791 books match the query 'Levels' and 60 start with c

cover of CANCELED - Notes from Home

CANCELED - Notes from Home

Jonna McKone

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Notes from Home weaves a tapestry of personal stories from a group of youth who have experienced family insecurity during childhood. At Rutgers University, the Price Family Fellows Program provides financial, emotional, and academic support for students who seek to steer their own narratives and achieve their dreams through education. Eight graduates of the program now share reflections, photographs, and memories in search of new, often surprising meanings of home and family.
 
Through portraiture, oral history, writing, and family archives, the contributors explore childhood, geography, immigration, education, and family relationships, recovering misunderstood or overlooked moments. In the process of making this work, the group found old family photos, returned to sites of significance, and made new friendships, discovering the transformational potential of this kind of storytelling to reframe hardship, loss, and uncertainty. In the words of one contributor, “I felt like this process was a necessary step that allowed me to acknowledge and comprehend what I was experiencing at the time. It allowed me to create a more coherent understanding that I am who I am because of my past and because I was the one who had control of molding my own, better path.” Each chapter, encompassing one person’s story, is strikingly unique in its vision and approach.
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cover of Call My Name, Clemson: Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community

Call My Name, Clemson

Documenting the Black Experience in an American University Community

Rhondda Robinson Thomas

University of Iowa Press, 2020

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.

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cover of Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Campus Life

Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz

University of Chicago Press, 1988

"Based on subtle, imaginative readings of autobiographies, memoirs, fiction and secondary sources, [Campus Life] tells the story of the changing mentalities of American undergraduates over two centuries."—Michael Moffatt, New York Times Book Review
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cover of Campus with Purpose: Building a Mission-Driven Campus

Campus with Purpose

Building a Mission-Driven Campus

Stephen Lehmkuhle

Rutgers University Press, 2021

When Stephen Lehmkuhle became the chancellor of the brand-new University of Minnesota-Rochester campus, he had to start from scratch. He did not inherit a legacy mission that established what the campus did and how to do it; rather, he needed to find a way to rationalize the existence of the nascent campus. Lehmkuhle recognized that without a shared understanding of purpose, the scope of a new campus expands at an unsustainable rate as it tries to be all things to all people, and so his first act was to decide on the driving purpose of the campus. He then used this purpose to make decisions about institutional design, scope, programs, and campus activities. Through personal and engaging anecdotes about his experience, Lehmkuhle describes how higher education leaders can focus on campus purpose to create new and fresh ways to think about many elements of campus operation and function, and how leaders can protect the campus’s purpose from the pervasive higher education culture that is hardened by history and habit.
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cover of Canons by Consensus: Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies

Canons by Consensus

Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies

Joseph Csicsila, with a foreword by Tom Quirk

University of Alabama Press, 2004

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.

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cover of Capital of Mind: The Idea of a Modern American University

Capital of Mind

The Idea of a Modern American University

Adam R. Nelson

University of Chicago Press, 2024

The second volume of an ambitious new economic history of American higher education.

Capital of Mind is the second volume in a breathtakingly ambitious new economic history of American higher education. Picking up from the first volume, Exchange of Ideas, Adam R. Nelson looks at the early decades of the nineteenth century, explaining how the idea of the modern university arose from a set of institutional and ideological reforms designed to foster the mass production and mass consumption of knowledge. This “industrialization of ideas” mirrored the industrialization of the American economy and catered to the demands of a new industrial middle class for practical and professional education. From Harvard in the north to the University of Virginia in the south, new experiments with the idea of a university elicited intense debate about the role of scholarship in national development and international competition, and whether higher education should be supported by public funds, especially in periods of fiscal austerity. The history of capitalism and the history of the university, Nelson reveals, are intimately intertwined—which raises a host of important questions that remain salient today. How do we understand knowledge and education as commercial goods? Should they be public or private? Who should pay for them? And, fundamentally, what is the optimal system of higher education for a capitalist democracy?
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cover of Case for Critical Literacy: A History of Reading in Writing Studies

Case for Critical Literacy

A History of Reading in Writing Studies

Alice S. Horning

Utah State University Press, 2024

The Case for Critical Literacy explores the history of reading within writing studies and lays the foundation for understanding the impact of this critical, yet often untaught, skill. Every measure of students’ reading comprehension, whether digital or analog, demonstrates that between 50 and 80 percent of students are unable to capture the substance of a full discussion or evaluate material for authority, accuracy, currency, relevancy, appropriateness, and bias.
 
This book examines how college-level instruction reached this point and provides pedagogical strategies that writing instructors and teachers can use to address the problem. Alice Horning makes the case for the importance of critical reading in the teaching of writing with intentionality and imagination, while sharing glimpses of her own personal history with reading and writing. Horning provides the context for understanding what college faculty face in their classrooms and offers a history of critical literacy that explains why, to date, it has mostly neglected or ignored the diverse statuses of students’ reading challenges.
 
The Case for Critical Literacy explores actionable options to better meet students’ literacy needs. College and university faculty, especially writing instructors, will benefit from an understanding of what has happened in the field and what needs to change.
 
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cover of Centering Student Activism: Feminist Rhetorical Interruptions of Sexual Assault Culture

Centering Student Activism

Feminist Rhetorical Interruptions of Sexual Assault Culture

Shari J. Stenberg

Utah State University Press, 2026

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.

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cover of Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University

Chalk Lines

The Politics of Work in the Managed University

Randy Martin, ed.

Duke University Press, 1999

The increasing corporatization of education has served to expose the university as a business—and one with a highly stratified division of labor. In Chalk Lines editor Randy Martin presents twelve essays that confront current challenges facing the academic workforce in U.S. colleges and universities and demonstrate how, like chalk lines, divisions between employees may be creatively redrawn.
While tracing the socioeconomic conditions that have led to the present labor situation on campuses, the contributors consider such topics as the political implications of managerialism and the conceptual status of academic labor.
They examine the trend toward restructuring and downsizing, the particular plight of the adjunct professor, the growing emphasis on vocational training in the classroom, and union organizing among university faculty, staff, and graduate students. Placing such issues within the context of the history of labor movements as well as governmental initiatives to train a workforce capable of competing in the global economy, Chalk Lines explores how universities have attempted to remake themselves in the image of the corporate sector. Originally published as an issue of Social Text, this expanded volume, which includes four new essays, offers a broad view of academic labor in the United States.
With its important, timely contribution to debates concerning the future of higher education, Chalk Lines will interest a wide array of academics, administrators, policymakers, and others invested in the state—and fate—of academia.


Contributors.
Stanley Aronowitz, Jan Currie, Zelda F. Gamson, Emily Hacker, Stefano Harney, Randy Martin, Bart Meyers, David Montgomery, Frederick Moten, Christopher Newfield, Gary Rhoades, Sheila Slaughter, Jeremy Smith, Vincent Tirelli, William Vaughn, Lesley Vidovich, Ira Yankwitt


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cover of Changing the Playbook: How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports

Changing the Playbook

How Power, Profit, and Politics Transformed College Sports

Howard Chudacoff

University of Illinois Press, 2015

"In Changing the Playbook, Howard P. Chudacoff delves into the background and what-ifs surrounding seven defining moments that redefined college sports. These changes involved fundamental issues--race and gender, profit and power--that reflected societal tensions and, in many cases, remain pertinent today:
  • 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."

