Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, Editors
University of Michigan Press, 2013
On May 21, 2010, Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt posted the following provocative questions online:
“Can an algorithm edit a journal? Can a library exist without books? Can students build and manage their own learning management platforms? Can a conference be held without a program? Can Twitter replace a scholarly society?”
As recently as the mid-2000s, questions like these would have been unthinkable. But today serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy as they have existed for decades, even centuries, aren’t becoming obsolete. Every aspect of scholarly infrastructure is being questioned, and even more importantly, being hacked. Sympathetic scholars of traditionally disparate disciplines are canceling their association memberships and building their own networks on Facebook and Twitter. Journals are being compiled automatically from self-published blog posts. Newly minted PhDs are forgoing the tenure track for alternative academic careers that blur the lines between research, teaching, and service. Graduate students are looking beyond the categories of the traditional CV and building expansive professional identities and popular followings through social media. Educational technologists are “punking” established technology vendors by rolling out their own open source infrastructure.
Here, in Hacking the Academy, Daniel J. Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt have gathered a sampling of the answers to their initial questions from scores of engaged academics who care deeply about higher education. These are the responses from a wide array of scholars, presenting their thoughts and approaches with a vibrant intensity, as they explore and contribute to ongoing efforts to rebuild scholarly infrastructure for a new millennium.

William Crimando
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988
A practical "how-to" workbook that outlines a plan for the design and implementation of staff in-service training programs for human service agencies and facilities.
Crimando and Riggar have made every effort to guarantee the usefulness of this text to practitioners, instructors, and students. This is a working book designed to assist trainers as they acquire the knowledge and skills needed to provide thorough, systematic in-service training that will enhance human service endeavors.
The authors have organized the nineteen chapters into four parts that treat significant steps in the training-program design process. These include analyzing problems that require training solutions; developing a proposal; writing a plan of action for training; and evaluating a program. Each of the chapters combines text, examples, exercises, and supplementary readings to foster a full appreciation of the process involved. Even those topics frequently overlooked or disregarded are included: budgeting program time and financial resources, obtaining administrative commitment, and transferring and maintaining skills in the work setting.

T.F. Riggar and R.E. Matkin
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986
A basic guide for individuals responsible for developing and/or operating comprehensive or specialized human service programs.
Drawing on more than a decade of classroom experience and development and incorporating standards from the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (1985 Edition), Riggar and Matkin have created a management tool that is as practical for human service providers as it is for students. Here is the fundamental management knowledge required to establish or manage all types of human service programs and facilities.
The text is organized into 23 sections that describe tasks ranging from constructing mission statements and admission criteria to developing start-up budgets and allocating space for both direct and indirect services. Each section provides definitions and guidelines, practical examples, exercises, and selected references. While the focus is on the practices of the private not-for-profit sector, those working in a profit-oriented setting will find many of the sections and exercises to be valuable aids for developing, operating, and maintaining successful programs.
Hiram E. Fitzgerald
Michigan State University Press, 2010
In the preface to the Handbook of Engaged Scholarship, Hiram Fitzgerald observes that the Kellogg Commission's challenge to higher education to engage with communities was a significant catalyst for action. At Michigan State University, the response was the development of "engaged scholarship," a distinctive, scholarly approach to campus-community partnerships.
Engaged scholars recognize that community based scholarship is founded on an underpinning of mutual respect and recognition that community knowledge is valid and that sustainability is an integral part of the partnership agenda.
In this two-volume collection, contributors capture the rich diversity of institutions and partnerships that characterize the contemporary landscape and the future of engaged scholarship. Volume One addresses such issues as the application of engaged scholarship across types of colleges and universities and the current state of the movement. Volume Two contains essays on such topics as current typologies, measuring effectiveness and accreditation, community-campus partnership development, national organizational models, and the future landscape.
Hiram E. Fitzgerald
Michigan State University Press, 2010
In the preface to the Handbook of Engaged Scholarship, Hiram Fitzgerald observes that the Kellogg Commission's challenge to higher education to engage with communities was a significant catalyst for action. At Michigan State University, the response was the development of "engaged scholarship," a distinctive, scholarly approach to campus-community partnerships.
Engaged scholars recognize that community based scholarship is founded on an underpinning of mutual respect and recognition that community knowledge is valid and that sustainability is an integral part of the partnership agenda.
