715 books match the query 'Higher' and 168 start with t

cover of The Ohio State University: An Illustrated History

The Ohio State University

An Illustrated History

Raimund E. Goerler

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

 Raimund E. Goerler, acclaimed archivist and historian, has written the definitive guidebook to the history of The Ohio State University, one of the world's largest universities and a prominent land-grant institution. Using a topical strategy—ranging widely through critical events in OSU's history, vignettes of prominent alumni, and stories of well known campus buildings, historic sites, presidents, student life, traditions, and athletics—The Ohio State University: An Illustrated History is the first one-volume history of the University to appear in more than fifty years.

 
Always entertaining and consistently informative, the book is lavishly illustrated with more than 300 rare photographs from the OSU Archives. The Ohio State University: An Illustrated History is a must-have for all who call themselves Buckeyes.
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cover of The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education

The Opinionated University

Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education

Brian Soucek

University of Chicago Press, 2026

Why institutional neutrality is nothing but an illusion.
 
Can a university ever truly be neutral in today’s social and political climate? Pushing against the tide of universities increasingly pledging to stay neutral about contentious issues, law professor Brian Soucek argues that their promises are doomed to fail—universities can’t help being opinionated.

In The Opinionated University, Soucek shows that neutrality is a myth by taking a deep dive into several prominent campus controversies of the day, including diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and restrictions on campus speech and protest. Each issue requires universities to choose a side in what they do, if not also in what they say. In everything from curricular and admissions decisions to their response to outside rankings and their evaluation of faculty, universities express the values at the heart of their mission. Soucek argues that those pushing for neutrality are only preventing universities from standing up for their values, whether in today’s current moment of crisis or in periods of political calm.

Both timely and deeply engaging, The Opinionated University calls on universities to dispense with neutrality as a governing principle and focus instead on what their mission should be, and who should determine it.  
 
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cover of The Past in the Present: Women's Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South

The Past in the Present

Women's Higher Education in the Twentieth-Century American South

Amy T. McCandless

University of Alabama Press, 1999

The history of higher education in the 20th-century South, like the history of the region, both mirrors and diverges from the national pattern. Not surprisingly the region’s demographic, economic, social, political, and cultural characteristics have accounted for many of the variations between the education of southern women and women in the rest of the nation.
 
Southern students, McCandless finds, have generally been more Protestant, more rural, more conservative, and less affluent than their northern and western counterparts. Southern institutions have been slower to raise matriculation and graduation standards and to revise the classical curriculum. Southern administrators and legislators have opposed coeducation and integration longer and harder than college officials elsewhere. Certain types of institutions, such as all-black colleges, public women’s colleges, and separate agricultural colleges, have been more prevalent in the South. Although many of these differences are not gender-specific, all have contributed to the distinctive educational experience of women in this region.
 
Much has been written on the distinctiveness of this region, but virtually nothing has been published on the education of women in the South. By focusing on both black and white women at a wide variety of institutions and drawing on oral interviews and campus publications as well as traditional histories, McCandless is able to construct a more detailed picture of women’s collegiate experiences in the 20th-century South than those provided by general studies that rely primarily on materials from the North and Midwest.
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cover of The PhDictionary: A Glossary of Things You Don't Know (but Should) about Doctoral and Faculty Life

The PhDictionary

A Glossary of Things You Don't Know (but Should) about Doctoral and Faculty Life

Herb Childress

University of Chicago Press, 2016

Navigating academia can seem like a voyage through a foreign land: strange cultural rules dictate everyday interactions, new vocabulary awaits at every turn, and the feeling of being an outsider is unshakable. For students considering doctoral programs and doctoral students considering faculty life, The PhDictionary is a lighthearted companion that illuminates the often opaque customs of academic life.

With more than two decades as a doctoral student, college teacher, and administrator, Herb Childress has tripped over almost every possible misunderstood term, run up against every arcane practice, and developed strategies to deal with them all. He combines current data and personal stories into memorable definitions of 150 key phrases and concepts graduate students will need to know (or pretend to know) as they navigate their academic careers. From ABD to white paper—and with buyout, FERPA, gray literature, and soft money in between—each entry contains a helpful definition and plenty of relevant advice. Wry and knowledgeable, Childress is the perfect guide for anyone hoping to scale the ivory tower.
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cover of The Pipeline Is Broken: Graduate Students of Color on Racism, Justice, and Joy in the Academy

The Pipeline Is Broken

Graduate Students of Color on Racism, Justice, and Joy in the Academy

Orly Clerge

Utah State University Press, 2026

The Pipeline Is Broken explores the reality of racial exclusion and bias in graduate student education, arguing that the insidious effects of structural and institutional racism substantially chip away at the very pipeline of future BIPOC academics—already limited for other racialized reasons.

A series of letters written by graduate students of color, this collection offers a multifaceted account of the challenges, oppositions, microaggressions, and outright discrimination that these students face in higher education settings. Graduate students describe navigating hostile mentoring relationships and unwelcoming campus cultures and peers and laboring for poverty wages to earn their degrees. Yet these letters celebrate joy, community, and agency, offering a more complete and affirming view of graduate student life. Through these brave personal stories, The Pipeline Is Broken asks readers to interrogate what it means to navigate higher education as a person of color and to understand that the reality of faculty of color’s numerical-minority status is a complicated phenomenon whose genesis rests not at the moment of job interview. Rather, these letters show, this status is an intricate manifestation of a process that begins in elementary schools, is reinforced in high schools and colleges, and is part and parcel of the minefield that is graduate education in America.

Essential reading for anyone who cares about racial equity in education, mentorship, leadership development, or student well-being, The Pipeline Is Broken is a guide, a mirror, and a call to action all in one, challenging graduate programs, faculty, and administrators to examine their complicity in maintaining inequitable systems and offering suggestions for building cultures of care.

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cover of The Pivot: One Pandemic, One University

The Pivot

One Pandemic, One University

Robert J. Bliwise

Duke University Press, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic presented higher education with an unprecedented challenge: How could institutions continue the basic work of teaching and research while maintaining safe environments for their faculty, staff, and students? In The Pivot, Robert J. Bliwise traces Duke University’s response to the pandemic to show how higher education broadly met that challenge head-on. Bliwise interviews people across the campus: from bus drivers and vaccine researchers to student activists, dining hall managers, and professors in areas from English to ecology. He explores the shift to teaching online and the reshaping of research programs; how surveillance testing and reconfiguring residence halls and dining sites helped limit the virus spread on campus; the efforts to promote student well-being and to sustain extracurricular programs; and what the surge in COVID-19 cases meant for the university health system. Bliwise also shows how broad cultural conversations surrounding the 2020 presidential election, climate change, free speech on campus, and systemic racism unfolded in this changed campus environment. Although the pandemic put remarkable pressures on the campus community, Bliwise demonstrates that it ultimately reaffirmed the importance of the campus experience in all its richness and complexity.
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cover of The Politics of Liberal Education

The Politics of Liberal Education

Darryl Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds.

