Results by title
791 books match the query 'Levels' and 41 start with s
Saving Alma Mater
A Rescue Plan for America's Public UniversitiesJames C. Garland
University of Chicago Press, 2009
America’s public universities educate 80% of our nation’s college students. But in the wake of rising demands on state treasuries, changing demographics, growing income inequality, and legislative indifference, many of these institutions have fallen into decline. Tuition costs have skyrocketed, class sizes have gone up, the number of courses offered has gone down, and the overall quality of education has decreased significantly.
Here James C. Garland draws on more than thirty years of experience as a professor, administrator, and university president to argue that a new compact between state government and public universities is needed to make these schools more affordable and financially secure. Saving Alma Mater challenges a change-resistant culture in academia that places too low a premium on efficiency and productivity. Seeing a crisis of campus leadership, Garland takes state legislators to task for perpetuating the decay of their public university systems and calls for reforms in the way university presidents and governing boards are selected. He concludes that the era is long past when state appropriations can enable public universities to keep their fees low and affordable. Saving Alma Mater thus calls for the partial deregulation of public universities and a phase-out of their state appropriations. Garland’s plan would tie university revenues to their performance and exploit the competitive pressures of the academic marketplace to control costs, rein in tuition, and make schools more responsive to student needs.
A much-needed blueprint for reform based on Garland’s real-life successes as the head of Miami University of Ohio, Saving Alma Mater will be essential for anyone concerned with the costs and quality of higher education in America today.
Saving the World in Five Hundred Words
Perspectives on Nationally Competitive ScholarshipsSuzanne McCray
University of Arkansas Press, 2024
The ninth collection of essays produced by the National Association of Fellowships Advisors, Saving the World in Five Hundred Words offers a unique set of resources for advisors negotiating the complex world of nationally competitive awards. The essays here focus on three main aspects of fellowships advising—serving students, ensuring access, and developing the profession—and range from practical advice on how to assist students with applications, to recommendations for recruiting a broad range of students more effectively, to innovative teaching and advising practices. This volume will prove invaluable to anyone who advises students through this sometimes daunting application process.
Scarlet and Black, Volume Three
Making Black Lives Matter at Rutgers, 1945-2020Miya Carey
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Scarlet and Black, Volume Two
Constructing Race and Gender at Rutgers, 1865-1945Kendra Boyd
Rutgers University Press, 2020
To learn more about the work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History, visit the project's website at http://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu
Scarlet and Black
Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers HistoryFuentes, Marisa J
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Scarlet and Black documents the history of Rutgers’s connection to slavery, which was neither casual nor accidental—nor unusual. Like most early American colleges, Rutgers depended on slaves to build its campuses and serve its students and faculty; it depended on the sale of black people to fund its very existence. Men like John Henry Livingston, (Rutgers president from 1810–1824), the Reverend Philip Milledoler, (president of Rutgers from 1824–1840), Henry Rutgers, (trustee after whom the college is named), and Theodore Frelinghuysen, (Rutgers’s seventh president), were among the most ardent anti-abolitionists in the mid-Atlantic.
Scarlet and black are the colors Rutgers University uses to represent itself to the nation and world. They are the colors the athletes compete in, the graduates and administrators wear on celebratory occasions, and the colors that distinguish Rutgers from every other university in the United States. This book, however, uses these colors to signify something else: the blood that was spilled on the banks of the Raritan River by those dispossessed of their land and the bodies that labored unpaid and in bondage so that Rutgers could be built and sustained. The contributors to this volume offer this history as a usable one—not to tear down or weaken this very renowned, robust, and growing institution—but to strengthen it and help direct its course for the future.
The work of the Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Population in Rutgers History.
Visit the project's website at http://scarletandblack.rutgers.edu
School Principal
Managing in PublicDan C. Lortie
University of Chicago Press, 2009
When we think about school principals, most of us imagine a figure of vague, yet intimidating authority—for an elementary school student, being sent to the principal’s office is roughly on par with a trip to Orwell’s Room 101. But with School Principal, Dan C. Lortie aims to change that. Much as he did for teachers with his groundbreaking book Schoolteacher, Lortie offers here an intensive and detailed look at principals, painting a compelling portrait of what they do, how they do it, and why.
