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On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, the work that was to have been Nietzsche's second book until he canceled the contract and used portions in his Untimely Meditations, is a substantial call for radical educational reform presented in the form of a prolonged narrative dialogue. It is presented here in the first English translation ever from the standard critical edition (a little-known translation was made for the Complete Works of 1909, long out of print). Here Nietzsche, through the characters of this prolonged narrative dialogue, starts from a consideration of German educational institutions and rises to a consideration of what is needed for true, or classical, education. Though Nietzsche engages his contemporary world more in this work than in perhaps any other, this engagement is neither arbitrary nor limiting. Starting where one is and has grown up happens to be the necessary grounding of the organic unity that belongs to true culture: "Every so-called classical education has only one healthy and natural starting point, the artistic, serious, and rigorous habituation in the use of the mother tongue. . . . Here where gradually the distinguishing feeling for form and for barbarism awakes, the wing bestirs itself for the first time that carries to the right and sole home of education, to Greek antiquity. Of course we would not come very far with the help of that wing all alone in the attempt to bring ourselves close to that castle of the Hellenic, infinitely distant and enclosed within diamond ramparts: rather anew we need the same leaders, the same teachers, our German classics, in order ourselves to become swept away under the wingbeat of their ancient endeavors – to the land of longing, to Greece."

In this dialogue, Nietzsche considers what it would mean to put education, culture, first in priority above all else, above religion, above economics, even above the state. The dialogue's call for educational reform goes so far as to require that the state be completely subordinated to the demands and needs of culture. The state must not be "a border guard, regulator, or overseer for his culture; rather the robust, muscular comrade, ready for battle, and companion on the way, who gives the admired, nobler, and, as it were, unearthly friend safe conduct through the harsh realities and for that earns his thankfulness."

Not only does the dialogue demand that the state subordinate itself to education, but it goes on to suggest that widespread educational institutions are for the sake of only a small number of beneficiaries. This radical and uncompromising devotion to the education of a very few sketches Nietzsche's thoughts on education perhaps more completely than any other work.

In addition, this dialogue offers numerous other objects of interest. The dialogue form shows off Nietzsche's literary art and offers an occasion to think carefully about the special tasks involved in reading philosophic texts well. The circumstances of this text's writing and its nearly being published offer insights both into Nietzsche's development and into the production of his works, especially regarding the Untimely Meditations. The letters and notes in the appendices help to flesh out the thinking that surrounds this text as well as to suggest the form of the never-written sixth lecture. Also Nietzsche's engagement with the immediate tradition of his contemporary milieu, not only with Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing but also with lesser figures such as Koetzebue, Grillparzer, and Gutzkow, should be of interest to intellectual historians and students of European culture.

Nietzsche read On the Future of Our Educational Institutions publicly in the form of five lectures. He then tried to rush it into publication, and it very nearly became Nietzsche's second book. Only at the last moment did he withdraw the book from the public. Now it is available in English.

How did the 1950s become “The Sixties”? This is the question at the heart of Daniel Horowitz's On the Cusp. Part personal memoir, part collective biography, and part cultural history, the book illuminates the dynamics of social and political change through the experiences of a small, and admittedly privileged, generational cohort.

A Jewish “townie” from New Haven when he entered Yale College in fall 1956, Horowitz reconstructs the undergraduate career of the class of 1960 and follows its story into the next decade. He begins by looking at curricular and extracurricular life on the all-male campus, then ranges beyond the confines of Yale to larger contexts, including the local drama of urban renewal, the lingering shadow of McCarthyism, and decolonization movements around the world. He ponders the role of the university in protecting the prerogatives of class while fostering social mobility, and examines the growing significance of race and gender in American politics and culture, spurred by a convergence of the personal and the political. Along the way he traces the political evolution of his classmates, left and right, as Cold War imperatives lose force and public attention shifts to the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam. 