Duke University Press, 1992

Controversy over what role “the great books” should play in college curricula and questions about who defines “the literary canon” are at the forefront of debates in higher education. The Politics of Liberal Education enters this discussion with a sophisticated defense of educational reform in response to attacks by academic traditionalists. The authors here—themselves distinguished scholars and educators—share the belief that American schools, colleges, and universities can do a far better job of educating the nation’s increasingly diverse population and that the liberal arts must play a central role in providing students with the resources they need to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world.
Within this area of consensus, however, the contributors display a wide range of approaches, illuminating the issues from the perspectives of their particular disciplines—classics, education, English, history, and philosophy, among others—and their individual experiences as teachers. Among the topics they discuss are canon-formation in the ancient world, the idea of a “common culture,” and the educational implications of such social movements as feminism, technological changes including computers and television, and intellectual developments such as “theory.” Readers interested in the controversies over American education will find this volume an informed alternative to sensationalized treatments of these issues.

Contributors. Stanley Fish, Phyllis Franklin, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Henry A. Giroux, Darryl J. Gless, Gerald Graff, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, George A. Kennedy, Bruce Kuklick, Richard A. Lanham, Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Alexander Nehamas, Mary Louise Pratt, Richard Rorty, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

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cover of The Power of Writing: Dartmouth '66 in the Twenty-First Century

The Power of Writing

Dartmouth '66 in the Twenty-First Century

Edited by Christiane Donahue and Kelly Blewett

Dartmouth College Press, 2015

At the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar, scholars gathered to debate the direction of English Studies in the academy. This debate had far-reaching effects and arguably forever changed writing instruction in the United States. To commemorate the 45th anniversary of this gathering, Dartmouth College hosted an event both celebrating the past and looking toward the future. Then as now, there is this simple truth: writing well matters, and it matters in institutions of higher education across disciplines. Yet what it means to be a good writer in the academy and in the public sphere remains a site of controversy and discussion. The Power of Writing: Dartmouth ’66 in the Twenty-First Century argues that any discussion of why writing well matters should extend beyond composition and rhetoric scholars to capture the knowledge that outstanding teachers and writers themselves put to work every day. The editors have brought together scholars and public intellectuals (including New York Times best-selling authors David McCullough and Steve Strogatz) from the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and interdisciplinary fields to engage in a dialogue about some of the controversial questions related to writing today. Readers will engage with questions about what it means to write well and how different answers affect the teaching and learning of writing in higher education. Each anchor article—representing disciplines as varied as musicology, African studies, mathematics, and history—receives responses from Dartmouth faculty and nationally renowned faculty members in writing studies programs. This timely and wide-ranging collection will have appeal far beyond writing instructors and is specifically designed for readers across disciplines.
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cover of The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America

The Production of Living Knowledge

The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America

Gigi Roggero

Temple University Press, 2011

Evaluating higher education institutions—particularly the rise of the “global university”—and their rapidly changing role in the global era, Gigi Roggero finds the system in crisis. In his groundbreaking book, The Production of Living Knowledge, Roggero examines the university system as a key site of conflict and transformation within “cognitive capitalism”—a regime in which knowledge has become increasingly central to the production process at large. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out through the activist method of conricerca, or “co-research,” wherein researchers are also subjects, Roggero’s book situates the crisis of the university and the changing composition of its labor force against the backdrop of the global economic crisis.

Combining a discussion of radical experiments in education, new student movements, and autonomist Marxian (or post-operaista) social theory, Roggero produces a distinctly transnational and methodologically innovative critique of the global university from the perspective of what he calls “living knowledge.”

In light of new student struggles in the United States and across the world, this first English-language edition is particularly timely.

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cover of The Purposeful Graduate: Why Colleges Must Talk to Students about Vocation

The Purposeful Graduate

Why Colleges Must Talk to Students about Vocation

Tim Clydesdale

University of Chicago Press, 2015

We all know that higher education has changed dramatically over the past two decades. Historically a time of exploration and self-discovery, the college years have been narrowed toward an increasingly singular goal—career training—and college students these days forgo the big questions about who they are and how they can change the world and instead focus single-mindedly on their economic survival. In The Purposeful Graduate, Tim Clydesdale elucidates just what a tremendous loss this is, for our youth, our universities, and our future as a society. At the same time, he shows that it doesn’t have to be this way: higher education can retain its higher cultural role, and students with a true sense of purpose—of personal, cultural, and intellectual value that cannot be measured by a wage—can be streaming out of every one of its institutions.

The key, he argues, is simple: direct, systematic, and creative programs that engage undergraduates on the question of purpose. Backing up his argument with rich data from a Lilly Endowment grant that funded such programs on eighty-eight different campuses, he shows that thoughtful engagement of the notion of vocational calling by students, faculty, and staff can bring rich rewards for all those involved: greater intellectual development, more robust community involvement, and a more proactive approach to lifelong goals. Nearly every institution he examines—from internationally acclaimed research universities to small liberal arts colleges—is a success story, each designing and implementing its own program, that provides students with deep resources that help them to launch flourishing lives.

Flying in the face of the pessimistic forecast of higher education’s emaciated future, Clydesdale offers a profoundly rich alternative, one that can be achieved if we simply muster the courage to talk with students about who they are and what they are meant to do.
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cover of The Recombinant University: Genetic Engineering and the Emergence of Stanford Biotechnology

The Recombinant University

Genetic Engineering and the Emergence of Stanford Biotechnology

Doogab Yi

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The advent of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s was a key moment in the history of both biotechnology and the commercialization of academic research. Doogab Yi’s The Recombinant University draws us deeply into the academic community in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the technology was developed and adopted as the first major commercial technology for genetic engineering. In doing so, it reveals how research patronage, market forces, and legal developments from the late 1960s through the early 1980s influenced the evolution of the technology and reshaped the moral and scientific life of biomedical researchers.

