front cover of Bearing the Torch
Bearing the Torch
The University of Tennessee, 1794–2010
T.R.C. Hutton
University of Tennessee Press, 2022

Bearing the Torch stands as a comprehensive history of the University of Tennessee, replete with anecdotes and vignettes of interest to anyone interested in UT, from the administrators and chancellors to students and alums, and even to the Vols fans whose familiarity with the school comes mainly from the sports page. It is also a biography of a school whose history reflects that of its state and its nation. The institution that began as Blount College in 1794 in a frontier village called Knoxville exemplifies the relationship between education and American history.

This is the first scholarly history of UT since 1984. T. R. C. Hutton not only provides a much-needed update, but also seeks to present a social history of the university, fully integrating historical context and showing how the volume’s central “character”—the university itself—reflects historical themes and concerns. For example, Hutton shows how the school’s development was hampered in the early nineteenth century by stingy state funding (a theme that also appears in subsequent decades) and Jacksonian fears that publicly funded higher education equaled elite privilege. The institution nearly disappeared as the Civil War raged in a divided region, but then it flourished thanks to policies that never could have happened without the war. In the twentieth century, students embraced dramatic social changes as the university wrestled with race, gender, and other important issues. In the Cold War era, UT became a successful research institution and entered into a deep partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratories that persists to this day. All the while UT athletics experienced the highs of national championships and the lows of lawsuits and losing seasons. UT is a university with a universe of historical experiences.

The University of Tennessee’s story has always been defined by inclusion and exclusion, and the school has triumphed when it practiced the former and failed when it took part in the latter. Bearing the Torch traces that ongoing process, richly detailing the University’s contributions to what one president, Joseph Estabrook, called the “diffusion of knowledge among the people.”

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No Boston Olympics
How and Why Smart Cities Are Passing on the Torch
Chris Dempsey and Andrew Zimbalist
University Press of New England, 2017
In 2013 and 2014, some of Massachusetts’ wealthiest and most powerful individuals hatched an audacious plan to bring the 2024 Summer Olympics to Boston. Like their counterparts in cities around the world, Boston’s Olympic boosters promised political leaders, taxpayers, and the media that the Games would deliver incalculable benefits and require little financial support from the public. Yet these advocates refused to share the details of their bid and only grudgingly admitted, when pressed, that their plan called for billions of dollars in construction of unneeded venues. To win the bid, the public would have to guarantee taxpayer funds to cover cost overruns, which have plagued all modern Olympic Games. The United States Olympic Committee (USOC) chose Boston 2024’s bid over that of other American cities in January 2015—and for a time it seemed inevitable that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would award the Games to Boston 2024. No Boston Olympics is the story of how an ad hoc, underfunded group of diverse and engaged citizens joined together to challenge and ultimately derail Boston’s boosters, the USOC, and the IOC. Chris Dempsey was cochair of No Boston Olympics, the group that first voiced skepticism, demanded accountability, and catalyzed dissent. Andrew Zimbalist is a world expert on the economics of sports, and the leading researcher on the hidden costs of hosting mega-events such as the Olympics and the World Cup. Together, they tell Boston’s story, while providing a blueprint for citizens who seek to challenge costly, wasteful, disruptive, and risky Olympic bids in their own cities.
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Passing the Torch
Does Higher Education for the Disadvantaged Pay Off Across the Generations?
Paul Attewell
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007

The steady expansion of college enrollment rates over the last generation has been heralded as a major step toward reducing chronic economic disparities. But many of the policies that broadened access to higher education—including affirmative action, open admissions, and need-based financial aid—have come under attack in recent years by critics alleging that schools are admitting unqualified students who are unlikely to benefit from a college education. In Passing the Torch, Paul Attewell, David Lavin, Thurston Domina, and Tania Levey follow students admitted under the City University of New York’s “open admissions” policy, tracking its effects on them and their children, to find out whether widening college access can accelerate social mobility across generations.

Unlike previous research into the benefits of higher education, Passing the Torch follows the educational achievements of three generations over thirty years. The book focuses on a cohort of women who entered CUNY between 1970 and 1972, when the university began accepting all graduates of New York City high schools and increasing its representation of poor and minority students. The authors survey these women in order to identify how the opportunity to pursue higher education affected not only their long-term educational attainments and family well-being, but also how it affected their children’s educational achievements. Comparing the record of the CUNY alumnae to peers nationwide, the authors find that when women from underprivileged backgrounds go to college, their children are more likely to succeed in school and earn college degrees themselves. Mothers with a college degree are more likely to expect their children to go to college, to have extensive discussions with their children, and to be involved in their children’s schools. All of these parenting behaviors appear to foster higher test scores and college enrollment rates among their children. In addition, college-educated women are more likely to raise their children in stable two-parent households and to earn higher incomes; both factors have been demonstrated to increase children’s educational success.

The evidence marshaled in this important book reaffirms the American ideal of upward mobility through education. As the first study to indicate that increasing access to college among today’s disadvantaged students can reduce educational gaps in the next generation, Passing the Torch makes a powerful argument in favor of college for all.

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Passing the Torch
Planning for the Next Generation of Leaders in Public Service
Karl Besel
University of Arkansas Press, 2016

Public-service executives, both elected and appointed within the public and nonprofit sectors, are retiring at record levels, and the number of Americans reaching age sixty-five annually will continue to rise over the next decade and is expected to surpass four million in 2020. Finding qualified, motivated leaders to fill vital public-service positions will challenge the public and nonprofit sectors.

Unfortunately, recent studies show that few proactive steps are being taken by public-service organizations to plan for the next generation. Passing the Torch: Planning for the Next Generation of Public-Service Leaders provides an outline for those who will be facing and managing these looming changes.

In this valuable guide, the factors that influence selection of a career in public service are explored through the authors’ years of experience as leaders in public-service organizations and through interviews with other public-service professionals. Passing the Torch will be essential for leaders of nonprofit organizations, university faculty, researchers in the field of nonprofit management, and students in nonprofit management courses.
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Sculpture with a Torch
John Rood
University of Minnesota Press, 1968

Sculpture with a Torch was first published in 1963. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

John Rood, a sculpture and former professor of art at the University of Minnesota, provides in this book a practical, how-to-do-it discussion of the technique of welded metal sculpture. In addition to serving as an instruction manual for students and artists working with welded sculpture, the book will be helpful to art critics, connoisseurs, and others, who will gain greater insight into this kind of art by knowing something of the processes involved. In an introductory chapter the author discusses welded sculpture as an art form. In separate chapters he considers oxyacetylene welding, equipment, finishes, brazing, techniques, and arc-welding. He gives a step-by-step account of the making of a piece of welded sculpture for an architectural setting. A chapter on the making of sketches and a list of safety rules conclude the text, and there is a brief bibliography. The book is profusely illustrated with photographs showing the author's own metal sculpture, works of other artists, and tools and equipment.

John Rood is also the author of Sculpture in Wood, and his art is critically discussed and portrayed in John Rood's Sculpture by Bruno Schneider, both published by the University of Minnesota Press.

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