[more]
cover of Charting Your Path to Full: A Guide for Women Associate Professors

Charting Your Path to Full

A Guide for Women Associate Professors

Vicki L. Baker

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Institutions, faculty, and students benefit when women academics advance in their careers, yet research shows that women academics are more likely to stall at the associate professor stage of their careers than men. Charting Your Path to Full is a data- and literature-informed resource aimed at helping women in the professoriate excel in their careers, regardless of discipline and institution type. Vicki L. Baker draws on human resources, organizational studies, and positive organizational psychology to help women first focus on their joy as the primary driver of career and personal pursuits, and provides action steps, “To Do” lists, and additional tools and resources to lay out a clear step-by-step approach to help women academics reach their goals. Baker’s wealth of consulting and research insights provides a compelling and accessible approach to supporting women as they re-envision their careers.
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cover of Cheating the Spread: Gamblers, Point Shavers, and Game Fixers in College Football and Basketball

Cheating the Spread

Gamblers, Point Shavers, and Game Fixers in College Football and Basketball

Albert J. Figone

University of Illinois Press, 2012

Delving into the history of gambling and corruption in intercollegiate sports, Cheating the Spread recounts all of the major gambling scandals in college football and basketball. Digging through court records, newspapers, government documents, and university archives and conducting private interviews, Albert J. Figone finds that game rigging has been pervasive and nationwide throughout most of the sports' history. The insidious practice has spread to implicate not only bookies and unscrupulous gamblers but also college administrators, athletic organizers, coaches, fellow students, and the athletes themselves.
 
Naming the players, coaches, gamblers, and go-betweens involved, Figone discusses numerous college basketball and football games reported to have been fixed and describes the various methods used to gain unfair advantage, inside information, or undue profit. His survey of college football includes early years of gambling on games between established schools such as Yale, Princeton, and Harvard; Notre Dame's All-American halfback and skilled gambler George Gipp; and the 1962 allegations of insider information between Alabama coach Paul "Bear" Bryant and former Georgia coach James Wallace "Wally" Butts; and many other recent incidents. Notable events in basketball include the 1951 scandal involving City College of New York and six other schools throughout the East Coast and the Midwest; the 1961 point-shaving incident that put a permanent end to the Dixie Classic tournament; the 1978 scheme in which underworld figures recruited and bribed several Boston College players to ensure a favorable point spread; the 1994-95 Northwestern scandal in which players bet against their own team; and other recent examples of compromised gameplay and gambling.
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cover of Checklist for Change: Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise

Checklist for Change

Making American Higher Education a Sustainable Enterprise

Zemsky, Robert

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Almost every day American higher education is making news with a list of problems that includes the incoherent nature of the curriculum, the resistance of the faculty to change, and the influential role of the federal government both through major investments in student aid and intrusive policies. Checklist for Change not only diagnoses these problems, but also provides constructive recommendations for practical change.

Robert Zemsky details the complications that have impeded every credible reform intended to change American higher education. He demythologizes such initiatives as the Morrill Act, the GI Bill, and the Higher Education Act of 1972, shedding new light on their origins and the ways they have shaped higher education in unanticipated and not commonly understood ways. Next, he addresses overly simplistic arguments about the causes of the problems we face and builds a convincing argument that well-intentioned actions have combined to create the current mess for which everyone is to blame.

Using provocative case studies, Zemsky describes the reforms being implemented at a few institutions with the hope that these might serve as harbingers of the kinds of change needed: the University of Minnesota at Rochester’s compact curriculum in the health sciences only, Whittier College’s emphasis on learning outcomes, and the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh’s coherent overall curriculum.

In conclusion, Zemsky describes the principal changes that must occur not singly but in combination. These include a fundamental recasting of federal financial aid; new mechanisms for better channeling the competition among colleges and universities; recasting the undergraduate curriculum; and a stronger, more collective faculty voice in governance that defines not why, but how the enterprise must change.
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cover of Childfree across the Disciplines: Academic and Activist Perspectives on Not Choosing Children

Childfree across the Disciplines

Academic and Activist Perspectives on Not Choosing Children

Davinia Thornley

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Recently, childfree people have been foregrounded in mainstream media. More than seven percent of Western women choose to remain childfree and this figure is increasing. Being childfree challenges the ‘procreation imperative’ residing at the center of our hetero-normative understandings, occupying an uneasy position in relation to—simultaneously—traditional academic ideologies and prevalent social norms. After all, as Adi Avivi recognizes, "if a woman is not a mother, the patriarchal social order is in danger." This collection engages with these (mis)perceptions about childfree people: in media representations, demographics, historical documents, and both psychological and philosophical models. Foundational pieces from established experts on the childfree choice--Rhonny Dam, Laurie Lisle, Christopher Clausen, and Berenice Fisher--appear alongside both activist manifestos and original scholarly work, comprehensively brought together. Academics and activists in various disciplines and movements also riff on the childfree life: its implications, its challenges, its conversations, and its agency—all in relation to its inevitability in the 21st century. Childfree across the Disciplines unequivocally takes a stance supporting the subversive potential of the childfree choice, allowing readers to understand childfreedom as a sense of continuing potential in who—or what—a person can become.

[more]
cover of Children as Social Butterflies: Navigating Belonging in a Diverse Swiss Kindergarten

Children as Social Butterflies

Navigating Belonging in a Diverse Swiss Kindergarten

Ursina Jaeger

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Children as Social Butterflies examines how kindergarten children experience, negotiate, and claim belonging in a diverse and stigmatized Swiss neighborhood. Schools as formative instances of social belonging are particularly important where children with different migration histories are educated together. Childhood scholar Ursina Jaeger followed individual children in a kindergarten class from day one of their school enrollment and accompanied them to extracurricular activities, to ballet classes, to their children's rooms, to the social welfare office, or on family visits abroad. Based on data from several years of this child-centered and multisited research, Children as Social Butterflies offers a vivid ethnography with unique insights into the everyday lives of young children in a diverse neighborhood. The book provides an analytical language informed by theories of social differentiation to grasp complex configurations of social belonging and shows the full potential of ethnographic research with young children. Jaeger thus offers a dynamic reading of migration, schooling, and childhood that is strongly informed by the experience of working with young children. The book provides educators, childhood scholars, and parents alike with suggestions for dealing with (migration-related) social differentiation. 

This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition, published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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cover of City of Broken Dreams: Myth-Making, Nationalism and the University in an African Motor City

City of Broken Dreams

Myth-Making, Nationalism and the University in an African Motor City

Leslie J. Bank

Michigan State University Press, 2019

What role should universities have in revitalizing rust-belt motor cities left to decay by economic and political transformation? In City of Broken Dreams, author Leslie J Bank addresses this question through a detailed case study of East London, a city in South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Here, as in American motor cities like Detroit and Flint, the car’s cultural power and association with the endless possibilities of modernity lie at the heart of the refusal to seek alternative development paths leading away from racially inscribed automotive capitalism. Rooting the university in a history of industrialisation, placemaking and city-building, this book examines contemporary debates about the role that urban universities should have in building economies, creating jobs and reshaping the politics and identities of their communities. In South Africa as in many other nations, institutions of higher education represent potentially powerful cultural and socioeconomic agents, but the 2015 #FeesMustFall student protests against rising tuition costs highlighted the limits of their power. Firmly grounded in the particulars of East London, this thoughtful study illuminates questions common to rust-belt cities and universities around the world.
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cover of Civics in a Digital Republic: A Transformative Curriculum