Lortie begins with a brief history of the job before turning to the daily work of a principal. These men and women, he finds, stand at the center of a constellation of competing interests around and within the school. School district officials, teachers, parents, and students all have needs and demands that frequently clash, and it is the principal’s job to manage these conflicting expectations to best serve the public. Unsurprisingly then, Lortie records his subjects’ professional dissatisfactions, but he also vividly depicts the pleasures of their work and the pride they take in their accomplishments. Finally, School Principal offers a glimpse of the future with an analysis of current issues and trends in education, including the increasing presence of women in the role and the effects of widespread testing mandated by the government.
Lortie’s scope is both broad and deep, offering an eminently useful range of perspectives on his subject. From the day-to-day toil to the long-term course of an entire career, from finding out just what goes on inside that office to mapping out the larger social and organizational context of the job, School Principal is a truly comprehensive account of a little-understood profession.
School for Cool
The Academic Jazz Program and the Paradox of Institutionalized CreativityEitan Y. Wilf
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Few art forms epitomize the anti-institutional image more than jazz, but it’s precisely at the academy where jazz is now flourishing. This shift has introduced numerous challenges and contradictions to the music’s practitioners. Solos are transcribed, technique is standardized, and the whole endeavor is plastered with the label “high art”—a far cry from its freewheeling days. Wilf shows how students, educators, and administrators have attempted to meet these challenges with an inventive spirit and a robust drive to preserve—and foster—what they consider to be jazz’s central attributes: its charisma and unexpectedness. He also highlights the unintended consequences of their efforts to do so. Ultimately, he argues, the gap between creative practice and institutionalized schooling, although real, is often the product of our efforts to close it.
School, Society, and State
A New Education to Govern Modern America, 1890-1940Tracy L. Steffes
University of Chicago Press, 2012
“Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife,” wrote John Dewey in his classic work The School and Society. In School, Society, and State, Tracy Steffes places that idea at the center of her exploration of the connections between public school reform in the early twentieth century and American political development from 1890 to 1940.
American public schooling, Steffes shows, was not merely another reform project of the Progressive Era, but a central one. She addresses why Americans invested in public education and explains how an array of reformers subtly transformed schooling into a tool of social governance to address the consequences of industrialization and urbanization. By extending the reach of schools, broadening their mandate, and expanding their authority over the well-being of children, the state assumed a defining role in the education—and in the lives—of American families.
In School, Society, and State, Steffes returns the state to the study of the history of education and brings the schools back into our discussion of state power during a pivotal moment in American political development.
School, State, and Society
The Growth of Elementary Schooling in Nineteenth-Century France--A Quantitative AnalysisRaymond Grew and Patrick J. Harrigan
University of Michigan Press, 1992
Schooled and Sorted
How Educational Categories Create InequalityThurston Domina
Russell Sage Foundation, 2023
Some educational categories have broadly egalitarian consequences. Indeed, Domina, Penner, and Penner argue that when societies enroll young people in school, making them students, they mark them as individuals who are worthy of rights. But other educational categories reinforce powerful social categories—including race, gender, and class—and ultimately reproduce social and economic inequality in society. Elite colleges, tracked high schools, and elementary school gifted programs provide not only different educational experiences, but also create merit and inequality by sorting students into categories that are defined by the students who are excluded.
Schooled & Sorted highlights that many of the decisions that define educational categories occur in school-based committee meetings and other relatively local settings. The local nature of these decisions provides many opportunities to define educational categories differently, and for school communities to bring about change.
Schooled & Sorted is an illuminating investigation into the ways sorting within schools translates into inequality in the larger world. While some educational categorization may be unavoidable, the authors suggest ways to build a more equitable system—and thus a more equitable society.
Schooling Selves
Autonomy, Interdependence, and Reform in Japanese Junior High EducationPeter Cave
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Cave examines the implementation of “relaxed education” reforms that attempted to promote individual autonomy and free thinking in Japanese classrooms. As he shows, however, these policies were eventually transformed by educators and school administrators into curricula and approaches that actually promoted social integration over individuality, an effect opposite to the reforms’ intended purpose. With vivid detail, he offers the voices of teachers, students, and parents to show what happens when national education policies run up against long-held beliefs and practices, and what their complex and conflicted interactions say about the production of self and community in education. The result is a fascinating analysis of a turbulent era in Japanese education that offers lessons for educational practitioners in any country.