Bay Area scientists, university administrators, and government officials were fascinated by and increasingly engaged in the economic and political opportunities associated with the privatization of academic research. Yi uncovers how the attempts made by Stanford scientists and administrators to demonstrate the relevance of academic research were increasingly mediated by capitalistic conceptions of knowledge, medical innovation, and the public interest. Their interventions resulted in legal shifts and moral realignments that encouraged the privatization of academic research for public benefit. The Recombinant University brings to life the hybrid origin story of  biotechnology and the ways the academic culture of science has changed in tandem with the early commercialization of recombinant DNA technology.
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cover of The Reimagined PhD: Navigating 21st Century Humanities Education

The Reimagined PhD

Navigating 21st Century Humanities Education

Leanne M Horinko

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Long seen as proving grounds for professors, PhD programs have begun to shed this singular sense of mission. Prompted by poor placement numbers and guided by the efforts of academic organizations, administrators and faculty are beginning to feel called to equip students for a range of careers. Yet, graduate students, faculty, and administrators often feel ill-prepared for this pivot. The Reimagined PhD assembles an array of professionals to address this difficult issue. The contributors show that students, faculty, and administrators must collaborate in order to prepare the 21st century PhD for a wide range of careers. The volume also undercuts the insidious notion that career preparation is a zero sum game in which time spent preparing for alternate careers detracts from professorial training. In doing so, The Reimagined PhD normalizes the multiple career paths open to PhD students, while providing practical advice geared to help students, faculty, and administrators incorporate professional skills into graduate training, build career networks, and prepare PhDs for a variety of careers.
 
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cover of The Reluctant Supervisor: Recognizing and Rethinking Power in Writing Center Supervisory Practices

The Reluctant Supervisor

Recognizing and Rethinking Power in Writing Center Supervisory Practices

Rachel Azima

Utah State University Press, 2026

The discipline of writing center studies has long emphasized collaboration in every context, including leadership. But what does this emphasis mean for supervision, which is inherently hierarchical? The Reluctant Supervisor attends to how power—institutional, racial, and otherwise—operates in work relationships, staff policies, and administrative decisions.

Giving sustained attention to writing center administrators as supervisors (in addition to their roles as leaders, directors, mentors, and teachers), contributors write from the specificities of their local contexts, institutional positions, and embodied histories in ways that deepen our understanding of writing center supervisory practice.

The Reluctant Supervisor wrestles with the tensions, contradictions, and challenges necessary to name, own, and recognize supervision as a fundamental part of writing center work. It provides valuable perspectives for aspiring, new, and experienced writing center professionals and others in higher education looking to develop a more reflective supervisory practice—especially those who want to center equity and justice in their workplaces.

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cover of The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference

The Reorder of Things

The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference

Roderick A. Ferguson

University of Minnesota Press, 2012

In the 1960s and 1970s, minority and women students at colleges and universities across the United States organized protest movements to end racial and gender inequality on campus. African American, Chicano, Asia American, American Indian, women, and queer activists demanded the creation of departments that reflected their histories and experiences, resulting in the formation of interdisciplinary studies programs that hoped to transform both the university and the wider society beyond the campus.

In The Reorder of Things, however, Roderick A. Ferguson traces and assesses the ways in which the rise of interdisciplines—departments of race, gender, and ethnicity; fields such as queer studies—were not simply a challenge to contemporary power as manifest in academia, the state, and global capitalism but were, rather, constitutive of it. Ferguson delineates precisely how minority culture and difference as affirmed by legacies of the student movements were appropriated and institutionalized by established networks of power.

Critically examining liberationist social movements and the cultural products that have been informed by them, including works by Adrian Piper, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Zadie Smith, The Reorder of Things argues for the need to recognize the vulnerabilities of cultural studies to co-option by state power and to develop modes of debate and analysis that may be in the institution but are, unequivocally, not of it.

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cover of The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook

The Rise of the Research University

A Sourcebook

Edited by Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, and Chad Wellmon

University of Chicago Press, 2017

The modern research university is a global institution with a rich history that stretches into an ivy-laden past, but for as much as we think we know about that past, most of the writings that have recorded it are scattered across many archives and, in many cases, have yet to be translated into English. With this book, Paul Reitter, Chad Wellmon, and Louis Menand bring a wealth of these important texts together, assembling a fascinating collection of primary sources—many translated into English for the first time—that outline what would become the university as we know it.
           
The editors focus on the development of American universities such as Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and the Universities of Chicago, California, and Michigan. Looking to Germany, they translate a number of seminal sources that formulate the shape and purpose of the university and place them next to hard-to-find English-language texts that took the German university as their inspiration, one that they creatively adapted, often against stiff resistance. Enriching these texts with short but insightful essays that contextualize their importance, the editors offer an accessible portrait of the early research university, one that provides invaluable insights not only into the historical development of higher learning but also its role in modern society.
 
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cover of The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads

The Road Half Traveled

University Engagement at a Crossroads

Rita Axelroth Hodges

Michigan State University Press, 2012

A growing number of universities are dedicating resources to support their surrounding communities, but much potential for advancement remains. A university’s mission as an “anchor institution,” as defined by the authors, is to consciously and strategically apply the institution’s long-term, place-based economic power, in combination with its human and intellectual resources, to better the welfare of the community in which it resides. Drawing on ten diverse universities as case studies, this eye-opening book explores practices and strategies that can be employed to improve conditions in low-income communities and emphasizes the critical roles of university leaders, philanthropy, and policy in this process. To date the most comprehensive account of the range of roles played by universities as anchors in their communities, The Road Half Traveled provides a forward-thinking perspective on new horizons in university and community partnership.

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cover of The Roles of Immigrants and Foreign Students in US Science, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

The Roles of Immigrants and Foreign Students in US Science, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

Edited by Ina Ganguli, Shulamit Kahn, and Megan MacGarvie

University of Chicago Press, 2020

The number of immigrants in the US science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce and among recipients of advanced STEM degrees at US universities has increased in recent decades. In light of the current public debate about immigration, there is a need for evidence on the economic impacts of immigrants on the STEM workforce and on innovation. Using new data and state-of-the-art empirical methods, this volume examines various aspects of the relationships between immigration, innovation, and entrepreneurship, including the effects of changes in the number of immigrants and their skill composition on the rate of innovation; the relationship between high-skilled immigration and entrepreneurship; and the differences between immigrant and native entrepreneurs. It presents new evidence on the postgraduation migration patterns of STEM doctoral recipients, in particular the likelihood these graduates will return to their home country. This volume also examines the role of the US higher education system and of US visa policy in attracting foreign students for graduate study and retaining them after graduation.
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cover of The Scripps School: Its Stories, People, and Legacy

The Scripps School

Its Stories, People, and Legacy

Ralph Izard

Ohio University Press, 2018

An anecdotal history published on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of Ohio University’s renowned E. W. Scripps School of Journalism.