Civics in a Digital Republic

A Transformative Curriculum

Robert A. Waterson

West Virginia University Press, 2012

This innovative curriculum book provides key materials, resources, and tools to help secondary educators prepare their students to be engaged citizens of their community, state, nation and world. Five complete units of instruction, based on West Virginia Content Standards and Objectives, provide meaningful lessons while being mindful of the transition from tangible text to more digital curricula:

•Rights of the Individual 
•Freedoms of the Individual
•Responsibilities of the Individual
•Beliefs Concerning Societal Conditions 
•Financial Literacy
 Additional features of the curriculum include:
•24 lessons that provide specific teaching and learning strategies
•4 culminating activities for enrichment opportunities  
•A matrix illustrating the West Virginia Content Standards and Objectives covered
•A matrix illustrating compliance with the National Council for the Social Studies Standards  
•A curriculum toolbox that provides over 70 engaging web sites to visit and explore.
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cover of Claiming Home, Shaping Community: Testimonios de los valles

Claiming Home, Shaping Community

Testimonios de los valles

Edited by Gloria H. Cuádraz and Yolanda Flores

University of Arizona Press, 2017

To offer testimonio is inherently political, a vehicle that counters the hegemony of the state and illuminates the repression and denial of human rights. Claiming Home, Shaping Community shares testimonios from and about the lives of Mexican-origin people who left the rural, agricultural Imperial and San Joaquín Valleys to pursue higher education at a University of California campus.

While symbolically their journeys embody the master narrative of the “American Dream,” Claiming Home, Shaping Community does not echo the “rags to riches” trope reified in dominant culture, but rather, it asserts the need to rehumanize the purpose and heart of education. In each chapter, the narrators illustrate myriad supports that allowed them to move forward on their academic and professional journeys: hard work, affirmative action, inclusionary practices, mentors, and their communities’ cultural wealth. Each trajectory is unique, but put together as a collection, the commonalities emerge.

Denoting a sense of political and social urgency that responds to the current accentuated economic disparities between the haves and the have-nots, these essays illuminate the broader societal benefits of federal legislation and resources for state-funded public higher education and policies that broaden access and resources. By telling their stories, the contributors seek to empower others on their journeys to and through higher education.

Contributors:

Daniel “Nane” Alejandrez
Manuel Barajas
Angelica Cárdenas-Chaisson
Gloria H. Cuádraz
Yolanda Flores
Francisco J. Galarte
John J. Halcón
Ester Hernández
Rosa M. Jiménez
Roberto Moreno
José R. Padilla
Enid Pérez
Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner
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cover of Claiming Space: Performing the Personal through Decorated Mortarboards

Claiming Space

Performing the Personal through Decorated Mortarboards

Sheila Bock

Utah State University Press, 2023

Claiming Space examines the growing tradition of decorating mortarboards at college graduations, offering a performance-centered approach to these material sites of display. Taking mortarboard displays seriously as public performances of the personal, this book highlights the creative, playful, and powerful ways graduates use their caps to fashion their personal engagement with notions of self, community, education, and the unknown future.
 
Claiming the space of these graduation caps is a popular and widespread way that individuals make their voices heard, or rather seen, in the visual landscape of commencement ceremonies. The forms and meanings of these material displays take shape in relation to broader, ongoing conversations about higher education in the United States, conversations grounded in discourses of belonging, citizenship, and the promises of the American Dream. Integrating observational fieldwork with extensive interviews and surveys, author Sheila Bock highlights the interpretations of individuals participating in this tradition. She also attends to the public framings of this tradition, including how images of mortarboards have grounded online enactments of community through hashtags such as #LatinxGradCaps and #LetTheFeathersFly, as well as what rhetorical framings are employed in news coverage and legal documents in cases where the value of the practice is both called into question and justified.
 
As university administrators and cultural commentators seek to make sense of the current state of higher education, these forms of material expression offer insight into how students themselves are grappling with higher ed's promises and shortcomings. Claiming Space is a meaningful contribution to folklore, cultural studies, media studies, and education.
 
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cover of Class Cultures and Social Mobility: The Hidden Strengths of Working-Class First-Generation Graduates

Class Cultures and Social Mobility

The Hidden Strengths of Working-Class First-Generation Graduates

Paul Dean

Rutgers University Press, 2026

When working-class first-generation students enter college or the professional workplace, they often find themselves immersed in entirely new worlds. They must learn the unwritten rules for how to speak, dress, behave, and interact with new peers and colleagues. While striving to fit in and do well, they risk feeling imposter syndrome, a loss of identity, or broken ties with friends and family. 

Class Cultures and Social Mobility tells the stories of upwardly mobile first-gen graduates who flipped the script and turned their working-class roots into a strength. This accessible and highly engaging book reveals how first-gen graduates overcame hardship while leveraging unique skills—their working-class cultural capital—in college and their professional careers. It demonstrates there needn’t be a choice between economic success and maintaining authenticity to one’s roots—we can balance the competing demands of the two class worlds together. Whether you're an educator, student, working professional, or advocate, this book provides a powerful way to reimagine the transformations that accompany class mobility. 

[more]
cover of Class Not Dismissed: Reflections on Undergraduate Education and Teaching the Liberal Arts

Class Not Dismissed

Reflections on Undergraduate Education and Teaching the Liberal Arts

Anthony Aveni

University Press of Colorado, 2014

In Class Not Dismissed, award-winning professor Anthony Aveni tells the personal story of his six decades in college classrooms and some of the 10,000 students who have filled them. Through anecdotes of his own triumphs and tribulations—some amusing, others heartrending—Aveni reveals his teaching story and thoughts on the future of higher education.

Although in recent years the lecture has come under fire as a pedagogical method, Aveni ardently defends lecturing to students. He shares his secrets on crafting an engaging lecture and creating productive dialogue in class discussions. He lays out his rules on classroom discipline and tells how he promotes the lost art of listening. He is a passionate proponent of the liberal arts and core course requirements as well as a believer in sound teaching promoted by active scholarship.

Aveni is known to his students as a consummate storyteller. In Class Not Dismissed he shares real stories about everyday college life that shed light on serious educational issues. The result is a humorous, reflective, inviting, and powerful inquiry into higher education that will be of interest to anyone invested in the current and future state of college and university education.


[more]
cover of Class Warfare: Class, Race, and College Admissions in Top-Tier Secondary Schools

Class Warfare

Class, Race, and College Admissions in Top-Tier Secondary Schools

Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, and Heather Jenkins

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Stories abound about the lengths to which middle- and upper-middle-class parents will go to ensure a spot for their child at a prestigious university. From the Suzuki method to calculus-based physics, from AP tests all the way back to early-learning Kumon courses, students are increasingly pushed to excel with that Harvard or Yale acceptance letter held tantalizingly in front of them. And nowhere is this drive more apparent than in our elite secondary schools. In Class Warfare, Lois Weis, Kristin Cipollone, and Heather Jenkins go inside the ivy-yearning halls of three such schools to offer a day-to-day, week-by-week look at this remarkable drive toward college admissions and one of its most salient purposes: to determine class.
             