In this two-volume collection, contributors capture the rich diversity of institutions and partnerships that characterize the contemporary landscape and the future of engaged scholarship. Volume One addresses such issues as the application of engaged scholarship across types of colleges and universities and the current state of the movement. Volume Two contains essays on such topics as current typologies, measuring effectiveness and accreditation, community-campus partnership development, national organizational models, and the future landscape.

Rosemary Sassoon
Intellect Books, 2007
Emily Ruth Capper
University of Chicago Press, 2026
How Allan Kaprow’s happenings fused modernist pedagogy with an emerging college culture.
In Happening Pedagogy, art historian Emily Ruth Capper argues that Allan Kaprow’s famed invention of the happening brought together experimental traditions of modernist pedagogy with emerging forms of American undergraduate student culture—from hazing rituals to campus protests. Capper traces Kaprow’s trajectory from 1947 to 1968, following him through the classrooms of three of his instructors who were prominent figures in postwar American art—painter Hans Hofmann, art historian Meyer Schapiro, and composer John Cage—and across his own classrooms at institutions including Rutgers and Stony Brook University. Although Kaprow’s teachers were educated in the distinct disciplines of studio art, art history, and music, all three designed their classrooms to cultivate student creativity and critical reflection through forms of social exchange.
Capper shows that Kaprow transformed these modernist classrooms into new pedagogical environments that he developed within the novel context of the suburban state university. Drawing on archival sources, she describes how Kaprow engaged the culture and creative work of middle-class college students, whose rituals he took seriously as an avant-garde vernacular. In this way, Kaprow’s happenings represent a critical extension of modernism as a social practice of sensory attunement, experimentation, and philosophical critique. Through Kaprow’s work, modernist pedagogy became an artistic medium in itself, and his participation-based creative practices helped define the broad resurgence of the American neo-avant-garde after 1960.
Ryan N. S. Topping
Catholic University of America Press, 2012
Paul Theobald
University of Iowa Press, 2008
Stefan M. Bradley
University of Illinois Press, 2012
Shirley W. Smith
University of Michigan Press, 1951
Benjamin Justice and Colin Macleod
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Stephen Tomlinson
University of Alabama Press, 2005
Rick Ostrander
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
Cheryl L. Eschbach
Michigan State University Press, 2024
Jones, Therese
Rutgers University Press, 2014
Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan B. Krasner, and Sharon Avni
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Judy G. Batson
Vanderbilt University Press, 2008
Her Oxford looks at the people and the political and social forces that produced this dramatic transformation. Drawing on a vast array of biographies, histories, obituaries, and archives, Batson traces not only the institutional struggles over privileges and disciplinary rules for women, but also the rich texture of everyday life-women's amateur theatricals, debating societies, sports, and college escapades (Dorothy Sayers is the subject of quite a few). She tells the stories of women's active roles in two war efforts and in the suffrage movement.
An unusual feature of the book is the set of 120 biographical profiles of women who attended Oxford between 1879 and 1960. They constitute a Who's Who of women scientists, anthropologists, psychotherapists, educators, novelists, and social reformers in the English-speaking world.
Stephen M. Monroe
University of Alabama Press, 2021
How southern universities continue to wrestle with the words and symbols that embody and perpetuate Old South traditions
The US South is a rhetorical landscape that pulsates with division, a place where words and symbols rooted in a deeply problematic past litter the ground and contaminate the soil. Stephen M. Monroe’s provocative study focuses on predominantly white southern universities where Old South rhetoric still reverberates, where rebel flags cast a shadow over attempts at racial harmony, school cheers to reinforce racial barriers, and student yearbooks to create and protect an oppressive culture of exclusion. Across the region, in college towns like Oxford, Mississippi; Athens, Georgia; and Tuscaloosa, Alabama—communities remain locked in a difficult, recursive, and inherently rhetorical struggle that wrestles with this troubling legacy.
Words, images, and symbols are not merely passive artifacts of southern history, Monroe argues, but formative agents that influence human behavior and shape historical events. Drawing on research from many disciplines, including rhetoric, southern studies, history, sociology, and African American studies, Monroe develops the concept of confederate rhetoric: the collection of Old South words and symbols that have been and remain central to the identity conflicts of the South. He charts examples of such rhetoric at work in southern universities from Reconstruction to the present day.