Schooling, Democracy, and the Quest for Wisdom
Partnerships and the Moral Dimensions of TeachingRobert V. Bullough Jr. and John R. Rosenberg
Rutgers University Press, 2018
In response to growing concern in the 1980s about the quality of public education across the United States, a tremendous amount of energy was expended by organizations such as the Holmes Group and the Carnegie Forum to organize professional development schools (PDS) or “partner schools” for teacher education. On the surface, the concept of partnering is simple; however, the practice is very costly, complex, and difficult. In Schooling, Democracy, and the Quest for Wisdom, Robert V. Bullough, Jr. and John R. Rosenberg examine the concept of partnering through various lenses and they address what they think are the major issues that need to be, but rarely are, discussed by thousands of educators in the U.S. who are involved and invested in university-public school partnerships. Ultimately, they assert that the conversation around partnering needs re-centering (most especially on the purposes of public education), refreshing, and re-theorizing.
Science for Sale
The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus CapitalismDaniel S. Greenberg
University of Chicago Press, 2007
With Science for Sale, acclaimed journalist Daniel S. Greenberg reveals that campus capitalism is more complicated—and less profitable—than media reports would suggest. While universities seek out corporate funding, news stories rarely note that those industry dollars are dwarfed by government support and other funds. Also, while many universities have set up technology transfer offices to pursue profits through patents, many of those offices have been financial busts. Meanwhile, science is showing signs of providing its own solutions, as highly publicized misdeeds in pursuit of profits have provoked promising countermeasures within the field.
But just because the threat is overhyped, Greenberg argues, doesn’t mean that there’s no danger. From research that has shifted overseas so corporations can avoid regulations to conflicts of interest in scientific publishing, the temptations of money will always be a threat, and they can only be countered through the vigilance of scientists, the press, and the public.
Based on extensive, candid interviews with scientists and administrators, Science for Sale will be indispensable to anyone who cares about the future of scientific research.
Segregation by Experience
Agency, Racism, and Learning in the Early GradesJennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove
University of Chicago Press, 2021
Early childhood can be a time of rich discovery, a period when educators have an opportunity to harness their students’ fascination to create unique learning opportunities. Some teachers engage with their students’ ideas in ways that make learning collaborative--but not all students have access to these kinds of learning environments.
In Segregation by Experience, the authors filmed and studied a a first-grade classroom led by a Black immigrant teacher who encouraged her diverse group of students to exercise their agency. When the researchers showed the film to other schools, everyone struggled. Educators admired the teacher but didn’t think her practices would work with their own Black and brown students. Parents of color—many of them immigrants—liked many of the practices, but worried that they would compromise their children. And the young children who viewed the film thought that the kids in the film were terrible, loud, and badly behaved; they told the authors that learning was supposed to be quiet, still, and obedient. In Segregation by Experience Jennifer Keys Adair and Kiyomi Sánchez-Suzuki Colegrove show us just how much our expectations of children of color affect what and how they learn at school, and they ask us to consider which children get to have sophisticated, dynamic learning experiences at school and which children are denied such experiences because of our continued racist assumptions about them.
Sensemaking for Writing Programs and Writing Centers
Rita Malenczyk
Utah State University Press, 2023
The book is divided into two sections: Sensemaking with Tutors and Teachers, and Sensemaking and Institutional Structures. Chapter authors employ several theoretical approaches to sensemaking, ranging from individual experience to institutional history to document design, providing readers with ideas for how to administer and teach within their programs more effectively; how to advocate for their programs within larger university contexts; and how to positively influence the lives and careers of those they work with.
Sensemaking for Writing Programs and Writing Centers theorizes daily experiences from working lives and suggests problem-solving strategies. Writing program administrators, writing department chairs, and writing center directors, tutors, and staff will find value in its pages.