After its founding in 1924, what is now the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University quickly became one of the premier programs in the country. For decades, it has produced leaders who have reached the highest levels of journalism and communication in their careers, and their success is a direct product not only of the education they get in Athens but of the community the school fosters.

In this book, nearly one hundred alumni, faculty, friends, and students offer their stories of life at and after Scripps. The result is a multilayered, inspiring portrait of the school and how it shapes those who pass through its doors. At the same time, The Scripps School gives a nuanced history of journalism education at Ohio University. From covering assassinations and presidential elections to major moments in sports, alumni have documented the unprecedented and the historic, and here they show just how Scripps prepared them to be there.

The Scripps School, edited by former director Ralph Izard, is a love letter to the people and the institution. At a time when journalism is more important than ever, this book humanizes and contextualizes the profession in ways that will resonate in the Scripps community and beyond.

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cover of The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion

The Spark of Learning

Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion

Sarah Rose Cavanagh

West Virginia University Press, 2016

Historically we have constructed our classrooms with the assumption that learning is a dry, staid affair best conducted in quiet tones and ruled by an unemotional consideration of the facts. The field of education, however, is beginning to awaken to the potential power of emotions to fuel learning, informed by contributions from psychology and neuroscience. In friendly, readable prose, Sarah Rose Cavanagh argues that if you as an educator want to capture your students' attention, harness their working memory, bolster their long-term retention, and enhance their motivation, you should consider the emotional impact of your teaching style and course design. To make this argument, she brings to bear a wide range of evidence from the study of education, psychology, and neuroscience, and she provides practical examples of successful classroom activities from a variety of disciplines in secondary and higher education.
 
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cover of The State University, Its Work and Problems: A Selection from Addresses Delivered Between 1921 and 1933

The State University, Its Work and Problems

A Selection from Addresses Delivered Between 1921 and 1933

Lotus Coffman

University of Minnesota Press, 1934

The State University: Its Work and Problems was first published in 1934. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This presentation of the views of the late University of Minnesota president, Lotus Delta Coffman, emphasizes his contention that state-supported institutions of higher learning should be open to all who have the ability to profit by the work offered in them. The volume contains a series of
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cover of The Stone Soup Experiment: Why Cultural Boundaries Persist

The Stone Soup Experiment

Why Cultural Boundaries Persist

Deborah Downing Wilson

University of Chicago Press, 2015

The Stone Soup Experiment is a remarkable story of cultural difference, of in-groups, out-groups, and how quickly and strongly the lines between them are drawn. It is also a story about simulation and reality, and how quickly the lines between them can be dismantled. In a compulsively readable account, Deborah Downing Wilson details a ten-week project in which forty university students were split into two different simulated cultures: the carefree Stoners, and the market-driven Traders. Through their eyes we are granted intimate access to the very foundations of human society: how group identities are formed and what happens when opposing ones come into contact.
           
The experience of the Stoners and Traders is a profound testament to human sociality. Even in the form of simulation, even as a game, the participants found themselves quickly—and with real conviction—bound to the ideologies and practices of their in-group. The Stoners enjoyed their days lounging, chatting, and making crafts, while the Traders—through a complex market of playing cards—competed for the highest bankrolls. When they came into contact, misunderstanding, competition, and even manipulation prevailed, to the point that each group became so convinced of its own superiority that even after the simulation’s end the students could not reconcile.  
           
Throughout her riveting narrative, Downing Wilson interweaves fascinating discussions on the importance of play, emotions, and intergroup interaction in the formation and maintenance of group identities, as well as on the dynamic social processes at work when different cultural groups interact. A fascinating account of social experimentation, the book paints a vivid portrait of our deepest social tendencies and the powers they have over how we make friends and enemies alike. 
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cover of The Sun Still Shone: Professors Talk Retirement

The Sun Still Shone

Professors Talk Retirement

Lorraine T. Dorfman

University of Iowa Press, 1997

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cover of The Supreme Court and the NCAA: The Case for Less Commercialism and More Due Process in College Sports

The Supreme Court and the NCAA

The Case for Less Commercialism and More Due Process in College Sports

Brian L. Porto

University of Michigan Press, 2013

Two Supreme Court decisions, NCAA v. Board of Regents (1984) and NCAA v. Tarkanian (1988), have shaped college sports by permitting the emergence of a supercharged commercial enterprise with high financial stakes for institutions and individuals, while failing to guarantee adequate procedural protections for persons charged with wrongdoing within that enterprise. Brian L. Porto examines the conditions that led to the cases, the reasoning behind the justices' rulings, and the consequences of those rulings.

Arguing that commercialized college sports should be compatible with the goals of higher education and fair to all participants, Porto suggests that the remedy is a federal statute. His proposed College Sports Legal Reform Act would grant the NCAA a limited "educational exemption" from the antitrust laws, enabling it to enhance academic opportunities for athletes. The Act would also afford greater procedural protections to accused parties in NCAA disciplinary proceedings. Porto's prescription for reform in college sports makes a significant contribution to the debate about how best to address perennial problems in college sports such as cost containment, access to a meaningful education for athletes, and fairness in rule enforcement.

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cover of The Sustainable Learning Community: One University’s Journey to the Future

The Sustainable Learning Community

One University’s Journey to the Future

John Aber

University of New Hampshire Press, 2009

University communities have the potential to serve as models in the development and application of sustainability principles and practices, not only by what they teach and study, but also by how they operate facilities and engage with off-campus partners. With the oldest endowed campus-wide sustainability program in the country, established in 1997, the University of New Hampshire has become a leader in advancing a campus culture of sustainability. The UNH experience provides a unique window into the development of a new and integrated approach to teaching, learning, research, and operations. It is also a valuable guide for other institutions that aim to enhance the quality of campus life while reducing their environmental footprint. The book’s organization along four functional domains (curriculum, operations, research, and engagement) allows faculty, staff, students, and managers to focus on sections of particular relevance to their university roles. Each chapter develops standards of best practices and presents interesting case studies to humanize the larger effort.
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cover of The Synergistic Classroom: Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Small College Setting

The Synergistic Classroom

Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Small College Setting

Corey Campion

Rutgers University Press, 2021

Among the many challenges confronting the liberal arts today is a fundamental disconnect between the curricula that many institutions offer and the training that many students need. Discipline-specific models of teaching and learning can underprepare students for the kinds of interdisciplinary collaboration that employers now expect. Although aware of these expectations and the need for change, many small colleges and universities have struggled to translate interdisciplinarity into programs and curricula that better serve today’s students.

