
Elizabeth Kleinfeld
Utah State University Press, 2024
Disruptive Stories uses an activist editing method to select and publish authors that have been marginalized in scholarly conversations and enrich the understanding of lived writing center experiences that have been underrepresented in writing center scholarship. These chapters explore how marginality affects writing centers, the people who work in them, and the scholarship generated from them by examining the consequences—both positive and negative—of marginalization through a mix of narratives and research. Contributors provide unique perspectives ranging across status, role, nationality, race, and ability.
 
While US tenure-track writing center administrators (WCAs) do not make up the majority of those who hold WCA positions in writing centers, they are more likely to be the storytellers of the writing center grand narrative. They publish more, present more conference papers, edit more journals, and participate more in organizational leadership. This collection complicates that narrative by adding marginalized voices and experiences in three thematic categories: structural marginalization, globalization and marginalization, and embodied marginalization.
 
Disruptive Stories spurs further conversations about ways to improve the review process in writing center scholarship so that it more accurately reflects the growing diversity of its administrators and practitioners.
 
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Divergent Paths to College
Race, Class, and Inequality in High Schools
Holland, Megan M
Rutgers University Press, 2019
In Divergent Paths to College, Megan M. Holland examines how high schools structure different pathways that lead students to very different college destinations based on race and class. She finds that racial and class inequalities are reproduced through unequal access to key sources of information, even among students in the same school and even in schools with well-established college-going cultures. As the college application process becomes increasingly complex and high-stakes, social capital, or relationships with people who can provide information as well as support and guidance, becomes much more critical. Although much has been written about the college-bound experience, we know less about the role that social capital plays, and specifically how high schools can serve as organizational brokers of social ties. The relationships that high schools cultivate between students and higher education institutions by inviting college admissions officers into their schools to market to students, is a particularly critical, yet unexplored source of college information.
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Diversifying STEM
Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Race and Gender
Ebony O. McGee
Rutgers University Press, 2020
2020 Choice​ Outstanding Academic Title

Research frequently neglects the important ways that race and gender intersect within the complex structural dynamics of STEM. Diversifying STEM fills this void, bringing together a wide array of perspectives and the voices of a number of multidisciplinary scholars. The essays cover three main areas: the widely-held ideology that science and mathematics are “value-free,” which promotes pedagogies of colorblindness in the classroom as well as an avoidance of discussions around using mathematics and science to promote social justice; how male and female students of color experience the intersection of racist and sexist structures that lead to general underrepresentation and marginalization; and recognizing that although there are no quick fixes, there exists evidence-based research suggesting concrete ways of doing a better job of including individuals of color in STEM. As a whole this volume will allow practitioners, teachers, students, faculty, and professionals to reimagine STEM across a variety of educational paradigms, perspectives, and disciplines, which is critical in finding solutions that broaden the participation of historically underrepresented groups within the STEM disciplines. 
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The Diversity Bargain
And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities
Natasha Warikoo
University of Chicago Press, 2016
We’ve heard plenty from politicians and experts on affirmative action and higher education, about how universities should intervene—if at all—to ensure a diverse but deserving student population. But what about those for whom these issues matter the most? In this book, Natasha K. Warikoo deeply explores how students themselves think about merit and race at a uniquely pivotal moment: after they have just won the most competitive game of their lives and gained admittance to one of the world’s top universities.
           
What Warikoo uncovers—talking with both white students and students of color at Harvard, Brown, and Oxford—is absolutely illuminating; and some of it is positively shocking. As she shows, many elite white students understand the value of diversity abstractly, but they ignore the real problems that racial inequality causes and that diversity programs are meant to solve. They stand in fear of being labeled a racist, but they are quick to call foul should a diversity program appear at all to hamper their own chances for advancement. The most troubling result of this ambivalence is what she calls the “diversity bargain,” in which white students reluctantly agree with affirmative action as long as it benefits them by providing a diverse learning environment—racial diversity, in this way, is a commodity, a selling point on a brochure. And as Warikoo shows, universities play a big part in creating these situations. The way they talk about race on campus and the kinds of diversity programs they offer have a huge impact on student attitudes, shaping them either toward ambivalence or, in better cases, toward more productive and considerate understandings of racial difference.
           
Ultimately, this book demonstrates just how slippery the notions of race, merit, and privilege can be. In doing so, it asks important questions not just about college admissions but what the elite students who have succeeded at it—who will be the world’s future leaders—will do with the social inequalities of the wider world.  
 
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Diversity Includes Disability
Perspectives on the U-M Council for Disability Concerns
Anna Ercoli Schnitzer and Bonnie A. Dede
Michigan Publishing Services, 2018
The U-M Council for Disability Concerns, established by then-UM President Harold Shapiro in 1983, has never had an official institutional history.  In this Maize Book, the authors present perspectives on the Council from its inception to date. Rather than merely listing dates and facts, the work focuses on selected representative dynamic individuals who provide vibrant descriptions of different aspects of the Council. The intent of including these personal narratives is to portray the inspirational culture and atmosphere that have imbued and grown the Council throughout its existence. 