Tracing the long life and legacy of Old South words and symbols at southern universities, this book provides close and nuanced analysis of the rhetorical conflicts that have resulted at places like the University of Mississippi and the University of Missouri. Some conflicts erupted during the civil rights movement, when the first African American students sought admission to all-white southern universities and colleges, and others are brewing now, as African Americans (and their progressive white peers) begin to cement genuine agency and voice in these communities. Tensions have been, and remain, high.
Ultimately, Monroe offers hope and optimism, contending that if words and symbols can be used to damage and divide, then words and symbols can also be used to heal and unify. Racist rhetoric can be replaced by antiracist rhetoric. The old South can become new. While resisting naïve or facile arguments, Heritage and Hate ultimately finds the promise of progress within the tremendous power of language.
Ellen C. Carillo
Utah State University Press, 2021
Current Arguments in Composition Series
The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading intervenes in the increasingly popular practice of labor-based grading by expanding the scope of this assessment practice to include students who are disabled and multiply marginalized. Through the lens of disability studies, the book critiques the assumption that labor is a neutral measure by which to assess students and explores how labor-based grading contracts put certain groups of students at a disadvantage. Ellen C. Carillo offers engagement-based grading contracts as an alternative that would provide a more equitable assessment model for students of color, those with disabilities, and students who are multiply marginalized.
This short book explores the history of labor-based grading contracts, reviews the scholarship on this assessment tool, highlights the ways in which it normalizes labor as an unbiased tool, and demonstrates how to extend the conversation in new and generative ways both in research and in classrooms. Carillo encourages instructors to reflect on their assessment practices by demonstrating how even assessment methods that are designed through a social-justice lens may unintentionally privilege some students over others.
Phillip B. Levine
University of Chicago Press, 2026
The secret economics of maximizing college financial aid (and why it’s not as miserable as you think).
In the college admissions process, a terrifying unknown looms large: How much is this really going to cost? For prospective students and their families, there’s no easy answer. While college prices continue to rise, so do their promises of financial aid for qualified students. But who qualifies? And for how much? How can this monumental life decision be so utterly impossible to understand?
Hidden Tuition is an insider’s guide for navigating college financial aid to maximum effect and with (relatively) minimal pain. Economist and financial-aid expert Phillip B. Levine draws on his unique experience—including years of research in higher-education finance and work alongside admissions and financial-aid departments—to help readers first identify, then minimize, what they’ll actually pay for different types of colleges based on their circumstances. With expertise, clarity, and the warmth of someone who’s been through it, Levine details how students can find the hidden tuition costs in the opaque landscape of college pricing and financial aid. He explores topics that include:
Debunking common myths and offering practical guidance for both families and individual students, Hidden Tuition makes a maddeningly imperfect process more manageable—and gives students a clearer path through one of life’s biggest financial decisions towards collegiate success.
Christopher Bjork
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Jessica Ostrow Michel
Rutgers University Press, 2024
Edited by John Saltmarsh and Edward Zlotkowski
Temple University Press, 2011
Higher Education and Democracy is a collection of essays written over the last ten years on how civic engagement in higher education works to achieve what authors John Saltmarsh and Edward Zlotkowsi consider to be the academic and civic purposes of higher education. These include creating new modes of teaching and learning, fostering participation in American democracy, the development and respect for community and civic institutions, and encouraging the constant renewal all of these dimensions of American life.
Organized chronologically, the twenty-two essays in this volume provide "signposts" along the road in the journey of fulfilling the civic purposes of higher education. For the authors, service-learning is positioned as centrally important to the primary academic systems and structures of higher education, departments, disciplines, curriculum, and programs that are central to the faculty domain. Progressing from the general and the contextual to specific practices embodied in ever larger academic units, the authors conclude with observations on the future of the civic engagement movement.
Marvin Lazerson
Central European University Press, 2007

Daniel C. Levy
University of Chicago Press, 1986
Nannerl O. Keohane
Duke University Press, 2006
Keohane regards colleges and universities as intergenerational partnerships in learning and discovery, whose compelling purposes include not only teaching and research but also service to society. Their mission is to equip students with a moral education, not simply preparation for a career or professional school.
But the modern era has presented universities and their leadership with unprecedented new challenges. Keohane worries about access to education in a world of rising costs and increasing economic inequality, and about threats to academic freedom and expressions of opinion on campus. She considers diversity as a key educational tool in our increasingly pluralistic campuses, ponders the impact of information technologies on the university’s core mission, and explores the challenges facing universities as they become more “global” institutions, serving far-flung constituencies while at the same time contributing to the cities and towns that are their institutional homes.