Written by faculty engaged in the design and delivery of interdisciplinary courses, programs, and experiential learning opportunities in the small college setting, The Synergistic Classroom addresses the many ways faculty can leverage their institutions' small size and openness to pedagogical experimentation to overcome the challenges of limited institutional resources and enrollment concerns and better prepare students for life and work in the twenty-first century. Taken together, the contributions in this volume invite reflection on a variety of important issues that attend the work of small college faculty committed to expanding student learning across disciplinary boundaries.
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cover of The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development: Values, the Practicum, and Programmatic Change in Writing Studies

The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development

Values, the Practicum, and Programmatic Change in Writing Studies

Adrienne Jankens

Utah State University Press, 2026

The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development explores the role of writing programs—specifically practicum courses—in developing teachers and articulating programmatic values. Drawing on interviews, curricular analysis, program archives, and teacher research, Adrienne Jankens explores how implicit values shape decisions about curriculum, pedagogy, and programmatic structures.
 
Through her multi-site analysis, Jankens examines the ways values are reflected in syllabi, committee meetings, and classroom practices. She demonstrates how values that are often unstated or assumed can be made explicit and linked to programmatic action, thus supporting development and aligning instructional goals with broader institutional objectives. Offering a nuanced framework on practicum courses, Jankens also highlights the importance of local contexts and distinguishes among tacit, implicit, explicit, emergent, and articulated values. This layered understanding helps reveal the often hidden mechanisms by which writing program values are enacted in day-to-day teaching practices.
 
Teacher development is a crucial site for enacting and understanding programmatic values, and making these values explicit can guide meaningful programmatic change. Providing an institutional ethnography of Jankens’s own writing program and situating those findings within broader conversations in writing studies, The Talk and Texts of Teacher Development adds to scholarship exploring the focus of the practicum course, the positionality and experience of graduate teaching assistants in writing programs, and the perennial work of the field to identify its core values and disciplinary identity.
 
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cover of The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study

The Teaching Archive

A New History for Literary Study

Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The Teaching Archive shows us a series of major literary thinkers in a place we seldom remember them inhabiting: the classroom. Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan open up “the teaching archive”—the syllabuses, course descriptions, lecture notes, and class assignments—of critics and scholars including T. S. Eliot, Caroline Spurgeon, I. A. Richards, Edith Rickert, J. Saunders Redding, Edmund Wilson, Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and Simon J. Ortiz. This new history of English rewrites what we know about the discipline by showing how students helped write foundational works of literary criticism and how English classes at community colleges and HBCUs pioneered the reading methods and expanded canons that came only belatedly to the Ivy League. It reminds us that research and teaching, which institutions often imagine as separate, have always been intertwined in practice. In a contemporary moment of humanities defunding, the casualization of teaching, and the privatization of pedagogy, The Teaching Archive offers a more accurate view of the work we have done in the past and must continue to do in the future.
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cover of The Thinking Student's Guide to College: 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education

The Thinking Student's Guide to College

75 Tips for Getting a Better Education

Andrew Roberts

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Each fall, thousands of eager freshmen descend on college and university campuses expecting the best education imaginable: inspiring classes taught by top-ranked professors, academic advisors who will guide them to a prestigious job or graduate school, and an environment where learning flourishes outside the classroom as much as it does in lecture halls. Unfortunately, most of these freshmen soon learn that academic life is not what they imagined. Classes are taught by overworked graduate students and adjuncts rather than seasoned faculty members, undergrads receive minimal attention from advisors or administrators, and potentially valuable campus resources remain outside their grasp.

Andrew Roberts’ Thinking Student’s Guide to College helps students take charge of their university experience by providing a blueprint they can follow to achieve their educational goals—whether at public or private schools, large research universities or small liberal arts colleges. An inside look penned by a professor at Northwestern University, this book offers concrete tips on choosing a college, selecting classes, deciding on a major, interacting with faculty, and applying to graduate school. Here, Roberts exposes the secrets of the ivory tower to reveal what motivates professors, where to find loopholes in university bureaucracy, and most importantly, how to get a personalized education. Based on interviews with faculty and cutting-edge educational research, The Thinking Student’s Guide to College is a necessary handbook for students striving to excel academically, creatively, and personally during their undergraduate years.

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cover of The Three Cs of Higher Education: Competition, Collaboration and Complementarity

The Three Cs of Higher Education

Competition, Collaboration and Complementarity

Mark O'Hara

Central European University Press, 2019

The thirteen papers in this collection address three aspects of higher education, primarily in Europe but also in the United States. These aspects are competition, collaboration, and complementarity, both on the level of policy and on the practical level of impact on students and staff. Competition, especially for funding, occurs between and within institutions. Collaboration, more than a basic code of conduct, has become a political principle across Europe. Complementarity in the market for higher education facilitates this collaboration. The themes and contexts in higher education for which the three Cs are examined include missions and identities, response to external forces, the impact of evaluation systems and ranking schemes, the effects of globalisation, intercultural awareness and gender imbalance, and the challenges of student participation. Statistical tables and visual aids support the analysis and arguments. This book is the fifth in a series of publications drawn from the annual Forums of the European Association of Institutional Research (EAIR) from 2013 onwards
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cover of The Three Minute Thesis in the Classroom: What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know

The Three Minute Thesis in the Classroom

What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know

Heather Boldt

University of Michigan Press, 2019

The Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) competition is an annual academic speaking competition that challenges graduate students to present their thesis and its significance to a non-specialist audience in just three minutes. In The Three Minute Thesis in the Classroom, author Heather Boldt focuses on how the 3MT can be used in an ESL or EAP classroom to improve students' speaking skills, particularly about research. This Brief Instructional Guide uses data from the author's corpus of 3MT transcripts to reveal the six moves typical of this type of presentation and then provides instructors with a variety of classroom applications in the areas of vocabulary, pronunciation, describing research to non-specialists, and effective slide design.
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cover of The Two Ends of the Log: Learning and Teaching in Today’s College