Throughout Horowitz draws on a broad range of sources, including personal interviews, writings by classmates, reunion books, issues of the Yale Daily News, and other undergraduate publications, as well as his own letters and college papers. The end product is a work consistent with much of Horowitz's previously published scholarship on postwar America, further exposing the undercurrent of discontent and dissent that ran just beneath the surface of the so-called Cold War consensus.

A witty and incisive exploration of the philosophical conundrums that animate the digital humanities

Since its inception, the digital humanities has been repeatedly attacked as a threat to the humanities: warnings from literary and cultural theorists of technology overtaking English departments and the mechanization of teaching have peppered popular media. Stephen Ramsay’s On the Digital Humanities, a collection of essays spanning the personal to the polemic, is a spirited defense of the field of digital humanities.

A founding figure in what was once known as “humanities computing,” Ramsay has a well-known and contentious relationship with what is now called the digital humanities (DH). Here Ramsay collects and updates his most influential and notorious essays and speeches from the past fifteen years, considering DH from an array of practical and theoretical perspectives. The essays pursue a broad variety of themes, including the nature of data and its place in more conventional notions of text and interpretation, the relationship between the constraints of computation and the more open-ended nature of the humanities, the positioning of practical skills and infrastructures in both research and pedagogical contexts, the status of DH as a program for political and social action, and personal reflections on the author’s journey into the field as both a theorist and a technologist.

These wide-ranging essays all center around one idea: that DH not forsake its connection to the humanities. While “digital humanities” may sound like an entirely new form of engagement with the artifacts of human culture, Ramsay argues that the field well reveals what is most essential to humanistic inquiry.

Inspiring writers through creativity, experimentation, and unexpected discovery.

Once Upon a Time in the Twenty-First Century: Unexpected Exercises in Creative Writing is a unique creative writing text that will appeal to a wide range of readers and writers—from grade nine through college and beyond. Successful creative writers from numerous genres constructed these exercises, including poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction to one-act plays, song lyrics, genre fiction, travel guides, comics and beyond. The exercises use a broad range of creative approaches, aesthetics, and voices, all with an emphasis on demystifying the writing process and having fun.

Editor Robin Behn has divided the book into three writing sections: Genres and Forms, Sources and Methods, and Style and Subject. In each section, Behn offers a brief introduction which explains how to get started and specific ways to develop one’s writing. Each introduction is followed by extensive exercises that draw on literature from classic to contemporary, as well as other art forms and popular culture. Examples range from Flannery O’Connor and Langston Hughes to Allen Ginsberg and Gertrude Stein, from Jamaica Kincaid and James Joyce to Arlo Guthrie and Harryette Mullen. Integrated within the exercises are apt examples of student writings that have emerged from actual use of the exercises in both the classroom and in writing groups. The book concludes with general advice and direction on how to get published.

Based on years of hands-on experiences in the teaching of creative writing in high schools, colleges, and after-school writing clubs, this volume of exercises offers inestimable value to students and teachers in the traditional classroom, as well as a growing number of homeschoolers, those who are part of a writing club or group, and independent writers and learners of all ages.
 

Small colleges are a vital component of the United States higher education system. However, their unique characteristics are often overlooked in analyses that incorporate all colleges and universities. Many concepts familiar to economics professors but less familiar to more general audiences are helpful in understanding small colleges. These concepts include sophisticated ideas not typically covered in basic economics courses, such as regulatory capture, decision-making under uncertainty, and the logic of collective action. By combining economic theories with his own experiences leading small colleges, William T. Bogart provides a way for presidents, trustees, and other leaders of small colleges to more effectively help their institutions achieve their full potential.

Explores how university governance is restricted by ceremony and what it must do to survive
 

University shared governance is a microcosm of regulation and thrives particularly on ceremony to communicate its relevance. While many investigations of university governance examine representation, Opening Ceremony offers that, instead, stakeholders’ belief in institutional values can invite revision of stagnant governance practices. Governance tells us what the rules are, but they also tell us how to feel: opening up the ceremonial communication of this system invites new participants to rewrite how universities respond to felt needs.