Drawing on deep and sustained contact with students, parents, teachers, and administrators at three iconic secondary schools in the United States, the authors unveil a formidable process of class positioning at the heart of the college admissions process. They detail the ways students and parents exploit every opportunity and employ every bit of cultural, social, and economic capital they can in order to gain admission into a “Most Competitive” or “Highly Competitive Plus” university. Moreover, they show how admissions into these schools—with their attendant rankings—are used to lock in or improve class standing for the next generation. It’s a story of class warfare within a given class, the substrata of which—whether economically, racially, or socially determined—are fiercely negotiated through the college admissions process.
In a historic moment marked by deep economic uncertainty, anxieties over socioeconomic standing are at their highest. Class, as this book shows, must be won, and the collateral damage of this aggressive pursuit may just be education itself, flattened into a mere victory banner.  
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cover of Climbing a Broken Ladder: Contributors of College Success for Youth in Foster Care

Climbing a Broken Ladder

Contributors of College Success for Youth in Foster Care

Nathanael J. Okpych

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Although foster youth have college aspirations similar to their peers, fewer than one in ten ultimately complete a two-year or four-year college degree. What are the major factors that influence their chances of succeeding? Climbing a Broken Ladder advances our knowledge of what can be done to improve college outcomes for a student group that has largely remained invisible in higher education. Drawing on data from one of the most extensive studies of young people in foster care, Nathanael J. Okpych examines a wide range of factors that contribute to the chances that foster youth enroll in college, persist in college, and ultimately complete a degree. Okpych also investigates how early trauma affects later college outcomes, as well as the impact of a significant child welfare policy that extends the age limit of foster care. The book concludes with data-driven and concrete recommendations for policy and practice to get more foster youth into and through college.
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cover of Cold War Exile: The Unclosed Case of Maurice Halperin

Cold War Exile

The Unclosed Case of Maurice Halperin

Don S. Kirschner

University of Missouri Press, 1995

In 1953 Maurice Halperin was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to defend himself on charges of espionage. He was accused of having supplied Soviet sources with classified material from the Office of Strategic Services while he was an employee during World War II.

The Cold War was in full force. McCarthyism was at its peak. Caught up in the rapids of history, Maurice Halperin's life spun out of control. Denying the charges but knowing he could never fully clear his name, Halperin fled to Mexico and then, to avoid extradition, to Moscow. Among the friends he made there were British spy Donald MacLean and Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara. Disenchanted with socialism in the Soviet Union, he accepted Guevara's invitation to come to Havana in 1962. There he worked for Castro's government for five years before political tension forced him to leave for Vancouver, Canada, where he now resides.

Was Halperin a spy or a scapegoat? Was he a victim of Red- baiting or a onetime Communist espionage agent who eventually lost faith in Communism? Halperin's accuser was Elizabeth Bentley, a confessed Soviet courier who accused more than one hundred Americans of spying. Yet Bentley had no proof, and Halperin continues to maintain his innocence. One of them was lying. As Kirschner unravels the engrossing facts of the case--utilizing FBI files and dozens of interviews, including extensive interviews with Halperin himself--the reader becomes the investigator in a riveting real-life spy mystery. Along the way Kirschner offers new material on the OSS and further disturbing information about J. Edgar Hoover's use of his considerable power.

Maurice Halperin has lived a life like few Americans in our century. A left-wing American exile, he experienced two socialist worlds from the inside. In recounting the unclosed case of Maurice Halperin, Cold War Exile is both a gripping account of that remarkable life and a significant contribution to our understanding of a fascinating and controversial era in American political history.

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cover of Collaborations & Innovations: Supporting Multilingual Writers across Campus Units

Collaborations & Innovations

Supporting Multilingual Writers across Campus Units

Nancy DeJoy and Beatrice Quarshie Smith

University of Michigan Press, 2017

For decades, U.S. institutions of higher education have discussed ways to meet the needs of multilingual students; the more recent increases in enrollment by international students have created opportunities for productive change across campuses—particularly ways that units can collaborate to better meet those needs.
 
The chapters in this volume demonstrate that teaching effective communication skills to all students in ways that recognize the needs of multiple language users requires a shift in perspective that approaches multilingualism as an opportunity that is enhanced by the internationalization of higher education because it makes transparent the problems of current structures and disciplinary approaches in accessing those opportunities. A goal of this collection is to address the economic, structural, disciplinary, and pedagogical challenges of making this type of shift in bold and compassionate ways.
 
Chapters are organized into these four parts--Program-Level Challenges and Opportunities, Opportunities for Enhancing Teacher Training, Multilingualism and the Revision of First-Year Writing, and Integrating Writing Center Insights—and reflect the perspectives of a variety of university language settings. The contributions feature collaborative models and illustrate the need to rethink structures, pedagogies, assessment/evaluation processes, and teacher training for graduate and undergraduate students who will teach writing and other forms of communication. 
[more]
cover of College Belonging: How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life

College Belonging

How First-Year and First-Generation Students Navigate Campus Life

Lisa M. Nunn

Rutgers University Press, 2021

College Belonging reveals how colleges’ and universities’ efforts to foster a sense of belonging in their students are misguided. Colleges bombard new students with the message to “get out there!” and “find your place” by joining student organizations, sports teams, clubs and the like. Nunn shows that this reflects a flawed understanding of what belonging is and how it works. Drawing on the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim, College Belonging shows that belonging is something that members of a community offer to each other. It is something that must be given, like a gift. Individuals cannot simply walk up to a group or community and demand belonging. That’s not how it works. The group must extend a sense of belonging to each and every member. It happens by making a person feel welcome, to feel that their presence matters to the group, that they would be missed if they were gone. This critical insight helps us understand why colleges' push for students simply to “get out there!” does not always work. 
[more]
cover of College Choices: The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay for It

College Choices

The Economics of Where to Go, When to Go, and How to Pay for It

Edited by Caroline M. Hoxby

University of Chicago Press, 2004

Aspiring college students and their families have many options. A student can attend an in-state or an out-of-state school, a public or private college, a two-year community college program or a four-year university program. Students can attend full-time and have a bachelor of arts degree by the age of twenty-three or mix college and work, progressing toward a degree more slowly. To make matters more complicated, the array of financial aid available is more complex than ever. Students and their families must weigh federal grants, state merit scholarships, college tax credits, and college savings accounts, just to name a few.

In College Choices, Caroline Hoxby and a distinguished group of economists show how students and their families really make college decisions—how they respond to financial aid options, how peer relationships figure in the decision-making process, and even whether they need mentoring to get through the admissions process. Students of all sorts are considered—from poor students, who may struggle with applications and whether to continue on to college, to high aptitude students who are offered "free rides" at elite schools. College Choices utilizes the best methods and latest data to analyze the college decision-making process, while explaining how changes in aid and admissions practices inform those decisions as well.
[more]
cover of College Knowledge for the Student Athlete

College Knowledge for the Student Athlete

David Schoem and Shelly Kovacs

University of Michigan Press, 2011

This book was written to support the academic success of student athletes—whether at a large or small university or college, whether team or individual sport, whether women or men, whether on scholarship or not.

While all college students must learn to negotiate the complex transition from high school to college, student athletes face unique challenges, including the complicated set of regulations set out by the NCAA and individual conferences that determine eligibility. The current environment in college athletics makes it even more critical that student athletes understand what they need to do academically and how to avoid potential situations that could jeopardize their athletic careers.

College Knowledge for the Student Athlete is a road map and tour guide for a successful career as a student athlete. Tips are based on research and the authors’ experience, as well as the wisdom and advice of hundreds of former student athletes.

[more]
cover of College in Prison: Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration

College in Prison

Reading in an Age of Mass Incarceration

Karpowitz, Daniel

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Over the years, American colleges and universities have made various efforts to provide prisoners with access to education. However, few of these outreach programs presume that incarcerated men and women can rise to the challenge of a truly rigorous college curriculum. The Bard Prison Initiative is different.