Seton Hall University
A History, 1856–2006Dermot Quinn
Rutgers University Press, 2023
In this vivid and elegantly written history, Dermot Quinn examines how Seton Hall was able to develop as an institution while keeping faith with its founder’s vision. Looking at the men and women who made Seton Hall what it is today, he paints a compelling picture of a university that has enjoyed its share of triumphs but has also suffered tragedy and loss. He shows how it was established in an age of prejudice and transformed in the aftermath of war, while exploring how it negotiated between a distinctly Roman Catholic identity and a mission to include Americans of all faiths.
Seton Hall University not only recounts the history of a great educational institution, it also shares the personal stories of the people who shaped it and were shaped by it: the presidents, the priests, the faculty, the staff, and of course, the students.
Shadow of My Shadow
Jennifer Doyle
Duke University Press, 2024
Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education
Stories of SelfhoodEdited by Alison Cook-Sather
Lever Press, 2026
Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education features accounts of how blindness and low vision intersect with other dimensions of identity for both students and faculty in higher education. Contributors from a range of institutional contexts illuminate “common but not comparable” experiences, as well as importantly different ones, and explore different intersections of identity while navigating higher education spaces. Each chapter addresses these questions: What is the relationship between seeing and selfhood? What choices do students and faculty make about how they experience and represent the intersections of their vision condition and other dimensions of their identity? What do authors wish others to understand, consider, let go of, and/or embrace regarding their experiences of navigating higher education with blindness or low vision?
Writing in their own unique voices, each author shares details of their lived experiences; analyses of how those are shaped by institutions, social norms, and individuals; and offers action steps for how everyone can make higher education more welcoming to and supportive of not only those with blindness or low vision but also those with a wide diversity of identities and experiences. Shifting Blind Identities in Higher Education inspires both insight and action into cultivating a more accessible and inclusive space in higher education.
Skills and Capacities for Students
Impacts of Arts Integration and Interdisciplinary PracticeGabriel Harp
A2RU Intervals, 2020
Skim, Dive, Surface
Teaching Digital ReadingJenae Cohn
West Virginia University Press, 2021
Students are reading on screens more than ever—how can we teach them to be better digital readers?
Smartphones, laptops, tablets: college students are reading on-screen all the time, and digital devices shape students’ understanding of and experiences with reading. In higher education, however, teachers rarely consider how digital reading experiences may have an impact on learning abilities, unless they’re lamenting students’ attention spans or the distractions available to students when they’re learning online.
Skim, Dive, Surface offers a corrective to these conversations—an invitation to focus not on losses to student learning but on the spectrum of affordances available within digital learning environments. It is designed to help college instructors across the curriculum teach digital reading in their classes, whether they teach face-to-face, fully online, or somewhere in between. Placing research from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, learning science, and composition in dialogue with insight from the scholarship of teaching and learning, Jenae Cohn shows how teachers can better frame, scaffold, and implement effective digital reading assignments. She positions digital reading as part of a cluster of literacies that students should develop in order to communicate effectively in a digital environment.
Sparks Flew
WOSU's Century on the AirThomas M. Rieland
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Sparks Flew is a rich story of creative, tenacious men and women working in a new medium that commercial enterprises soon dominated. At any moment in time, educational broadcasting could have failed if not for a few land-grant institutions like The Ohio State University and prominent stations like WOSU that supported the medium. Sparks Flew is the untold story, a century in the making, of one institution and one educational station that represent the roots of today’s public broadcasting system.
Speaking in Social Contexts
Communication for Life and Study in the U.S.Robyn Brinks Lockwood
University of Michigan Press, 2018
The text provides language to use for a variety of functions as they might related to life on a university campus: offering greetings and goodbyes, making introductions, giving opinions, agreeing and disagreeing, using the phone, offering assistance, asking for advice, accepting and declining invitations, giving and receiving compliments, complaining, giving congratulations, expressing condolences, and making small talk. Users are also taught to think beyond the words and to interpret intonation and stress (how things sound).
Each of the 10 units includes discussion prompts, language lessons, practice activities, get acquainted tasks (interacting with native speakers), and analysis opportunities (what did they discover and what can they apply?).
Speaking of Duke
Leading the Twenty-First-Century UniversityRichard H. Brodhead
Duke University Press, 2017
In these essays, Brodhead shows a university thinking its way forward through challenges all institutes of higher education have faced in the twenty-first century, including an expanding global horizon, an economic downturn that has left a diminished sense of opportunity and a shaken faith in the value of liberal arts education, and pressure to think more deeply about issues of equity and inclusion. His audiences range from newly arrived freshmen and new graduates—both facing uncertainty about how to build their future lives—to seasoned faculty members. On other occasions, he makes the case to the general public for the enduring importance of the humanities.