The Council has changed and enlarged its membership from its origins as a small, low-key group consisting primarily of faculty and staff engaged in the disability arena, to an organization that encompasses a diverse, cross-campus and local community membership, with an extensive mailing list, as well. The achievements of the Council over the years and the goals that it envisions for the future, we hope, will serve as a template for other institutions.
 
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Diversity Regimes
Why Talk Is Not Enough to Fix Racial Inequality at Universities
James M. Thomas
Rutgers University Press, 2020
2021 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

As a major, public flagship university in the American South, so-called “Diversity University” has struggled to define its commitments to diversity and inclusion, and to put those commitments into practice. In Diversity Regimes, sociologist James M. Thomas draws on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork at DU to illustrate the conflicts and contingencies between a core set of actors at DU over what diversity is and how it should be accomplished. Thomas’s analysis of this dynamic process uncovers what he calls “diversity regimes”: a complex combination of meanings, practices, and actions that work to institutionalize commitments to diversity, but in doing so obscure, entrench, and even magnify existing racial inequalities. Thomas’s concept of diversity regimes, and his focus on how they are organized and unfold in real time, provides new insights into the social organization of multicultural principles and practices.
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Documenting the American Student Abroad
The Media Cultures of International Education
Kelly Hankin
Rutgers University Press, 2021
1 in 10 undergraduates in the US will study abroad. Extoled by students as personally transformative and celebrated in academia for fostering cross-cultural understanding, study abroad is also promoted by the US government as a form of cultural diplomacy and a bridge to future participation in the global marketplace.

In Documenting the American Student Abroad, Kelly Hankin explores the documentary media cultures that shape these beliefs, drawing our attention to the broad range of stakeholders and documentary modes involved in defining the core values and practices of study abroad. From study abroad video contests and a F.B.I. produced docudrama about student espionage to reality television inspired educational documentaries and docudramas about Amanda Knox, Hankin shows how the institutional values of "global citizenship," "intercultural communication," and "cultural immersion" emerge in contradictory ways through their representation.

By bringing study abroad and media studies into conversation with one another, Documenting the American Student Abroad: The Media Cultures of International Education offers a much needed humanist contribution to the field of international education, as well as a unique approach to the growing scholarship on the intersection of media and institutions. As study abroad practitioners and students increase their engagement with moving images and digital environments, the insights of media scholars are essential for helping the field understand how the mediation of study abroad rhetoric shapes rather than reflects the field's central institutional ideals
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Doing Development in West Africa
A Reader by and for Undergraduates
Charles Piot
Duke University Press, 2016
In recent years the popularity of service learning and study abroad programs that bring students to the global South has soared, thanks to this generation of college students' desire to make a positive difference in the world. This collection contains essays by undergraduates who recount their experiences in Togo working on projects that established health insurance at a local clinic, built a cyber café, created a microlending program for teens, and started a local writers' group. The essays show students putting their optimism to work while learning that paying attention to local knowledge can make all the difference in a project's success. Students also conducted research on global health topics by examining the complex relationships between traditional healing practices and biomedicine. Charles Piot's introduction contextualizes student-initiated development within the history of development work in West Africa since 1960, while his epilogue provides an update on the projects, compiles an inventory of best practices, and describes the type of projects that are likely to succeed. Doing Development in West Africa provides a relatable and intimate look into the range of challenges, successes, and failures that come with studying abroad in the global South.

Contributors. Cheyenne Allenby, Kelly Andrejko, Connor Cotton, Allie Middleton, Caitlin Moyles, Charles Piot, Benjamin Ramsey, Maria Cecilia Romano, Stephanie Rotolo, Emma Smith, Sarah Zimmerman

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Doing Difference Differently
Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and Affordances
Zhaozhe Wang
Utah State University Press, 2024
Doing Difference Differently ethnographically recounts the stories of four Chinese international students navigating the complex socio-academic environment of a North American institution for higher education. Author Zhaozhe Wang traces the ecologically situated and distributed literacy practices of these individuals across rhetorical contexts, both on and off campus, and reconstructs the digitally networked, spatiotemporally emerging, rhetorically potent, and ecologically afforded literacy worlds of Chinese international students.
 
Doing Difference Differently provides an in-depth, nuanced understanding of the multifaceted literate lives of this often-marginalized cultural group, highlighting their diverse aspirations, personas, communities, challenges, and strategies. The book reconceptualizes the linguistic and cultural differences of Chinese international students as active processes of embracing, performing, resisting, negotiating, and redefining the identities that institutions impose on them through everyday literacy practices. Wang offers an analytical heuristic for researchers and educators to better understand these students’ backgrounds and to more effectively and ethically support and advocate for them. This case study critically engages broad and interconnected concepts that are essential to educators’ collective understanding of Generation Z students brought up in cultural and educational contexts outside of the European-American sphere.
 
This book appeals to scholars, researchers, teachers, and administrators working in North American higher education and English-speaking countries, particularly those in the fields of writing studies, second language studies, applied linguistics, multilingual education, literacy studies, and international education. Educators across disciplines seeking to better understand the growing population of Chinese international students in North America will likewise benefit.
 