College in Prison chronicles how, since 2001, Bard College has provided hundreds of incarcerated men and women across the country access to a high-quality liberal arts education. Earning degrees in subjects ranging from Mandarin to advanced mathematics, graduates have, upon release, gone on to rewarding careers and elite graduate and professional programs. Yet this is more than just a story of exceptional individuals triumphing against the odds. It is a study in how the liberal arts can alter the landscape of some of our most important public institutions giving people from all walks of life a chance to enrich their minds and expand their opportunities.

Drawing on fifteen years of experience as a director of and teacher within the Bard Prison Initiative, Daniel Karpowitz tells the story of BPI’s development from a small pilot project to a nationwide network. At the same time, he recounts dramatic scenes from in and around college-in-prison classrooms pinpointing the contested meanings that emerge in moments of highly-charged reading, writing, and public speaking. Through examining the transformative encounter between two characteristically American institutions—the undergraduate college and the modern penitentiary—College in Prison makes a powerful case for why liberal arts education is still vital to the future of democracy in the United States.
[more]
cover of Community Engagement Abroad: Perspectives and Practices on Service, Engagement, and Learning Overseas

Community Engagement Abroad

Perspectives and Practices on Service, Engagement, and Learning Overseas

Pat Crawford

Michigan State University Press, 2020

A landmark in our understanding of international community-engaged learning programs, this book invites educators to rethink everything from disciplinary assumptions to the role of higher education in a globalizing world. Tapping the many such programs developed at Michigan State University during the last half-century, the volume develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing study-abroad programs with a community-engagement focus. More than a how-to guide, it also offers seven theoretically framed case studies showing how these experiences can change students, faculty, and communities alike. The purposeful broadening of who is involved in these types of international learning programs leads to conceptual transformation and self-reflection within the participants. The authors take the reader on a fascinating journey through how they changed as a result of designing and delivering programs in full collaboration with community partners. The arguments given in this volume for developing truly reciprocal, mutually beneficial partnerships beyond the academy are powerful and persuasive.
[more]
cover of Complacency: Classics and Its Displacement in Higher Education

Complacency

Classics and Its Displacement in Higher Education

John T. Hamilton

University of Chicago Press, 2022

A critical reflection on complacency and its role in the decline of classics in the academy.
 
In response to philosopher Simon Blackburn’s portrayal of complacency as a vice that impairs university study at its core, John T. Hamilton examines the history of complacency in classics and its implications for our contemporary moment.
 
The subjects, philosophies, and literatures of ancient Greece and Rome were once treated as the foundation of learning, with everything else devolving from them. Hamilton investigates what this model of superiority, derived from the golden age of the classical tradition, shares with the current hegemony of mathematics and the natural sciences. He considers how the qualitative methods of classics relate to the quantitative positivism of big data, statistical reasoning, and presumably neutral abstraction, which often dismiss humanist subjectivity, legitimize self-sufficiency, and promote a fresh brand of academic complacency. In acknowledging the reduced status of classics in higher education today, he questions how scholarly striation and stagnation continue to bolster personal, ethical, and political complacency in our present era.
 
[more]
cover of Complaint!

Complaint!

Sara Ahmed

Duke University Press, 2021

In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.
[more]
cover of Completing College: Rethinking Institutional Action

Completing College

Rethinking Institutional Action

Vincent Tinto

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Even as the number of students attending college has more than doubled in the past forty years, it is still the case that nearly half of all college students in the United States will not complete their degree within six years. It is clear that much remains to be done toward improving student success. For more than twenty years, Vincent Tinto’s pathbreaking book Leaving College has been recognized as the definitive resource on student retention in higher education. Now, with Completing College, Tinto offers administrators a coherent framework with which to develop and implement programs to promote completion.

Deftly distilling an enormous amount of research, Tinto identifies the essential conditions enabling students to succeed and continue on within institutions. Especially during the early years, he shows that students thrive in settings that pair high expectations for success with structured academic, social, and financial support, provide frequent feedback and assessments of their performance, and promote their active involvement with other students and faculty. And while these conditions may be worked on and met at different institutional levels, Tinto points to the classroom as the center of student education and life, and therefore the primary target for institutional action.

Improving retention rates continues to be among the most widely studied fields in higher education, and Completing College carefully synthesizes the latest research and, most importantly, translates it into practical steps that administrators can take to enhance student success.

[more]
cover of Composing Research: A Contextualist  Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition

Composing Research

A Contextualist Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition

Cindy Johanek

Utah State University Press, 2000

Cindy Johanek offers a new perspective on the ideological conflict between qualitative and quantitative research approaches, and the theories of knowledge that inform them. With a paradigm that is sensitive to the context of one's research questions, she argues, scholars can develop less dichotomous forms that invoke the strengths of both research traditions. Context-oriented approaches can lift the narrative from beneath the numbers in an experimental study, for example, or bring the useful clarity of numbers to an ethnographic study.

A pragmatic scholar, Johanek moves easily across the boundaries that divide the field, and argues for contextualist theory as a lens through which to view composition research. This approach brings with it a new focus, she writes. "This new focus will call us to attend to the contexts in which rhetorical issues and research issues converge, producing varied forms, many voices, and new knowledge, indeed reconstructing a discipline that will be simultaneously focused on its tasks, its knowledge-makers, and its students."

Composing Research is a work full of personal voice and professional commitment and will be a welcome addition to the research methods classroom and to the composition researcher's own bookshelf.

2000 Outstanding Scholarship Award from the International Writing Centers Association.

[more]
cover of Computational Humanities

Computational Humanities

Jessica Marie Johnson

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

The first book to intervene in debates on computation in the digital humanities

Bringing together leading experts from across North America and Europe, Computational Humanities redirects debates around computation and humanities digital scholarship from dualistic arguments to nuanced discourse centered around theories of knowledge and power. This volume is organized around four questions: Why or why not pursue computational humanities? How do we engage in computational humanities? What can we study using these methods? Who are the stakeholders?

 

Recent advances in technologies for image and sound processing have expanded computational approaches to cultural forms beyond text, and new forms of data, from listservs and code repositories to tweets and other social media content, have enlivened debates about what counts as digital humanities scholarship. Providing case studies of collaborations between humanities-centered and computation-centered researchers, this volume highlights both opportunities and frictions, showing that data and computation are as much about power, prestige, and precarity as they are about p-values.

 

Contributors: Mark Algee-Hewitt, Stanford U; David Bamman, U of California, Berkeley; Kaspar Beelen, U of London; Peter Bell, Philipps U of Marburg; Tobias Blanke, U of Amsterdam; Julia Damerow, Arizona State U; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Crystal Nicole Eddins, U of Pittsburgh; Abraham Gibson, U of Texas at San Antonio; Tassie Gniady; Crystal Hall, Bowdoin College; Vanessa M. Holden, U of Kentucky; David Kloster, Indiana U; Manfred D. Laubichler, Arizona State U; Katherine McDonough, Lancaster U; Barbara McGillivray, King’s College London; Megan Meredith-Lobay, Simon Fraser U; Federico Nanni, Alan Turing Institute; Fabian Offert, U of California, Santa Barbara; Hannah Ringler, Illinois Institute of Technology; Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College; Joshua D. Rothman, U of Alabama; Benjamin M. Schmidt; Lisa Tagliaferri, Rutgers U; Jeffrey Tharsen, U of Chicago; Marieke van Erp, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Lee Zickel, Case Western Reserve U.

