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At the end of the eighteenth century, just eighteen colleges existed in the United States, with an average enrollment of fewer than seventy. One hundred years later, over 450 American colleges and universities boasted enrollments up more than one hundredfold. The role of educational institutions in the life of the nation had been utterly transformed.

As the bridge between the two eras, the nineteenth-century college has been among the most controversial subjects in the history of American higher education. While earlier historians portrayed the "old-time" college as an impediment to modernization, later scholars affirmed the broad role of the colleges in the education of the American people.

The American College in the Nineteenth Century combines the best recent scholarship with an interpretive introduction to provide a fresh view of the development of American colleges. The contributors consider these institutions within four new contexts: first, the dramatic transformation in the college students' experience from oppressive discipline to relative freedom; second, the regional variations among the developing American colleges (for example, a South dominated by state colleges, a Midwest by denominational schools); third, the revolution in the century's third quarter as colleges became multipurpose institutions; and fourth, universities that became dominant by the end of the century, incorporating rather than displacing the colleges.

Innovative in its examination of the nature and function of these uniquely American institutions, The American College in the Nineteenth Century is a vital addition to the scholarship of the period.

Contributors: David B. Potts, Leon Jackson, Julie Ann Bubolz, Michael Sugrue, James Findlay, Margaret A. Nash, Peter Dobkin Hall, James Turner, Paul Bernard, and Willard J. Pugh.

Since the American University of Beirut opened its doors in 1866, the campus has stood at the intersection of a rapidly changing American educational project for the Middle East and an ongoing student quest for Arab national identity and empowerment. Betty S. Anderson provides a unique and comprehensive analysis of how the school shifted from a missionary institution providing a curriculum in Arabic to one offering an English-language American liberal education extolling freedom of speech and analytical discovery.

Anderson discusses how generations of students demanded that they be considered legitimate voices of authority over their own education; increasingly, these students sought to introduce into their classrooms the real-life political issues raging in the Arab world. The Darwin Affair of 1882, the introduction of coeducation in the 1920s, the Arab nationalist protests of the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the even larger protests of the 1970s all challenged the Americans and Arabs to fashion an educational program relevant to a student body constantly bombarded with political and social change. Anderson reveals that the two groups chose to develop a program that combined American goals for liberal education with an Arab student demand that the educational experience remain relevant to their lives outside the school's walls. As a result, in eras of both cooperation and conflict, the American leaders and the students at the school have made this American institution of the Arab world and of Beirut.

The network as a mode of being

In 1968, Fernand Deligny established a “network” for informally taking care of children with autism that was more than a mere site of living; it was a milieu created out of a reflection on the mode of being autistic. What is a space perceived outside of language? What is the form of a movement without perspective or goal? How do we engage with a world that is not our own, a world turned upside down yet truly common, where acting cohabitates with our actions and the unknown with our forms of knowledge? Such is the mythical web of the “Arachnean,” made of lines, holes, traces, enigmas, and questions without answers that demand to see that which cannot be seen. The Arachnean and Other Texts is a collection of Deligny’s writings from the second half of the 1970s. Long before the digital age of social networks, meshworks, and digital webs, Deligny speaks to us in his own autobiographical and aphoristic manner. For him, life was always experienced in the form of “the network as a mode of being.”g.”

This arresting graphic provides a visual overview of the impacts of arts integration and interdisciplinarity in the university. It can be a tool for case-making, communication, and further inquiry.

With funding cuts well under way and many institutions already promising to charge the maximum £9,000 yearly tuition fee, university education for the majority is under threat. This book exposes the true motives behind the government's programme and provides the analytical tools to fight it.

Widespread student protests and occupations, often supported by staff, unions and society at large, show the public's opposition to funding cuts and fee increases. The contributors to this sharp, well-written collection, many of whom are active participants in the anti-cuts movement, outline what's at stake and why it matters. They argue that university education is becoming increasingly skewed towards vocational degrees, which devalues the arts and social sciences – subjects that allow creativity and political inquiry to flourish.

Released at the beginning of the new academic year, this book will be at the heart of debates around the future of higher education in the UK and beyond, inspiring both new and seasoned activists in the fight for the soul of our universities.

Collaboratively reassesses Barbara Johnson’s legacy as a reader and thinker with an eye to contemporary conditions

Across an archive of essays on abortion and race, Mallarmé and Melville, feminist philosophy, rhetorical device, and pedagogical method, Barbara Johnson built a legacy of thought whose energies reverberate into the present. This collected volume gathers writers and critics from a range of North American higher educational settings to engage with this essential but still often underappreciated critic in a time of renewed and deepening crisis.

