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Kimberly A. Scott explores this question and others as she details the National Science Foundation-funded enrichment project COMPUGIRLS. This groundbreaking initiative teaches tech skills to adolescent girls of color but, as importantly, offers a setting that emphasizes empowerment, community advancement, and self-discovery. Scott draws on her experience as an architect of COMPUGIRLS to detail the difficulties of translating participants' lives into a digital context while tracing how the program evolved. The dramatic stories of the participants show them blending newly developed technical and communication skills in ways designed to spark effective action and bring about important change.

A compelling merger of theory and storytelling, COMPUGIRLS provides a much-needed roadmap for understanding how girls of color can find and define their selves in today's digital age.

Between 1890 and 1915, a predominately African American state convict crew built Clemson University on John C. Calhoun’s Fort Hill Plantation in upstate South Carolina. Calhoun’s plantation house still sits in the middle of campus. From the establishment of the plantation in 1825 through the integration of Clemson in 1963, African Americans have played a pivotal role in sustaining the land and the university. Yet their stories and contributions are largely omitted from Clemson’s public history.

This book traces “Call My Name: African Americans in Early Clemson University History,” a Clemson English professor’s public history project that helped convince the university to reexamine and reconceptualize the institution’s complete and complex story from the origins of its land as Cherokee territory to its transformation into an increasingly diverse higher-education institution in the twenty-first century. Threading together scenes of communal history and conversation, student protests, white supremacist terrorism, and personal and institutional reckoning with Clemson’s past, this story helps us better understand the inextricable link between the history and legacies of slavery and the development of higher education institutions in America.

Winner of the 2020 OSCLG Outstanding Book Award
This new book for scholars and university administrators offers a provocative critique of sexual justice language and policy in higher education around the concept of consent. Complicating the idea that consent is plain common sense, Campuses of Consent shows how normative and inaccurate concepts about gender, gender identity, and sexuality erase queer or trans students' experiences and perpetuate narrow, regressive gender norms and individualist frameworks for understanding violence.

Theresa A. Kulbaga and Leland G. Spencer prove that consent in higher education cannot be meaningfully separated from larger issues of institutional and structural power and oppression. While sexual assault advocacy campaigns, such as It's On Us, federal legislation from Title IX to the Clery Act, and more recent affirmative-consent measures tend to construct consent in individualist terms, as something “given” or “received” by individuals, the authors imagine consent as something that can be constructed systemically and institutionally: in classrooms, campus communication, and shared campus spaces.

An even-handed exploration of the polarized state of campus politics that suggests ways for schools and universities to encourage discourse across difference. 

College campuses have become flashpoints of the current culture war and, consequently, much ink has been spilled over the relationship between universities and the cultivation or coddling of young American minds. Philosopher Sigal R. Ben-Porath takes head-on arguments that infantilize students who speak out against violent and racist discourse on campus or rehash interpretations of the First Amendment. Ben-Porath sets out to demonstrate the role of the university in American society and, specifically, how it can model free speech in ways that promote democratic ideals.

In Cancel Wars, she argues that the escalating struggles over “cancel culture,” “safe spaces,” and free speech on campus are a manifestation of broader democratic erosion in the United States. At the same time, she takes a nuanced approach to the legitimate claims of harm put forward by those who are targeted by hate speech. Ben-Porath’s focus on the boundaries of acceptable speech (and on the disproportional impact that hate speech has on marginalized groups) sheds light on the responsibility of institutions to respond to extreme speech in ways that proactively establish conversations across difference. Establishing these conversations has profound implications for political discourse beyond the boundaries of collegiate institutions. If we can draw on the truth, expertise, and reliable sources of information that are within the work of academic institutions, we might harness the shared construction of knowledge that takes place at schools, colleges, and universities against truth decay. Of interest to teachers and school leaders, this book shows that by expanding and disseminating knowledge, universities can help rekindle the civic trust that is necessary for revitalizing democracy.
 

The first systematic analysis of American literature textbooks used by college instructors in the last century

Scholars have long noted the role that college literary anthologies play in the rising and falling reputations of American authors. Canons by Consensus examines this classroom fixture in detail to challenge and correct a number of assumptions about the development of the literary canon throughout the 20th century.

Joseph Csicsila analyzes more than 80 anthologies published since 1919 and traces not only the critical fortunes of individual authors, but also the treatment of entire genres and groupings of authors by race, region, gender, and formal approach. In doing so, he calls into question accusations of deliberate or inadvertent sexism and racism. Selections by anthology editors, Csicsila demonstrates, have always been governed far more by prevailing trends in academic criticism than by personal bias.

Academic anthologies are found to constitute a rich and often overlooked resource for studying American literature, as well as an irrefutable record of the academy’s changing literary tastes throughout the last century.