[more]
cover of Conditionally Accepted: Navigating Higher Education from the Margins

Conditionally Accepted

Navigating Higher Education from the Margins

Edited by Eric Joy Denise and Bertin M. Louis, Jr.

University of Texas Press, 2024

A collection of essays that provides advice and strategies for BIPOC scholars on how to survive, thrive, and resist in academic institutions.

Conditionally Accepted builds upon an eponymous blog on InsideHigherEd.com, which is now a decade-old national platform for BIPOC academics in the United States. Bringing together perspectives from academics of color on navigating intersecting forms of injustice in the academy, each chapter offers situated knowledge about experiencing—and resisting—marginalization in academia. Contextualized within existing scholarship, these personal narratives speak to institutional betrayals while highlighting agency and sharing stories of surviving on treacherous terrain. Covering topics from professional development to the emptiness of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and redefining what it means to be an academic in our contemporary moment, this edited collection directly confronts issues of systemic exclusion, discrimination, harassment, microaggressions, tokenism, and surveillance. Letting marginalized scholars know they are not alone, Conditionally Accepted offers concrete wisdom for readers seeking to navigate and transform oppressive academic institutions.

[more]
cover of Connecting in College: How Friendship Networks Matter for Academic and Social Success

Connecting in College

How Friendship Networks Matter for Academic and Social Success

Janice M. McCabe

University of Chicago Press, 2016

We all know that good study habits, supportive parents, and engaged instructors are all keys to getting good grades in college. But as Janice M. McCabe shows in this illuminating study, there is one crucial factor determining a student’s academic success that most of us tend to overlook: who they hang out with. Surveying a range of different kinds of college friendships, Connecting in College details the fascinatingly complex ways students’ social and academic lives intertwine and how students attempt to balance the two in their pursuit of straight As, good times, or both.
           
As McCabe and the students she talks to show, the friendships we forge in college are deeply meaningful, more meaningful than we often give them credit for. They can also vary widely. Some students have only one tight-knit group, others move between several, and still others seem to meet someone new every day. Some students separate their social and academic lives, while others rely on friendships to help them do better in their coursework. McCabe explores how these dynamics lead to different outcomes and how they both influence and are influenced by larger factors such as social and racial inequality. She then looks toward the future and how college friendships affect early adulthood, ultimately drawing her findings into a set of concrete solutions to improve student experiences and better guarantee success in college and beyond.
[more]
cover of Conquering Heroines: How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX

Conquering Heroines

How Women Fought Sex Bias at Michigan and Paved the Way for Title IX

Sara Fitzgerald

University of Michigan Press, 2020

In 1970, a group of women in Ann Arbor launched a crusade with an objective that seemed beyond reach at the time—force the University of Michigan to treat women the same as men. Sex discrimination was then rampant at U-M. The school’s admissions officials sought to maintain a ratio of 55:45 between male and female undergraduate entrants, turning away more qualified female applicants and arguing, among other things, that men needed help because they were less mature and posted lower grades. Women comprised less than seven percent of the University’s faculty members and their salaries trailed their male peers by substantial amounts. As one administrator put it when pressed about the disparity, “Men have better use for the extra money.”

Galvanized by their shared experiences with sex discrimination, the Ann Arbor women organized a group called FOCUS on Equal Employment for Women, led by activist Jean Ledwith King. Working with Bernice Sandler of the Women’s Equity Action League, they developed a strategy to unleash the power of another powerful institution—the federal government—to demand change at U-M and, they hoped, across the world of higher education. Prompted by a complaint filed by FOCUS, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare soon documented egregious examples of discrimination in Michigan’s practices toward women and threatened to withhold millions of dollars in contracts unless the school adopted remedies. Among the hundreds of similar complaints filed against U.S. colleges in 1970–1971, the one brought by the Michigan women achieved the breakthrough that provided the historic template for settlements with other institutions.
 
Drawing on oral histories from archives as well as new interviews with living participants, Conquering Heroines chronicles this pivotal period in the histories of the University of Michigan and the women’s movement. An incredible story of grassroots activism and courageous women, the book highlights the kind of relentless effort that has helped make inclusivity an ongoing goal at U-M.
[more]
cover of Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College: A Documentary History

Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College

A Documentary History

Roland M. Baumann

Ohio University Press, 2010

In 1835 Oberlin became the first institute of higher education to make a cause of racial egalitarianism when it decided to educate students “irrespective of color.” Yet the visionary college’s implementation of this admissions policy was uneven. In Constructing Black Education at Oberlin College: A Documentary History, Roland M. Baumann presents a comprehensive documentary history of the education of African American students at Oberlin College.

Following the Reconstruction era, Oberlin College mirrored the rest of society as it reduced its commitment to black students by treating them as less than equals of their white counterparts. By the middle of the twentieth century, black and white student activists partially reclaimed the Oberlin legacy by refusing to be defined by race. Generations of Oberlin students, plus a minority of faculty and staff, rekindled the college’s commitment to racial equality by 1970. In time, black separatism in its many forms replaced the integrationist ethic on campus as African Americans sought to chart their own destiny and advance curricular change.

Oberlin’s is not a story of unbroken progress, but rather of irony, of contradictions and integrity, of myth and reality, and of imperfections. Baumann takes readers directly to the original sources by including thirty complete documents from the Oberlin College Archives. This richly illustrated volume is an important contribution to the college’s 175th anniversary celebration of its distinguished history, for it convincinglydocuments how Oberlin wrestled over the meaning of race and the destiny of black people in American society.

[more]
cover of Contested Curriculum: LGBTQ History Goes to School

Contested Curriculum

LGBTQ History Goes to School

Don Romesburg

Rutgers University Press, 2025

Today, many states have proposed so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bills that prohibit public school teachers from mentioning LGBTQ topics in the classroom. But a few states, like California, have taken decisive steps in the other direction. They mandate inclusive education that treats LGBTQ history as essential to the curriculum. At once a history of an evolving movement and an activist handbook, Contested Curriculum navigates the rocky path to LGBTQ-inclusive K–12 history education in the United States and recounts the fight for a curriculum that recognizes the value of queer and trans lives.
 
What began in fits and starts in activism and educational materials across the late twentieth century led to the passage of California’s landmark FAIR Education Act in 2011, ensuring that LGBTQ history has a place in the K–12 classroom. Historian Don Romesburg, the lead scholar who worked with advocacy organizations to pass the act, recounts the decades-long struggle to integrate LGBTQ content into history education policy, textbooks, and classrooms. Looking at California and states that followed its lead, he assesses the challenges and opportunities presented by this new way of teaching history. Romesburg’s powerful case for LGBTQ-inclusive education is all the more urgent in this era of anti-gay book bans, regressive legislation, and attempts to diminish the vital role that inclusive and honest history education should play in a democratic nation.
[more]
cover of Coordinated Science Laboratory: 75 Years of Multidisciplinary Excellence

Coordinated Science Laboratory

75 Years of Multidisciplinary Excellence

Coordinated Science Laboratory

University of Illinois Press, 2026

The Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL) was established in 1951 as a small-scale, military-funded initiative to advance American efforts in the Korean War. But CSL long outlived that conflict—and in time became one of the world’s premier multidisciplinary research laboratories.