The Two Ends of the Log

Learning and Teaching in Today’s College

Russell Cooper

University of Minnesota Press, 1958

The Two Ends of the Log was first published in 1958. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.Distinguished professors and administrators from a number of colleges, universities, and related organizations pool their thinking in this volume for an appraisal of college teaching as it stands today and a synthesis of ideals for the improvement of teaching and learning in higher education. The book is based on a series of papers presented at a conference on college teaching held at the University of Minnesota under the sponsorship of the Association of Minnesota Colleges. There are 27 chapters by 24 contributors.The chapters in the first section consider various aspects of the learning process. The subjects discussed include an analysis of learning, the motivation of students’ interest, the gifted student, the use of examinations, student-teacher relations, the stimulation of creativity, and the development of critical thinking and judgment.The second section, which deals with teaching, includes chapters on such subjects as a historical survey of teaching, the role of teaching in relation to technological progress, and artistry in teaching.The final section is devoted to individual methods of teaching, both traditional and new. Among chapter topics are the use of television and other audio-visual methods, student personnel services, and the role of the community in college teaching.In addition to presenting the material based on the major conference addresses, the book also includes the reports of analysts who participated in the conference programs. There is a foreword by James Lewis Morrill, former president of the University of Minnesota.
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cover of The Uberfication of the University

The Uberfication of the University

Gary Hall

University of Minnesota Press, 2016

Even after the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalism has been able to advance its program of privatization and deregulation. The Uberfication of the University analyzes the emergence of the sharing economy—an economy that has little to do with sharing access to good and services and everything to do with selling this access—and the companies behind it: LinkedIn, Uber, and Airbnb. In this society, we all are encouraged to become microentrepreneurs of the self, acting as if we are our own precarious freelance enterprises at a time when we are being steadily deprived of employment rights, public services, and welfare support. The book considers the contemporary university, itself subject to such entrepreneurial practices, as one polemical site for the affirmative disruption of this model.

Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

[more]
cover of The Unheard Voices: Community Organizations and Service Learning

The Unheard Voices

Community Organizations and Service Learning

Randy Stoecker

Temple University Press, 2009

Service learning has become an institutionalized practice in higher education. Students are sent out to disadvantaged communities to paint, tutor, feed, and help organize communities. But while the students gain from their experiences, the contributors to The Unheard Voices ask, "Does the community?"

This volume explores the impact of service learning on a community, and considers the unequal relationship between the community and the academy. Using eye-opening interviews with community-organization staff members, The Unheard Voices challenges assumptions about the effectiveness of service learning. Chapters offer strong critiques of service learning practices from the lack of adequate training and supervision, to problems of communication and issues of diversity. The book's conclusion offers ways to improve service learning so that future endeavors can be better at meeting the needs of the communities and the students who work in them.

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cover of The University Against Itself: The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace

The University Against Itself

The NYU Strike and the Future of the Academic Workplace

edited by Monika Krause, Mary Nolan, Michael Palm and Andrew Ross

Temple University Press, 2008

During the last two decades, many U.S. universities have restructured themselves to operate more like corporations.  Nowhere has this process been more dramatic than at New York University, which has often been touted as an exemplar of the "corporate university."  Over the same period, an academic labor movement has arisen in response to this corporatization.  Using the unprecedented 2005 strike by the graduate student union at NYU as a springboard, The University Against Itself provides a brief history of labor organizing on American campuses, analyzes the state of academic labor today, and speculates about how the university workplace may evolve for employees.

All of the contributors were either participants in the NYU strike -- graduate students, faculty, and organizers -- or are nationally recognized as writers on academic labor.  They are deeply troubled by the ramifications of corporatizing universities.  Here they spell out their concerns, offering lessons from one historic strike as well as cautions about the future of all universities.

Contributors include: Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Bowen, Andrew Cornell, Ashley Dawson, Stephen Duncombe, Steve Fletcher, Greg Grandin, Adam Green, Kitty Krupat, Gordon Lafer, Micki McGee, Sarah Nash, Cary Nelson, Matthew Osypowski, Ed Ott, Ellen Schrecker, Susan Valentine, and the editors.
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cover of The University in the Twenty-first Century: Teaching the New Enlightenment in the Digital Age

The University in the Twenty-first Century

Teaching the New Enlightenment in the Digital Age

Hannes Klöpper

Central European University Press, 2016

This volume addresses the broad spectrum of challenges confronting the university of the 21st century. Elkana and Klöpper place special emphasis on the questions regarding the very idea and purposes of universities, especially as viewed through curriculum—what is taught—and pedagogy—how it is taught. The ideas recommended here for reform concern especially undergraduate or Bachelor degree programs in all areas of study, from the humanities and social sciences to the natural sciences, the technical fields, law, medicine, and other professions. The core thesis of this book rests on the emergence of a 'New Enlightenment', which requires a revolution in curriculum and teaching in order to translate the academic philosophy of global contextualism into universal practice or application. The university is asked to revamp teaching in order to foster critical thinking that would serve students their entire lives. This book calls for universities to become truly integrated rather than remaining collections of autonomous agencies more committed to competition among themselves than cooperation in the larger interest of learning.
[more]
cover of The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Stories

The University of Arizona

A History in 100 Stories

Gregory McNamee

University of Arizona Press, 2024

Southwest Books of the Year Top Pick

The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Stories is a celebration of the people, ideas, inventions, teaching, and structures that have been part of the school’s evolution from a small land-grant institution to an internationally renowned research institution. Drawing on half a century of connection with the University of Arizona as a student, staff member, and faculty member, Gregory McNamee presents a history through the lens of a hundred subjects.

That story begins in 1885, with the establishment of the school, which quickly proved itself to be a powerhouse in its foundational “four pillars”: agriculture and earth sciences, followed by astronomy and anthropology. In the years following World War II, those four pillars became ever more important to the University, even as countless other fields of study gained prominence: optical sciences, women’s studies, the humanities, mathematics, and more. This phenomenal institution has as its setting the Sonoran Desert, and, closer to home, to a built environment that is widely considered among the most scenic in the country, from the Historic District with its buildings that are more than a century old to the latest steel-and-glass constructions on the edges of the ever-expanding campus.