What results is a portrait of Duke University in its modern chapter and the social and political climate that it shapes and is shaped by. While these speeches were given on official occasions, they are not impersonal official pronouncements; they are often quite personal and written with grace, humor, and an unwavering belief in the power of education to shape a changing world for the better.
Brodhead notes that it is an underappreciated fact that a great deal of the exercise of power by a university leader is done through speaking: by articulating the aspirations of the school and the reasons for its choices, and by voicing the shared sense of mission that gives a learning community its reality. Speaking of Duke accomplishes each of those and demonstrates Brodhead's conviction that higher education is more valuable now than ever.
Speaking of Race and Class
The Student Experience at an Elite CollegeElizabeth Aries
Temple University Press, 2012
In Speaking of Race and Class, the follow-up volume to her groundbreaking Race and Class Matters at an Elite College, Elizabeth Aries completes her four-year study of diversity at a prestigious liberal arts college. Here, the 58 students—affluent, lower-income, black, and white—that Aries has interviewed since they were Amherst freshmen provide a complete picture of what and how each group learned about issues of race and class.
Aries presents the students’ personal perceptions of their experiences. She reveals the extent to which learning from diversity takes place on campus, and examines the distinct challenges that arise for students living in this heterogeneous community. Aries also looks more broadly at how colleges and universities across the country are addressing the challenges surrounding diversity. Speaking of Race and Class testifies to the programming and practices that have proven successful.
Special Admission
How College Sports Recruitment Favors White Suburban AthletesKirsten Hextrum
Rutgers University Press, 2021
Special Admission contradicts the national belief that college sports provide upward mobility opportunities. Kirsten Hextrum documents how white middle-class youth become overrepresented on college teams. Her institutional ethnography of one elite athletic and academic institution includes over 100 hours of interviews with college rowers and track & field athletes. She charts the historic and contemporary relationships between colleges, athletics, and white middle-class communities that ensure white suburban youth are advantaged in special athletic admissions. Suburban youth start ahead in college admissions because athletic merit—the competencies desired by university recruiters—requires access to vast familial, communal, and economic resources, all of which are concentrated in their neighborhoods. Their advantages increase as youth, parents, and coaches strategically invest in and engineer novel opportunities to maintain their race and class status. Thus, college sports allow white, middle-class athletes to accelerate their racial and economic advantages through admission to elite universities.
Speechifying
The Words and Legacy of Johnnetta Betsch ColeJohnnetta Betsch Cole. Celeste Watkins-Hayes and Erica Lorraine Williams, editors
Duke University Press, 2023
Sport and the Neoliberal University
Profit, Politics, and PedagogyKing-White, Ryan
Rutgers University Press, 2018
The contributors to Sport and the Neoliberal University examine how intercollegiate athletics became a contested terrain of public/private interests. They look at college sports from economic, social, legal, and cultural perspectives to cut through popular mythologies regarding intercollegiate athletics and to advocate for increased clarity about what is going on at a variety of campuses with regard to athletics. Focusing on current issues, including the NCAA, Title IX, recruitment of high school athletes, and the Penn State scandal, among others, Sport and the Neoliberal University shows the different ways institutions, individuals, and corporations are interacting with university athletics in ways that are profoundly shaped by neoliberal ideologies.
Standing at the Threshold
Working through Liminality in the Composition and Rhetoric TAshipWilliam J. Macauley
Utah State University Press, 2021
These authors enrich the TA experience by supporting agency and self-efficacy, encouraging TAs to take active roles in understanding their positions and making the most of that experience. Many chapters are written by current or former TAs who are writing as a means of preparing, informing, and guiding new rhet/comp TAs, encouraging them to make choices about how they want to think through and participate in their teaching work.
The first work on the market to delve deeply into the TAship itself and what it means for the larger discipline, Standing at the Threshold provides a rich new theorizing based in the real experiences and liminalities of teaching assistants in composition and rhetoric, approached from a productive array of perspectives.