In Zoom meetings and shared essays, across a virtualized map of today’s academic and para-academic worlds, the group assessed how the rolling catastrophes of late neoliberalism continue to stage the sort of analogy Johnson herself would highlight between patriarchy, capitalism, ecocide, and other forms of structural violence. Emerging from that assemblage, this experimental collection tracks Johnson’s efforts to link literary reading with concrete matters of personhood and care at a moment when the very system of higher education that enabled Johnson’s work in the 1980s and 1990s faces existential threat. The frozen record of a live experience, the book is an impure procedure, tangled in the idiom of its own unfolding: a temporary culmination of an ongoing collaborative undertaking that will always remain unfinished.

Traces the little-known story of the bitter contest for the fate of the University of Alabama after the Civil War.

In The Battle for the University of Alabama, William Warren Rogers Jr. gives a fascinating account of the fierce struggle over the nature of the University of Alabama after the Civil War. Union forces reduced the campus to ruins as the war ended, and the university did not reopen until 1869. In the interregnum, powerful forces shifted the trajectory of the school. Alabama Republicans authored an egalitarian state constitution that delivered oversight of the university to the Republican Party. That set the stage for turmoil and confrontation. This book tells the story of that conflict.

In the next few years, Democrats charged Republicans with turning the university into a “radical” institution. They alleged that a handful of unqualified individuals had gained faculty positions because of their political allegiance, which resulted in the university’s academic desecration. Professors were bitterly denounced in the state newspaper press and quite personally in Tuscaloosa. Administration of the university became part of the fratricidal political debate in the state. Political violence and questions concerning race, specifically the possible integration of the university, illuminated the controversies of the Reconstruction years. Many of these questions resonate even today.

This authoritative account sets events at the University of Alabama against the backdrop of what occurred at other state universities in the Reconstruction South. The University of North Carolina experienced controversy similar to Alabama’s. At the University of Georgia, however, calm prevailed. This story of the incendiary events at Alabama’s flagship university charts new ground and provides a revelatory look into the extraordinary partisanship that characterized the South after the Civil War.

The Nazi 1933 Civil Service Law and the 1935 Nuremberg Laws are often considered the first anti-Jewish decrees in interwar Europe. Mária M. Kovács convincingly argues that Hungary’s numerus clausus law of 1920, which introduced a Jewish quota at Hungary’s institutions of higher learning, was, in fact, interwar Europe’s first antisemitic law. By defining—and discriminating against—Jews as a separate “racial” or “national” group, it abrogated the principle of equal rights that had been enshrined into law; as such, it marked an abrupt reversal of Jewish emancipation in Hungary. Moreover, the numerus clausus law set the stage for subsequent “Jewish Laws” (in the late 1930s and early 1940s) that sought to solve Hungary’s “Jewish Question” by means of extraordinary legal measures that targeted Jews alone. This book examines the origins and implementation of the numerus clausus, as well as the attempts to dampen its impact on Hungary’s international reputation, focusing on the debates surrounding it promulgation (1920), its modification (1928) and its eventual application to other areas of Jewish life (1938–45).

At the intersection of rhetorical studies and critical race/ethnic studies, The Benevolent Gaslight analyzes cultural and political discourses that recharacterize acts of racial violence as teaching moments and learning opportunities. Naming this phenomenon “benevolent gaslighting,” Louis M. Maraj and Pritha Prasad explore its application across academic disciplines/epistemologies, educational history, and university race management, while also diving into how popular culture and political figures use benevolent gaslighting to reinscribe normative operations of race, gender, and sexuality.

Although this rhetoric usually presents as progressive, when used for the purposes of advancing “antiracism,” the benevolent gaslight re-centers the very whiteness it supposedly critiques. It prompts peoples of color to question their histories, memories, and realities by suggesting their pain has been necessary for positive social change and by situating racial trauma as opportunities for public learning. Specific examples include antiracist teaching initiatives and the sudden proliferation of apologies for past acts of racism by public figures. Both trends saw an uptick from 2020 onward as a result of publicity crises and public “reckonings” necessitated by Black Lives Matter protests in response to widely reported, hypervisible anti-Black violences like the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery.

These discourses deflect blame for past or present racial violence by narrating it as an opportunity for “antiracist” growth and intervention. Utilizing conventional academic and creative/narrative methods to examine examples of the benevolent gaslight across US histories of education during the First Reconstruction, the post–Civil Rights management of student activists in the university, and the progressivist discourses of humanities disciplines and popular culture, this book reveals the insidious ways in which peoples of color are routinely (re)traumatized through mechanisms of “pedagogy.”