McNamee relates this history in an entertaining manner, peppering discussion of serious intellectual and institutional themes with lighter moments—the origins of the university's rivalry with Arizona State, the ghosts that are said to lurk about campus, and more. Wildcats everywhere will delight in McNamee’s celebration of the people, places, learning, books, and pastimes that have distinguished our school.
[more]
cover of The University of Chicago: A History

The University of Chicago

A History

John W. Boyer

University of Chicago Press, 2015

One of the most influential institutions of higher learning in the world, the University of Chicago has a powerful and distinct identity, and its name is synonymous with intellectual rigor. With nearly 170,000 alumni living and working in more than 150 countries, its impact is far-reaching and long-lasting.

With The University of Chicago: A History, John W. Boyer, Dean of the College since 1992, presents a deeply researched and comprehensive history of the university. Boyer has mined the archives, exploring the school’s complex and sometimes controversial past to set myth and hearsay apart from fact. The result is a fascinating narrative of a legendary academic community, one that brings to light the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the conditions that have enabled the university to survive and sustain itself through decades of change.

Boyer’s extensive research shows that the University of Chicago’s identity is profoundly interwoven with its history, and that history is unique in the annals of American higher education. After a little-known false start in the mid-nineteenth century, it achieved remarkable early successes, yet in the 1950s it faced a collapse of undergraduate enrollment, which proved fiscally debilitating for decades. Throughout, the university retained its fierce commitment to a distinctive, intense academic culture marked by intellectual merit and free debate, allowing it to rise to international acclaim. Today it maintains a strong obligation to serve the larger community through its connections to alumni, to the city of Chicago, and increasingly to its global community.

Published to coincide with the 125th anniversary of the university, this must-have reference will appeal to alumni and anyone interested in the history of higher education of the United States.

[more]
cover of The University of Chicago: A History

The University of Chicago

A History

John W. Boyer

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An expanded narrative of the rich, unique history of the University of Chicago.

One of the most influential institutions of higher learning in the world, the University of Chicago has a powerful and distinct identity, and its name is synonymous with intellectual rigor. With nearly 170,000 alumni living and working in more than one hundred and fifty countries, its impact is far-reaching and long-lasting.
 
With The University of Chicago: A History, John W. Boyer, Dean of the College from 1992 to 2023, thoroughly engages with the history and the lived politics of the university. Boyer presents a history of a complex academic community, focusing on the nature of its academic culture and curricula, the experience of its students, its engagement with Chicago’s civic community, and the resources and conditions that have enabled the university to sustain itself through decades of change. He has mined the archives, exploring the school’s complex and sometimes controversial past to set myth and hearsay apart from fact.
 
Boyer’s extensive research shows that the University of Chicago’s identity is profoundly interwoven with its history, and that history is unique in the annals of American higher education. After a little-known false start in the mid-nineteenth century, it achieved remarkable early successes, yet in the 1950s it faced a collapse of undergraduate enrollment, which proved fiscally debilitating for decades. Throughout, the university retained its fierce commitment to a distinctive, intense academic culture marked by intellectual merit and free debate, allowing it to rise to international acclaim. Today it maintains a strong obligation to serve the larger community through its connections to alumni, to the city of Chicago, and increasingly to its global community. Boyer’s tale is filled with larger-than-life characters—John D. Rockefeller, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and many other famous figures among them—and episodes that reveal the establishment and rise of today’s institution.
 
Newly updated, this edition extends through the presidency of Robert Zimmer, whose long tenure was marked by significant developments and controversies over subjects as varied as free speech, medical inequity, and community relations.
 
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cover of The University of Illinois: Engine of Innovation

The University of Illinois

Engine of Innovation

Edited by Frederick E. Hoxie

University of Illinois Press, 2017

The founding of the university in 1867 created a unique community in what had been a prairie. Within a few years, this creative mix of teachers and scholars produced innovations in agriculture, engineering and the arts that challenged old ideas and stimulated dynamic new industries. Projects ranging from the Mosaic web browser to the discovery of Archaea and pioneering triumphs in women's education and wheelchair accessibility have helped shape the university's mission into a double helix of innovation and real-world change. These essays explore the university's celebrated accomplishments and historic legacy, candidly assessing both its successes and its setbacks. Experts and students tell the eye-opening stories of campus legends and overlooked game-changers, of astonishing technical and social invention, of incubators of progress as diverse as the Beckman Institute and Ebertfest. Contributors: James R. Barrett, George O. Batzli, Claire Benjamin, Jeffrey D. Brawn, Jimena Canales, Stephanie A. Dick, Poshek Fu, Marcelo H. Garcia, Lillian Hoddeson, Harry Liebersohn, Claudia Lutz, Kathleen Mapes, Vicki McKinney, Elisa Miller, Robert Michael Morrissey, Bryan E. Norwood, Elizabeth H. Pleck, Leslie J. Reagan, Susan M. Rigdon, David Rosenboom, Katherine Skwarczek, Winton U. Solberg, Carol Spindel, William F. Tracy, and Joy Ann Williamson-Lott.
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cover of The University of Iowa in the Twentieth Century: An Institutional History

The University of Iowa in the Twentieth Century

An Institutional History

Stow Persons

University of Iowa Press, 1990

In order to write this exhaustive history, Persons focused his research on the extensive university archive of personal correspondence and reminiscences. The result is a study rich in personality, character, and insight, complete with political and economic drama. The definitive analytical history of the school, this volume captures the vigor and color of the people it chronicles.
Organized by president, this history follows the school’s struggle to establish a major public university in an agricultural state. Persons shows how George MacLean introduced the institutional forms of the modern university and oriented it toward the major state university of the upper Midwest. Walter Jessup was successful in strengthening the faculty and laying the foundations of the modern physical plant. Howard Bowne’s attempt to revivify the school was cut short by the campus uprisings of 1968 to 1970. Since no part of the university has undergone more striking changes than the College of Medicine, Persons has devoted a chapter to the efforts to find an effective organizational pattern for that college. And, in the area of undergraduate education, he outlines the struggle to define and implement a successful general education program.
More than just a recounting of past issues and accomplishments, The University of Iowa in the Twentieth Century also serves to identify a pattern of historical development which will provide a context in which the present issues facing the school can be most fruitfully addressed. This book should be read by everyone interested in the development of the university, educators, higher education administrators, and all those captivated by Iowa history.
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cover of The University of Michigan & China, 1845 – 2017

The University of Michigan & China, 1845 – 2017

Neal McKenna

Michigan Publishing Services, 2017

The University of Michigan and China, 1845-2017 traces the long and important historical relationships that have existed between U-M and China. From U-M graduates doing missionary work in China in 1845 to the multitude of innovative and successful partnerships that U-M maintains with many Chinese universities and institutions today, The University of Michigan has a long, rich and varied history with China. This book traces that history, highlighting some of the more notable partnerships and persona that have brought about this strong and enduring relationship.

