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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.

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.