Published in honor of CSL’s seventy-fifth anniversary, this book reveals how the institution evolved into a rich research ecosystem that pursues a wide range of diverse projects. CSL’s work to date has given rise to dozens of startups, thousands of careers, and countless innovations in communications, robotics, computing, and other areas of science and technology. As the stories in this book show, CSL brings together diverse minds from across disciplines to solve some of the world’s most complex challenges. Indeed, the institution’s history is interwoven with the histories of industry, national security, and the familiar everyday technologies that connect and empower our world.
[more]
cover of Copyright, Fair Use, and the Challenge for Universities: Promoting the Progress of Higher Education

Copyright, Fair Use, and the Challenge for Universities

Promoting the Progress of Higher Education

Kenneth D. Crews

University of Chicago Press, 1993

The recent lawsuit against Kinko's Copies for copyright infringement has exposed the confusion and heightened the fear of liability surrounding copyright issues in colleges and universities. This volume offers an enlightening explanation of copyright and the ambiguous concept of fair use as they affect and are affected by higher education.

In the first large-scale study of its kind, Kenneth D. Crews surveys the copyright policies of ninety-eight American research universities. His analysis reveals a variety of ways in which universities have responded to—and how they could better manage—the conflicting goals of copyright policies: avoiding infringements while promoting lawful uses that serve teaching and research. He explains in detail the background of copyright law and congressional guidelines affecting familiar uses of photocopies, videotapes, software, and reserve rooms. Crews concludes that most universities are overly conservative in their interpretation of copyright and often neglect their own interests, adding unnecessary costs and obstacles to the lawful dissemination of information.

Copyright, Fair Use, and the Challenge for Universities provides administrators, instructors, lawyers, librarians, and educational leaders a much-needed exegesis of copyright and how it can better serve higher education.
[more]
cover of Cradle to Kindergarten: A New Plan to Combat Inequality

Cradle to Kindergarten

A New Plan to Combat Inequality

Ajay Chaudry

Russell Sage Foundation, 2017

Early care and education for many children in the United States is in crisis. The period between birth and kindergarten is a critical time for child development, and socioeconomic disparities that begin early in children’s lives contribute to starkly different long-term outcomes for adults. Yet, compared to other advanced economies, high-quality child care and preschool in the United States are scarce and prohibitively expensive for many middle-class and most disadvantaged families. To what extent can early-life interventions provide these children with the opportunities that their affluent peers enjoy and contribute to reduced social inequality in the long term? Cradle to Kindergarten offers a comprehensive, evidence-based strategy that diagnoses the obstacles to accessible early education and charts a path to opportunity for all children.
 
The U.S. government invests less in children under the age of five than do most other developed nations. Most working families must seek private childcare, which means that children from low-income households, who would benefit most from high-quality early education, are the least likely to attend them. Existing policies, such as pre-kindergarten in some states are only partial solutions. To address these deficiencies, the authors propose to overhaul the early care system, beginning with a federal paid parental leave policy that provides both mothers and fathers with time and financial support after the birth of a child. They also advocate increased public benefits, including an expansion of the child care tax credit, and a new child care assurance program that subsidizes the cost of early care for low- and moderate-income families. They also propose that universal, high-quality early education in the states should start by age three, and a reform of the Head Start program that would include more intensive services for families living in areas of concentrated poverty and experiencing multiple adversities from the earliest point in these most disadvantaged children’s lives. They conclude with an implementation plan and contend that these reforms are attainable within a ten-year timeline.
 
Reducing educational and economic inequalities requires that all children have robust opportunities to learn, fully develop their capacities, and have a fair shot at success. Cradle to Kindergarten presents a blueprint for fulfilling this promise by expanding access to educational and financial resources at a critical stage of child development.
 
[more]
cover of Cradle to Kindergarten: A New Plan to Combat Inequality

Cradle to Kindergarten

A New Plan to Combat Inequality

Ajay Chaudry

Russell Sage Foundation, 2021

Early care and education in the United States is in crisis. The period between birth and kindergarten is a crucial time for a child’s development. Yet vast racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities that begin early in children’s lives contribute to starkly different long-term outcomes for adults. Compared to other advanced economies, child care and preschool in the U.S. are scarce, prohibitively expensive, and inadequate in quality for most middle- and low-income families. To what extent can early-life opportunities provide these children with the same life chances of their affluent peers and contribute to reduced social inequality in the long term, and across generations? The updated second edition of Cradle to Kindergarten offers a comprehensive, evidence-based strategy that diagnoses the obstacles to accessible early education and charts a path to opportunity for all children.
 
The U.S. government invests less in children under the age of five than do most other developed nations. Most working families must seek private child care, but high-quality child care options are expensive relative to the means of most families. This means that children from lower-income households, who would benefit most from high-quality early education, are the least likely to attend them. Existing policies, such as pre-kindergarten in some states, are only partial solutions, and what exists varies tremendously in terms of access and quality. 
 
To address these deficiencies, the authors propose to overhaul the early care and education system, beginning with a federal paid parental leave policy that provides both mothers and fathers with time and financial support after the birth of a child. They also advance an expansion of the child care tax credit, and a new child care assurance program that provides grant assistance towards the cost of high-quality early care for low- and moderate-income families. Their plan establishes universal, high-quality early education in the states starting by age three, and a reform of the Head Start program that would include more intensive services for families living in areas of concentrated poverty and experiencing multiple adversities from the earliest point in these most disadvantaged children’s lives. They conclude with an implementation plan and contend that these reforms are attainable well within a ten-year timeline.
 
Reducing educational and economic inequalities requires that all children have robust opportunities to learn and fully develop their capacities and have a fair shot at success. Cradle to Kindergarten presents a blueprint for fulfilling this promise by expanding access to educational and financial resources at a critical stage of child development. 
 
[more]
cover of Creating Citizens: Liberal Arts, Civic Engagement, and the Land-Grant Tradition

Creating Citizens

Liberal Arts, Civic Engagement, and the Land-Grant Tradition

Edited by Brigitta R. Brunner

University of Alabama Press, 2016

Creating Citizens is a collection of essays about Community and Civic Engagement (CCE) learning at land-grant universities.

In Creating Citizens, professors and administrators at Auburn University’s College of Liberal Arts recount valuable, first-hand experiences teaching Community and Civic Engagement (CCE). They demonstrate that, contrary to many expectations, CCE instruction both complements the mission of liberal arts curricula and powerfully advances the fundamental mission of American land-grand institutions.

The nine essays in Creating Citizens offer structures for incorporating CCE initiatives into university programs, instructional methods and techniques, and numerous case studies and examples undertaken at Auburn University but applicable at any university. Many contributors describe their own rewarding experiences with CCE and emphasize the ways outreach efforts reinvigorate their teaching or research.

Creating Citizens recounts the foundation of land-grant institutions by the Morrill Act of 1862. Their mission is to instruct in agriculture, military science, and mechanics, but these goals augmented rather than replaced an education in the classics, or liberal arts. Land-grant institutions, therefore, have a special calling to provide a broad spectrum of society with an education that not only enriched the personal lives of their students, but the communities they are a part of. Creating Citizens demonstrates the important opportunities CCE instruction represents to any university but are especially close to the heart of the mission of land-grant colleges.

In open societies, the role and mission of public institutions of higher learning that are supported by public subsidies are perennial subjects of interest and debate. Creating Citizens provides valuable insights of interest to educators, education administrators, students, and policy makers involved in the field of higher education.
 