Centering Student Activism is a deep exploration of institutional responses to sexual assault. It addresses critical issues facing campuses today, examining how students navigate institutional dynamics and utilize the power of new and traditional rhetorical strategies to effect change. In doing so, it provides a profound understanding of the mechanisms by which coalitions can transform educational environments.

Centering Student Activism features a national interview-based study of contemporary student activists who deploy rhetorical strategies and tactics—old and new, embodied and digital—with agility and awareness. They aim their strategies and tactics of “intersectional rhetorical feminism” to interrupt and transform a sedimented culture. The students’ activism highlights not only the harms experienced by survivors in the aftermath of their assaults but also how their efforts to communicate those harms are often stymied or silenced by official responses and practices. These student activists pair interruption with rhetorical transformation as they seek to create a survivor-centric culture. In so doing they spotlight the systemic roots of sexual violence and respond to sexual assault through intersectional, coalition-based work.

Through detailed analysis and compelling narratives, Shari J. Stenberg underscores the importance of community care and mutual support in advocacy efforts. Centering Student Activism is an essential work for navigating institutional dynamics, providing an important resource to students, educators, and administrators who seek to understand how universities silence survivors and how students create ways to speak back and transform institutional culture.

In the mid-twentieth century colleges' concerns about finances and enrollments, as well as ideological pressures to integrate formerly separate social groups, led men's colleges, and some women's colleges, to become coeducational. The admission of women to practically all men's colleges created a serious challenge for women's colleges. Most people no longer believed women's colleges were necessary since women had virtually unlimited access to higher education. Even though research spawned by the women's movement indicated the benefits to women of a "room of their own," few young women remained interested in applying to women's colleges.

Challenged by Coeducation details the responses of women's colleges to this latest wave of coeducation. Case studies written expressly for this volume include many types of women's colleges-Catholic and secular; Seven Sisters and less prestigious; private and state; liberal arts and more applied; northern, southern, and western; urban and rural; independent and coordinated with a coeducational institution. They demonstrate the principal ways women's colleges have adapted to the new coeducational era: some have been taken over or closed, but most have changed by admitting men and thereby becoming coeducational, or by offering new programs to different populations. Some women's colleges, mostly those that are in cities, connected to other colleges, and prestigious with a high endowment, still enjoy success.

Despite their dramatic drop in numbers, from 250 to fewer than 60 today, women's colleges are still important, editors Miller-Bernal and Poulson argue. With their commitment to enhancing women's lives, women's colleges and formerly women's colleges can serve as models of egalitarian coeducation.

• the failed 1950 effort to pass a Sanity Code regulating payments to football players;
• the thorny racial integration of university sports programs;
• the boom in television money;
• the 1984 Supreme Court decision that settled who could control skyrocketing media revenues;
• Title IX's transformation of women's athletics;
• the cheating, eligibility, and recruitment scandals that tarnished college sports in the 1980s and 1990s;
• the ongoing controversy over paying student athletes a share of the enormous moneys harvested by schools and athletic departments.

A thought-provoking journey into the whos and whys of college sports history, Changing the Playbook reveals how the turning points of yesterday and today will impact tomorrow."

    The demonstrations capture interest, teach, inform, fascinate, amaze, and perhaps, most importantly, involve students in chemistry. Nowhere else will you find books that answer, "How come it happens? . . . Is it safe? . . . What do I do with all the stuff when the demo is over?"
    Shakhashiri and his collaborators offer 282 chemical demonstrations arranged in 11 chapters. Each demonstration includes seven sections: a brief summary, a materials list, a step-by-step account of procedures to be used, an explanation of the hazards involved, information on how to store or dispose of the chemicals used, a discussion of the phenomena displayed and principles illustrated by the demonstration, and a list of references.

    The demonstrations capture interest, teach, inform, fascinate, amaze, and perhaps, most importantly, involve students in chemistry. Nowhere else will you find books that answer, "How come it happens? . . . Is it safe? . . . What do I do with all the stuff when the demo is over?"
    Shakhashiri and his collaborators offer 282 chemical demonstrations arranged in 11 chapters. Each demonstration includes seven sections: a brief summary, a materials list, a step-by-step account of procedures to be used, an explanation of the hazards involved, information on how to store or dispose of the chemicals used, a discussion of the phenomena displayed and principles illustrated by the demonstration, and a list of references.

    The demonstrations capture interest, teach, inform, fascinate, amaze, and perhaps, most importantly, involve students in chemistry. Nowhere else will you find books that answer, "How come it happens? . . . Is it safe? . . . What do I do with all the stuff when the demo is over?"
    Shakhashiri and his collaborators offer 282 chemical demonstrations arranged in 11 chapters. Each demonstration includes seven sections: a brief summary, a materials list, a step-by-step account of procedures to be used, an explanation of the hazards involved, information on how to store or dispose of the chemicals used, a discussion of the phenomena displayed and principles illustrated by the demonstration, and a list of references. You'll find safety emphasized throughout the book in each demonstration.