Kathryn J. Gindlesparger considers how to break the seal of ceremony to invite voices not traditionally heard in governance and, in doing so, protect the ideals of the institution and rebuild trust in higher education.

Empowering women through education has become a top priority of international development efforts. Erin MurphyGraham draws on more than a decade of qualitative research to examine the experiences of Juanita and eighteen other women who participated in the SAT program. Their narratives suggest the simple yet subtle ways education can spark the empowerment process, as well as the role of men and boys in promoting gender equality.

Drawing on indepth interviews and classroom observation in Honduras and Uganda, MurphyGraham shows the potential of the SAT program to empower women through expanded access and improved quality of secondary education in Latin America and Africa. An appendix provides samples of the classroom lessons.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook edition of this book.

An illuminating history of the reform agenda in higher education.

For well over one hundred years, people have been attempting to make American colleges and universities more efficient and more accountable. Indeed, Ethan Ris argues in Other People’s Colleges, the reform impulse is baked into American higher education, the result of generations of elite reformers who have called for sweeping changes in the sector and raised existential questions about its sustainability. When that reform is beneficial, offering major rewards for minor changes, colleges and universities know how to assimilate it. When it is hostile, attacking autonomy or values, they know how to resist it. The result is a sector that has learned to accept top-down reform as part of its existence.
 
In the early twentieth century, the “academic engineers,” a cadre of elite, external reformers from foundations, businesses, and government, worked to reshape and reorganize the vast base of the higher education pyramid. Their reform efforts were largely directed at the lower tiers of higher education, but those efforts fell short, despite the wealth and power of their backers, leaving a legacy of successful resistance that affects every college and university in the United States. Today, another coalition of business leaders, philanthropists, and politicians is again demanding efficiency, accountability, and utility from American higher education. But, as Ris argues, top-down design is not destiny. Drawing on extensive and original archival research, Other People’s Colleges offers an account of higher education that sheds light on today’s reform agenda. 

The first book to explore writing center (WC) and writing program (WP) administration in HBCUs, Our Charge to Keep nuances ideas of ethical tutoring, explores Black college students’ beliefs about using Black Language in academic writing, provides new theories about tutoring, and gives insights into infrastructure and challenges facing WC and WP administrators in HBCU settings.

Many writing center directors have taken up the challenge to interrogate the impact of systemic racism on writing center theory, research, pedagogy, praxes, and daily operations, but the focus has largely been on predominantly white institutions (PWIs). As a result, writing center theory and research has unintentionally excluded the practices of everyday HBCU writing centers—their pedagogies, praxes, theories, and research. This edited volume rectifies this marginality by centering the epistemologies, practices, and wisdom of HBCU writing administrators, theorists, and practitioners. Chapters examine antiracist pedagogy, first-year writing challenges, the role of the larger HBCU community, and more.

Our Charge to Keep is a collection of writings that ultimately demystifies the administration of HBCU writing centers and inspires critical curiosity about them. Dr. Wonderful and Kendra Mitchell frame and showcase the resilience of HBCU writing center directors in combating the residual impact of systemic oppression and point the way forward for PWIs to shift toward new HBCU-centered perspectives on how to institute true antiracist policies and initiatives.

Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

When the Oakland, California, school board called African American English "Ebonics" and claimed that it "is not a black dialect or any dialect of English," they reignited a debate over language, race, and culture that reaches back to the era of slavery in the United States. In this book, John Baugh, an authority on African American English, sets new parameters for the debate by dissecting and challenging many of the prevailing myths about African American language and its place in American society.

Baugh's inquiry ranges from the origins of African American English among slaves and their descendants to its recent adoption by standard English speakers of various races. Some of the topics he considers include practices and malpractices for educating language minority students, linguistic discrimination in the administration of justice, cross-cultural communication between Blacks and whites, and specific linguistic aspects of African American English. This detailed overview of the main points of debate about African American language will be important reading for both scholars and the concerned public.