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Doing Diversity in Higher Education
Faculty Leaders Share Challenges and Strategies
Brown-Glaude, Winnifred R
Rutgers University Press, 2008
Using case studies from universities throughout the nation, Doing Diversity in Higher Education examines the role faculty play in improving diversity on their campuses. The power of professors to enhance diversity has long been underestimated, their initiatives often hidden from view. Winnifred Brown-Glaude and her contributors uncover major themes and offer faculty and administrators a blueprint for conquering issues facing campuses across the country. Topics include how to dismantle hostile microclimates, sustain and enhance accomplishments, deal with incomplete institutionalization, and collaborate with administrators. The contributors' essays portray working on behalf of diversity as a genuine intellectual project rather than a faculty "service."

The rich variety of colleges and universities included provides a wide array of models that faculty can draw upon to inspire institutional change.

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Doodling for Academics
A Coloring and Activity Book
Julie Schumacher
University of Chicago Press, 2017
To an outsider, working as a university professor might seem like a dream: summers off, a few hours of class each week, an exchange of ideas with brilliant colleagues, books and late afternoon lattes. . . . Who wouldn’t envy that life?
 
But those in the trenches of academe are well acquainted with the professoriate’s dark underside: the hierarchies and pseudo-political power plays, the peculiar colleagues, the over-parented students, the stacks of essays that need to be graded ASAP.
 
No one understands this world better than novelist Julie Schumacher, who here provides a bitingly funny distraction designed to help you survive life in higher education without losing your mind. Sardonic yet shrewdly insightful, Doodling for Academics offers the perfect cognitive relief for the thousands of faculty and grad students whose mentors and loved ones failed to steer them toward more reasonable or lucrative fields.
 
Through forty pages of original illustrations and activities—from coloring to paper dolls to mad libs—this book traces the arc of a typical day on campus. Get a peek inside the enigma of the student brain. Imagine a utopian faculty meeting. Navigate the red tape maze of university administration. With the help of hilarious illustrations by Lauren Nassef, Schumacher infuses the world of campus greens and university quads with cutting wit, immersing you deep into the weirdly creative challenges of university life. Offering a satirical interactive experience for scholars, the combination of humor and activities in this book will bring academia into entertaining relief, making it the perfect gift for your colleagues, advisors, or newly minted graduates.
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The Douglass Century
Transformation of the Women’s College at Rutgers University
Denda, Kayo
Rutgers University Press, 2018
Rutgers University’s Douglass Residential College is the only college for women that is nested within a major public research university in the United States. Although the number of women’s colleges has plummeted from a high of 268 in 1960 to 38 in 2016, Douglass is flourishing as it approaches its centennial in 2018. To explore its rich history, Kayo Denda, Mary Hawkesworth, Fernanda H. Perrone examine the strategic transformation of Douglass over the past century in relation to continuing debates about women’s higher education.

The Douglass Century celebrates the college’s longevity and diversity as distinctive accomplishments, and analyzes the contributions of Douglass administrators, alumnae, and students to its survival, while also investigating multiple challenges that threatened its existence.  This book demonstrates how changing historical circumstances altered the possibilities for women and the content of higher education, comparing the Jazz Age, American the Great Depression, the Second World War, the post-war Civil Rights era, and the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. Concluding in the present day, the authors highlight the college’s ongoing commitment to Mabel Smith Douglass’ founding vision, “to bring about an intellectual quickening, a cultural broadening in connection with specific training so that women may go out into the world fitted…for leadership…in the economic, political, and intellectual life of this nation.” In addition to providing a comprehensive history of the college, the book brings its subjects to life with eighty full-color images from the Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries.  
 
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During the Dissertation
A Textual Mentor for Doctoral Students in the Process of Writing
Christine Pearson Casanave
University of Michigan Press, 2020
“A textual mentor like During the Dissertation can fill a void in writers’ lives at a time of solitude, uncertainty, and anxiety. Keep it under your pillow.”
 
This volume is a sequel to Casanave’s popular Before the Dissertation. Like that volume, this book is designed as a companion for doctoral dissertation writers of qualitative or mixed methods work in fields related to language education. It could also benefit those writing master’s theses and those writing in other social science fields. It is meant to be consulted once the writing has begun—once students have settled on a topic, designed the project, or collected the data—because this is the time when they are analyzing, drafting, revising, polishing, and probably fretting, deleting, reconstructing, and even losing sleep. Also, like its predecessor, it is not designed to teach anyone how to write a dissertation as there are plenty of those available elsewhere.
            For most doctoral students, writing will happen at different stages of the project. Strategies for timing of these kinds of writing differ across students, and also across supervisors and advisers. If dissertation writers do not know by the time they start writing which strategies and issues pertain to them, this book can help them craft some approaches to suit their own personalities, preferred practices, and individual goals and visions, as well as help them figure out how dissertation writing might fit into the real-life intrusions of work and family.
           Issues covered in the book are: starting to write, envisioning the project as a whole, relationships with supervisors, perfectionism and other maladies, health, low- and high-IQ days, loneliness and isolation, distractions and interruptions, revising, and knowing when to stop.
 
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