Reflecting on the role of contemporary university leaders, Keohane asserts that while they have many problems to grapple with, they will find creative ways of dealing with them, just as their predecessors have done.
Jabari M. Evans
University of Michigan Press, 2025
Sam Wineburg
Temple University Press, 2001
Gregory M. Pfitzer
University of Massachusetts Press, 2014
Recently publishers on the Christian Right have been reprinting nineteenth-century children's history books and marketing them to parents as “anchor texts” for homeschool instruction. Why, Gregory M. Pfitzer asks, would books written more than 150 years ago be presumed suitable for educating twenty-first-century children? The answer, he proposes, is that promoters of these recycled works believe that history as a discipline took a wrong turn in the early twentieth century, when progressive educators introduced social studies methodologies into public school history classrooms, foisting upon unsuspecting and vulnerable children ideologically distorted history books.
In History Repeating Itself, Pfitzer tests these assertions by scrutinizing and contextualizing the original nineteenth-century texts on which these republications are based. He focuses on how the writers borrowed from one another to produce works that were similar in many ways yet differed markedly in terms of pedagogical strategy and philosophy of history. Pfitzer demonstrates that far from being non-ideological, these works were rooted in intense contemporary debates over changing conceptions of childhood.
Pfitzer argues that the repurposing of antiquated texts reveals a misplaced resistance to the idea of a contested past. He also raises essential philosophical questions about how and why curricular decisions are shaped by the “past we choose to remember” on behalf of our children.
Michiel Leezenberg
Amsterdam University Press, 2018
Michiel Leezenberg
Amsterdam University Press, 2019

Kate Hawkey
University College London, 2023
Ivan T. Berend is Distinguished Research Professor at the History Department of the University of California Los Angeles.
Central European University Press, 2009
Ivan T. Berend is Distinguished Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, Director of the European Studies Program. He was one of the masterminds of regime change in Hungary. He made a career in Hungary as a university professor, Rector of the University of Economics (1973–79), and President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (1985–90). He was President of the International Committee of Historical Sciences (1995–2000), and Vice-President of the International Economic History Association (1986–1994). His research interests are the complex economic, social, ideological, and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th–20th century; economic modernization; problems of European backwardness; transition from state socialism to capitalism. He published and 26 books and more than 120 studies.
Before he became a professor at UCLA, Ivan Berend had survived five regime changes and two revolutions in Hungary, had been in prison and German concentration camp in 1944–45.
His memoir offers an interesting case study, a subjective addition to the “objective” historical works on Central and Eastern European state socialism. It describes the hard choices of intellectuals in a dictatorial state: 1. remain in isolation, concentrate on scholarly works, and exclude politics in your personal life; 2. be in opposition, criticize and unveil the regime, accept discrimination and exclusion; 3. remain within the establishment and work for reforming the country using legal possibilities to criticize the regime and to achieve changes from within.
Berend’s book raises basic historical questions and debates, compares East European and American higher education systems, and presents an eyewitness’ insights on life in the United States.
James Benson Sellers
University of Alabama Press, 1953
The definitive and authorized history of the University of Alabama's birth and first century
Step into the rich heritage of one of America’s most storied institutions with the History of the University of Alabama, Volume One 1818 – 1902 by James Sellers. This definitive volume captures the legends, triumphs, and traditions that shaped the Capstone’s first century. From its earliest days on the frontier to its rise as a modern research university, Sellers weaves a narrative that celebrates the people, places, and pivotal moments that define the University of Alabama’s proud legacy.
Among the most dramatic chapters is the interruption of campus life during the closing days of the Civil War, when Union troops burned the university to the ground—a devastating blow that tested resilience and sparked a remarkable rebirth. Through vivid storytelling and meticulous research, Sellers honors the people and milestones that built the Crimson legacy.
Beautifully written and meticulously researched, this book is perfect as a gift for alumni, fans, and collectors. Whether displayed on a coffee table or shared with a fellow member of the Crimson Tide family, this book is more than history. It’s a tribute to the spirit of Alabama. Own the legend. Share the legacy. Celebrate the spirit of the Capstone for generations to come.