Contributors: Lew Caccia, Lillian Campbell, Rachel Donegan, Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannady, Jennifer K. Johnson, Ronda Leathers Dively, Faith Matzker, Jessica Restaino, Elizabeth Saur, Megan Schoettler, Kylee Thacker Maurer
Stepping Away
Returning to the Faculty After Senior Academic LeadershipLisa Jasinski
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Stigma and Culture
Last-Place Anxiety in Black AmericaJ. Lorand Matory
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Matory describes the competitive process that hierarchically structures their self-definition as ethnic groups and the similar process by which middle-class African Americans seek distinction from their impoverished compatriots. Drawing on research at universities such as Howard, Harvard, and Duke and among their alumni networks, he details how university life—while facilitating individual upward mobility, touting human equality, and regaling cultural diversity—also perpetuates the cultural standards that historically justified the dominance of some groups over others. Combining his ethnographic findings with classic theoretical insights from Frantz Fanon, Fredrik Barth, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu and others—alongside stories from his own life in academia—Matory sketches the university as an institution that, particularly through the anthropological vocabulary of culture, encourages the stigmatized to stratify their own.
Straddling Worlds
The Jewish-American Journey of Professor Richard W. LeopoldSteven J. Harper
Northwestern University Press, 2008
Author Steven J. Harper pays tribute to a well-respected teacher with this biography of a distinguished William Smith Mason Professor of History at Northwestern University, Richard W. Leopold. Harper had maintained contact with his former professor, as had hundreds of other alumni, meeting with him in the apartment to which his age and health confined him. When Leopold invited him to review his biographical materials to prepare a New York Times obituary, Harper began to catch glimpses of a deeper history in Leopold’s life: that of Jews in America after the turn of the century.
Across two years of Sundays, Leopold’s life came together and Harper began to notice parallels between the life of his professor and the life of his recently deceased father-in-law. Both grew up in less orthodox households but were still identified as Jewish by others; both attended Ivy League colleges, fighting (and beating) anti-Semitism there; and both served their country with distinction in World War II. The two men persevered through a twentieth century Jewish-American experience that they and many others shared, but rarely discussed. Steven Harper has caught them both on the page just in time to document their lives, their culture, and the nation that grew and changed alongside them.
Straight A's
Asian American College Students in Their Own WordsChristine R. Yano and Neal K. Adolph Akatsuka, editors
Duke University Press, 2018
Strength through Diversity
Harlem Prep and the Rise of MulticulturalismBarry M. Goldenberg
Rutgers University Press, 2025
strengththroughdiversity.com
Student Experiences In and Out of the Classroom
Impacts of Arts Integration and Interdisciplinary PracticeGabriel Harp
A2RU Intervals, 2020
Studious Drift
Movements and Protocols for a Postdigital EducationPeter Hyland
University of Minnesota Press, 2022
What kind of university is possible when digital tools are not taken for granted, but hacked for a more experimental future?
The global pandemic has underscored contemporary reliance on digital environments. This is particularly true among schools and universities, which, in response, shifted much of their instruction online. Because the rise of e-learning logics, ed-tech industries, and enterprise learning-management systems all threaten to further commodify and instrumentalize higher education, these technologies and platforms have to be creatively and critically struggled over.
Studious Drift intervenes in this struggle by reviving the relationship between studying and the generative space of the studio in service of advancing educational experimentation for a world where digital tools have become a permanent part of education. Drawing on Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, the “science of imaginary solutions,” this book reveals how the studio is a space-time machine capable of traveling beyond the limits of conventional online learning to redefine education as interdisciplinary, experimental, public study.
Study Without Ends
Aesthetic Education in Neoliberal Latin AmericaD. Bret Leraul
Northwestern University Press, 2026
Calls for aesthetic education to unite cultural practices of radical imagination with everyday practices of care
While Latin America was neoliberalism’s laboratory, Argentina and Chile have been crucibles for its cultural logics. In this book, D. Bret Leraul examines the rise of neoliberal culture in the Southern Cone through the educational infrastructures that disseminate and reproduce it. Leraul draws on literature and criticism, the history of higher education, and examples of recent social movements to propose a theory of cultural production for social transformation.