[more]
cover of Creating Community: Life and Learning at Alabama State University

Creating Community

Life and Learning at Alabama State University

Edited by Karl E. Westhauser, Elaine M. Smith, and Jennifer A. Fremlin

University of Alabama Press, 2008

Creating Community explores how faculty members at Alabama State University, a historically black university in Montgomery, have been inspired by the legacy of African American culture and the civil rights movement and how they seek to interpret and extend that legacy through teaching, scholarship, and service. Authors describe a wide range of experiences from the era of segregation to the present day. These include accounts of growing up and going to college in Alabama, arriving in the South for the first time to teach at ASU, and the development of programs such as the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights and African American Culture. Together, the essays present viewpoints that reflect the diverse ethnic, cultural, and academic backgrounds of the contributors and of the university.
[more]
cover of Creating Our Own Lives: College Students with Intellectual Disability

Creating Our Own Lives

College Students with Intellectual Disability

Michael Gill

University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Young adults with intellectual disability tell the story of their own experience of higher education

 

How do students with intellectual disability experience higher education? Creating Our Own Lives addresses this question through the eyes of participants themselves. In relating their experiences and aspirations, these student perspectives mount a powerful challenge to assumptions that intellectual disability is best met with protection or segregation.

 

Taken together, the essays expose and contradict the inherently ableist claim that individuals with intellectual disability cannot be reliable storytellers. Instead, their deeply informative stories serve as a corrective narrative. The first of the four sections, “Laying the Foundation: Why Everyone Belongs in College,” focuses on belonging and inclusion; the second, “Opening Up Possibilities: Overcoming Doubt and Uncertainty,” conveys the optimism of this generation of advocates through stories of personal hardship, hopeful perseverance, and triumph over adversity; the third, “Inclusion as Action: Diversifying Student Experiences,” supports the understanding of diverse student experiences in inclusive higher education; and the fourth, “Supporting Growth: Peer Mentoring and Advice,” offers guidance to those reimagining and creating educational spaces.

 

Students with disabilities belong in higher education. Not only does this book serve as an important record of students enrolled in inclusive higher education programs, it is also an unprecedented resource, packed with information and inspiration both for parents seeking opportunities for their children and for individuals with intellectual disability who aspire to attend college.

 

Contributors: Makayla Adkins, Olivia Baist, Brandon Baldwin, George Barham, Marquavious Barnes, Katie Bartlett, Steven Brief, De'Onte Brown, Meghan Brozaitis, Mary Bryant, Gracie Carrol, Taylor Cathey, Maia Chamberlain, Antonio E. Contreras, Kim Dean, Elizabeth Droessler, Katie Ducett, Keiron Dyck, Rachel Gomez, Deriq Graves, Micah Gray, Maggie Guillaume, Cleo Hamilton, Nathan Heald, Joshua R. Hourigan, Hannah Lenae Humes, Courtney Jorgensen, Eilish Kelderman, Kailin Kelderman, Kenneth Kelty, Kaelan Knowles, Karlee Lambert, Kate Lisotta, Rachel Mast, Elise McDaniel, Emma Miller, Jake Miller, Lydia Newnum, Brenna Mantz Nielsen, Carly O’Connell, Nadia Osbey, Stirling Peebles, Breyan Pettaway, Amanda Pilkenton, True Rafferty, Taylor Ruppe, Lawrence Sapp, Tyler Shore, Brianna Silva, Alex Smith, Elliott Smith, Phillandra Smith, Payton Storms, Allen Thomas, Kylie Walter, Stephen Wanser, Sayid Webb, Breana Whittlesey, Luke Wilcox, Adam Wolfond.

[more]
cover of Creating a Framework for Developing Sessional Teachers in Higher Education: A practical guide for education leaders

Creating a Framework for Developing Sessional Teachers in Higher Education

A practical guide for education leaders

Edited by Neil Sutherland and Alex Standen

University College London, 2026

Addressing a critical yet underserved community in higher education, this volume is the first of its kind to focus on the professional development of sessional and atypically contracted teaching staff.

Across higher education, a significant proportion of teaching is carried out by non-permanent staff, be they graduate teaching assistants, associate lecturers, visiting lecturers, postdoctoral researchers, or hourly paid staff. Their work is invaluable to the sector, yet they frequently lack access to structured professional development and institutional support.

Creating a Framework for Developing Sessional Teachers in Higher Education aims to address this problem with guidance for the higher education leaders who support and manage sessional teachers. It offers a comprehensive framework that will enable education leaders to improve the experience and effectiveness of sessional staff through practical guidance, evidence-informed recommendations, best practice case studies, sector-wide research, and the lived experience of academic leaders. The book explores key areas including induction, teaching, learning and assessment practices, mentoring, reward and recognition, community building and ongoing professional development. It presents strategies for embedding consistency and quality across departments and disciplines while recognizing the individuality and diverse contributions of sessional teachers. With clear, actionable guidance and insights from across the higher education sector, this book is an essential resource for education leaders such as program directors, department heads, faculty managers, and anyone involved in academic staffing and teaching development. It champions an inclusive, sustainable approach to educational leadership—one that values and rewards all contributors to student learning.

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cover of Creating the Big Ten: Courage, Corruption, and Commercialization

Creating the Big Ten

Courage, Corruption, and Commercialization

Winton U Solberg

University of Illinois Press, 2018

Big Ten football fans pack gridiron cathedrals that hold up to 100,000 spectators. The conference's fourteen member schools share a broadcast network and a 2016 media deal worth $2.64 billion. This cultural and financial colossus grew out of a modest 1895 meeting that focused on football's brutality and encroaching professionalism in the game.

Winton U. Solberg explores the relationship between higher education and collegiate football in the Big Ten's first fifty years. This formative era saw debates over eligibility and amateurism roil the sport. In particular, faculty concerned with academics clashed with coaches, university presidents, and others who played to win. Solberg follows the conference's successful early efforts to put the best interests of institutions and athletes first. Yet, as he shows, commercial concerns undid such work after World War I as sports increasingly eclipsed academics. By the 1940s, the Big Ten's impact on American sports was undeniable. It had shaped the development of intercollegiate athletics and college football nationwide while serving as a model for other athletic conferences.

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cover of Creativity and Academic Activism: Instituting Cultural Studies

Creativity and Academic Activism

Instituting Cultural Studies

Meaghan Morris and Mette Hjort, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

This work explores in detail how innovative academic activism can transform our everyday workplaces in contexts of considerable adversity. Personal essays by prominent scholars provide critical reflections on their institution-building triumphs and setbacks across a range of cultural institutions. Often adopting narrative approaches, the contributors examine how effective programs and activities are built in varying local and national contexts within a common global regime of university management policy. Here they share experiences based on developing new undergraduate degrees, setting up research centers and postgraduate schools, editing field-shaping book series and journals, establishing international artist-in-residence programs, and founding social activist networks.

This book also investigates the impact of managerialism, marketization, and globalization on university cultures, asking what critical cultural scholarship can do in such increasingly adversarial conditions. Experiments in Asian universities are emphasized as exemplary of what can or could be achieved in other contexts of globalized university policy.

Contributors. Tony Bennett, Stephen Ching-Kiu Chan, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Douglas Crimp, Dai Jinhua, John Nguyet Erni, Mette Hjort, Josephine Ho, Koichi Iwabuchi, Meaghan Morris, Tejaswini Niranjana, Wang Xiaoming, Audrey Yue

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