Explores the contradictory perceptions of African immigrant students in New York City and reveals how anti-Blackness persists even within predominantly Black and Brown schools.

African immigrant students are often celebrated in the United States as academically successful and culturally disciplined. But what happens when praise itself becomes part of a racial hierarchy? In The Black Model Minority Student, sociologist of education Mercy Agyepong traces the complex experiences of West African immigrant students attending public high schools in New York City. 

Using ethnographic and interview data from predominantly Black and Brown schools in the Bronx, Agyepong shows that African immigrant students are often viewed through two competing yet coexisting narratives: as intellectually capable and hardworking, yet also as uncivilized or socially inferior. These perceptions are not incidental, but central to how anti-Blackness operates and how racial hierarchies are sustained in the United States. While the model minority stereotype shaped their experiences in Black and Brown high schools, West African immigrant students found that this seemingly favorable stereotype mattered less once they graduated and entered the white spaces of higher education and other social settings. At every step, African students—regardless of their national origins—were disadvantaged by racial stereotypes.

Theoretically grounded yet deeply human, The Black Model Minority Student offers an important new perspective on race, immigration, and education in contemporary America.

Four-year-old Eli plays alone at the shore, inventing dramas out of sand and water. He is Builder, Fireman, Protector, and Scout, overcoming waves and conquering monsters. Enter Marianne and doll, Mother and Baby, eager to redefine Eli as a good father and homesteader. Their separate visions intertwine in a search for a common ground on which howling wolves and butterfly sisters can learn to understand and need one another.

What can the richly imagined, impressively adaptable fantasy world of these children tell us about childhood, development, education, and even life itself? For fifty years, teacher and writer Vivian Gussin Paley has been exploring the imagery, language, and lore of young children, asking the questions they ask of themselves.

In The Boy on the Beach she continues to do so, going deeper into the mystery of play as she follows Eli and Marianne through the kindergarten year, finding more answers and more questions. How does their teacher, Mrs. Olson, manage to honor and utilize the genius of play to create an all-inclusive community in which boys and girls like each other and listen to each other’s stories? Why is Paley’s fellow teacher Yu-ching in Taiwan certain that her children pretend to be kittens in order to become necessary to the group? And why do teachers in London see their childrens’ role-playing as the natural end to loneliness in the school community?

Rich with the words of children and teachers themselves, The Boy on the Beach is vintage Paley, a wise and provocative appreciation of the importance of play and enduring curiosity about the nature of childhood and the imagination.

Like all A2RU’s programs, The Case for Arts Integration is grounded in research and developed through integration and synthesis. This resource supports the work of arts integration on-campus, and draws on insights gathered from over 600 interviews with academic leaders, institutional officers, faculty, staff, and students at over 60 research universities. The A2RU research team systematically reviews these insights for evidence of the positive impacts, successful patterns, best practices, recurring challenges, and salient stories of arts integration.

A companion workbook, The Case for Arts Integration: Workbook, is also available as a hands-on tool designed to help you map how the arts and arts integration advances your university’s mission.

This workbook is designed to help you in case-making, developing a workshop, or as a common framework for benchmarking. Properly applied, the workbook will save weeks of work, provide structure and clarity for your group’s work, accelerate your ability to assemble exemplary case-making materials, and raise the quality of your messaging.

This workbook is a companion to The Case for Arts Integration book, which is recommended as a reference and source of inspiration.

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

An eye-opening analysis of collegiate activism and its effects on the divisions in contemporary American politics. 

The past six years have been marked by a contentious political atmosphere that has touched every arena of public life, including higher education. Though most college campuses are considered ideologically progressive, how can it be that the right has been so successful in mobilizing young people even in these environments?

As Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder show in this surprising analysis of the relationship between political activism on college campuses and the broader US political landscape, while liberal students often outnumber conservatives on college campuses, liberal campus organizing remains removed from national institutions that effectively engage students after graduation. And though they are usually in the minority, conservative student groups have strong ties to national right-leaning organizations, which provide funds and expertise, as well as job opportunities and avenues for involvement after graduation. Though the left is more prominent on campus, the right has built a much more effective system for mobilizing ongoing engagement. What’s more, the conservative college ecosystem has worked to increase the number of political provocations on campus and lower the public’s trust in higher education.
 
In analyzing collegiate activism from the left, right, and center, The Channels of Student Activism shows exactly how politically engaged college students are channeled into two distinct forms of mobilization and why that has profound consequences for the future of American politics.