Robert B. Townsend
University of Chicago Press, 2012

Debra Charlton
Intellect Books, 2012
Edited by Stuart Foster, Andy Pearce, and Alice Pettigrew
University College London, 2020
Ruby Oram
University of Chicago Press, 2025
James G. Dwyer and Shawn F. Peters
University of Chicago Press, 2019
James G. Dwyer and Shawn F. Peters
University of Chicago Press, 2019
This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.
Jean Cheney and L. Jackson Newell, editors, with Hikmet Sidney Loe, Jeff Metcalf, and Bridget M. Newell
University of Utah Press, 2016
Hope, Heart, and the Humanities tells the story of how Venture, a free, interdisciplinary college humanities course inspired by the national Clemente Course, has helped open doors to improve the lives of people with low incomes who face barriers to attending college. For over a decade, this course has given hundreds of adults, some of them immigrants or refugees, the knowledge, confidence, and power to rechart their lives.
Readers will go inside Venture classrooms to see what occurs when adults enter serious discussions about literature, critical writing, art history, American history, and philosophy. Apparent also are the difficulties nontraditional students, who range in age from 18 to 60, often encounter in a college classroom and the hard choices they and their teachers make. What readers may remember most are the stories and words from people whose views of the world broaden and whose directions in life changed.
Interview with Tom Williams at Access Utah
Michael Fielding
University College London, 2026
The true story behind a school that pioneered progressive education in post-Second World War Britain and inspired the famous film To Sir, With Love.
Alex Bloom (1895–1955) was a remarkable school leader whose reputation in his lifetime extended far beyond the UK. Against all odds, in the bomb-damaged remains of London’s East End immediately after the Second World War, he established a school that championed equality, democracy, diversity, and creativity. That school—St George-in-the-East Secondary Modern on Cable Street—is known to many as the inspiration for the novel and film To Sir, With Love, but its significance for education goes far deeper. An explicit affirmation of Bloom’s progressive values and aspirations, it had no punishments or rewards, no prizes or failures, and no set curriculum. It became a beacon for radical democratic schooling, achieving an astonishing international reputation and a lasting legacy.
Based on primary research with former teachers and pupils of St George-in-the-East, How Alex Bloom Built Radical Democratic Secondary Education in Post-war London recounts the story of the school’s founding, pedagogy, and democratic inclusivity. Through the book’s own narrative, and in short contributions from some of today’s leading educators, it examines Bloom’s contemporary and subsequent influence on education in the UK and further afield. Most of all, this book reveals Bloom’s extraordinary dedication and commitment to his staff, his pupils, and their community, exemplifying the importance of engaging with the school’s contemporary realities.
Joshua R. Eyler
West Virginia University Press, 2018
Even on good days, teaching is a challenging profession. One way to make the job of college instructors easier, however, is to know more about the ways students learn. How Humans Learn aims to do just that by peering behind the curtain and surveying research in fields as diverse as developmental psychology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience for insight into the science behind learning.
The result is a story that ranges from investigations of the evolutionary record to studies of infants discovering the world for the first time, and from a look into how our brains respond to fear to a reckoning with the importance of gestures and language. Joshua R. Eyler identifies five broad themes running through recent scientific inquiry—curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure—devoting a chapter to each and providing practical takeaways for busy teachers. He also interviews and observes college instructors across the country, placing theoretical insight in dialogue with classroom experience.
David Johnson
University of Michigan Press, 2013
How Myths about Language Affect Education: What Every Teacher Should Know clarifies some of the most common misconceptions about language, particularly those that affect teachers and the decisions they make when they teach English language learners. The chapters in this book address myths about language in general, about first and second language acquisition, about language and society, and about language and thinking. Each chapter concludes with activities for teachers that give examples, exercises, or simple questions that relate directly to teachers' everyday dealings with ELLs and language.
How Myths about Language Affect Education is not intended to be a complete introduction to linguistics; it does not contain information on phonetics or complex syntactic explanations, and technical jargon is kept to a minimum. The aim of this book is not to settle language issues but rather to highlight popular misconceptions and the ways that they influence debates regarding language and affect language policies in and out of the classroom.Michael T. Hartney
University of Chicago Press, 2022
Katie Kerstetter
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Douglas B. Downey
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Douglas B. Downey
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Rebecca Barr and Robert Dreeben
University of Chicago Press, 1988