Study Without Ends charts the cultural consequences of introducing a neoliberal rationality into the region’s higher education landscape. The university’s increasing centrality within the literary institution and the rise of theoretical prose fiction suggest that poetics today is less about crafting literary works than instructing readers. At the same time, despite efforts to reduce education to human capital investment, it remains a process of personal and social transformation, as recent activism by Chilean students and Argentinean unemployed workers shows. In response to the compounding crises of social reproduction represented by the informal work and precarious livelihoods of people rendered surplus populations, and inspired by the decommodified labor of students, artists, women, and the unemployed, Leraul calls for a materialist aesthetic education that unites artistic culture’s practices of radical imagination and everyday culture’s practices of care.
Suddenly Diverse
How School Districts Manage Race and InequalityErica O. Turner
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Suddenly Diverse is an ethnographic account of two school districts in the Midwest responding to rapidly changing demographics at their schools. It is based on observations and in-depth interviews with school board members and superintendents, as well as staff, community members, and other stakeholders in each district: one serving “Lakeside,” a predominately working class, conservative community and the other serving “Fairview,” a more affluent, liberal community. Erica O. Turner looks at district leaders’ adoption of business-inspired policy tools and the ultimate successes and failures of such responses. Turner’s findings demonstrate that, despite their intentions to promote “diversity” or eliminate “achievement gaps,” district leaders adopted policies and practices that ultimately perpetuated existing inequalities and advanced new forms of racism.
While suggesting some ways forward, Suddenly Diverse shows that, without changes to these managerial policies and practices and larger transformations to the whole system, even district leaders’ best efforts will continue to undermine the promise of educational equity and the realization of more robust public schools.
Summers Off?
A History of U.S. Teachers' Other Three MonthsChristine A. Ogren
Rutgers University Press, 2026
Sunk Cost
Who’s to Blame for the Nation’s Broken Student Loan System and How to Fix ItJillian Berman
University of Chicago Press, 2025
Student-loan horror stories are a dime a dozen. But students today are faced with a seemingly insurmountable paradox: Research consistently shows that the clearest viable option to financial stability is a college degree. But if and when Americans decide to pursue diplomas, student loan payments quickly follow, and even after securing full-time employment, many borrowers struggle to make ends meet for years. In Sunk Cost, journalist Jillian Berman explores how the nation’s student loan program went from a well-intentioned initiative aimed at helping low- and middle-income students afford college to one that traps borrowers in long-term debt.
Berman interviewed dozens of borrowers and policymakers and dug into the archives to unearth the true causes of the student loan problem. A couple of generations ago, policy makers generously subsidized Americans’ college educations because they knew it would be advantageous for the entire country: a more educated population meant better quality of life for all. But today, higher education is viewed as an individual goal, so students and their families are expected to be on the hook for it themselves. Berman explains how this enormous shift happened, which industries benefit from it, and what it means for college-going Americans today. She shares real-life stories of college graduates who are being crushed under some of the harshest consequences of the student loan system. These borrowers pursued higher education in hopes of a better life and yet some have been trapped in debt for decades, making it difficult to put food on the table, much less imagine a life beyond debt.
By connecting personal accounts to the policy history of student loans, Berman makes clear that if American society continues to push students toward higher education, but fails to truly subsidize it, the financial strain will become unbearable for all but the most privileged. The current system is broken, but Berman proposes that significant changes are possible, and will require political will from state lawmakers and Congress, along with a philosophical shift, to tackle one of the largest consumer finance challenges of our time.
Surveying the Landscape
Arts Integration at Research Universities: A Review of Best Practices and Challenges for Arts Integration in Higher EducationBruce M. Mackh, PhD
Michigan Publishing Services, 2015
This study presents “best practices in the integration of arts practice in U.S. research universities . . . , fulfill[ing] the need for a document that articulates models, obstacles, implementation strategies, costs, and impact on students and faculty as well as on research, practice, and teaching in other knowledge areas” (ArtsEngine). Rather than providing a detailed set of instructions, this document maps the landscape of arts integration at 30 partner institutions in the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) and at 16 other institutions. It highlights aspirational models and presents an overall guide to current practices linking the arts to other learning areas.
Sustaining Interdisciplinary Collaboration
A Guide for the AcademyRegina Bendix
University of Illinois Press, 2017