Throughout the last two centuries U.S. administrations from President Lincoln to President Clinton have relied on U-M leaders and faculty to engage China and develop political and cultural relationships. The University of Michigan was one of the first universities in the U.S. to enroll Chinese students and has many prominent Chinese graduates, including a Nobel Laureate and the first female college president in China.

As U-M celebrates its own bicentennial, this book recounts the university's considerable history with Chinese governments, people and culture. The book also updates readers on the current and ongoing partnerships between different U-M departments and schools with Chinese institutions, and provides a list of several prominent Chinese graduates of the University of Michigan.
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cover of The University of Michigan MBA/MA in Asian Studies Retrospection and Reflections: A Bicentennial Contribution

The University of Michigan MBA/MA in Asian Studies Retrospection and Reflections

A Bicentennial Contribution

Linda Lim

Michigan Publishing Services, 2020

The University of Michigan dual-degree master’s program in Asian Studies and Business began in the 1980s and quickly developed into a dynamic training ground for international business experts. Professor Emerita Linda Lim provides an oral history of the program, including her reflections on decades of teaching and leadership in international business education. This book also features essays on business in Asia from graduates of the program, and reflections on the program from graduates, and photos of some of the faculty and graduates of the MBA/MA Asian Studies program throughout the years.
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cover of The University of Nevada, 1874-2024: 150 Years of Inspiring Excellence

The University of Nevada, 1874-2024

150 Years of Inspiring Excellence

John Trent

University of Nevada Press, 2024

With an uncertain beginning in the sparsely populated remote northern Nevada town of Elko, a preparatory school opened its doors in October 1874 through the Morrill Act that sought to establish land-grant universities across the nation. Seven students began their higher education experience with dreams of a better future, but they probably could not have predicted that their alma mater would one day become the University of Nevada, Reno, a nationally classified Carnegie R1 “Very High Research” institution.

As both the University’s student body and the state’s population grew, the campus was transferred to Reno in 1885-86 as an effort to secure the fledgling institution’s prospects for survival. Many of the initial class of thirty-five students resided in Morrill Hall, the only building on campus, where they also received instruction and ate their meals. As the University enhanced its academic offerings, enrollment grew to more than 1,000 students by the turn of the century. A strong belief that the University must always be changing and evolving to meet the needs of its students and answer the challenges of a particular era became the guiding forces behind the administration’s decision-making. With an increasingly diverse student body and one of the most productive academic faculties in the country, the little school on the hill expanded during its first 100 years to become a leading public university in the western United States.

Today, the University continues to achieve institutional benchmarks, including a record 5,000 graduates during the 2019–20 academic year. It is exactly this kind of student success that has always been at the heart of the Wolf Pack Family’s mission to help students find the path that is right for them, and beckon others to share in their journey.

The 150th anniversary book is published in honor of this milestone and highlights numerous parts of the University’s history, showcasing why the University of Nevada, Reno has truly been a catalyst for success and change throughout the state’s story.
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cover of The View from the Helm: Leading the American University during an Era of Change

The View from the Helm

Leading the American University during an Era of Change

James J. Duderstadt

University of Michigan Press, 2009

Widely regarded as one of the most active and publicly engaged university presidents in modern academia, Duderstadt—who led the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996—presided over a period of enormous change, not only for his institution, but for universities across the country. His presidency was a time of growth and conflict: of sweeping new affirmative-action and equal-opportunity programs, significant financial expansion, and reenergized student activism on issues from apartheid to codes of student conduct.

Under James Duderstadt’s stewardship, Michigan reaffirmed its reputation as a trailblazer among universities. Part memoir, part history, part commentary, The View from the Helm extracts general lessons from his experiences at the forefront of change in higher education, offering current and future administrators a primer on academic leadership and venturing bold ideas on how higher education should be steered into the twenty-first century.

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cover of The Village on the Plain: Auburn University, 1856–2006

The Village on the Plain

Auburn University, 1856–2006

Dwayne Cox

University of Alabama Press, 2016

The Village on the Plain tells the story of the founding of Auburn University as a small private college and the tumultuous history of its growth and transformation into the complex institution it is today.

Auburn University possesses a rich and storied past as well as an esprit de corps that is the envy of its rivals. Dwayne Cox’s The Village on the Plain traces the school’s history in fascinating detail from its origins as a private college through its emergence as a nationally recognized land-grant university.

Founded before the Civil War to provide a classical education, Auburn became the state’s land-grant college after the cessation of hostilities. This infused the school with a vision of the reborn South as a commercial and industrial power. By the 1880s, the applied sciences were at the core of Auburn’s growth and strength. Like most southern universities, Auburn never enjoyed financial abundance, and scarcity intensified internal debates over investments in liberal arts or science. Modest state funding for higher education also complicated Auburn’s rise. It became a source of competition with the University of Alabama. This rivalry was most intense between 1908 and 1948. The two schools did not meet on the gridiron but blocked and tackled one another in the legislature over the division of state funds.

On the idyllic plains of Lee County, Alabama, Auburn developed a unique, sometimes introspective culture, which is true of many universities founded far from urban centers. Long Auburn’s head archivist, Cox describes this culture with an insider’s insights and shows how it shaped the school's history and community.

Auburn University’s history is that of a small private college that rose to the challenges of convulsive state and national events, not only to survive but to emerge more vibrant and thriving. Offering much to students of higher education and Alabama history, as well as readers affiliated with Auburn University, The Village on the Plain tells the story of this complex and fascinating institution.
 

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cover of The Virtues

The Virtues

John H. Garvey

Catholic University of America Press, 2022

An ancient question asks what role moral formation ought to play in education. It leads to such questions as, do intellectual and moral formation belong together? Is it possible to form the mind and neglect the heart? Is it wise? These perennial questions take on new significance today, when education — especially, higher education — has become a defining feature in the lives of young people. Throughout his more than 40 years in academia, John Garvey has reflected on the relationship between intellectual and moral formation, especially in Catholic higher education. For 12 years as the President of The Catholic University of America, he made the cultivation of moral virtue a central theme on campus, highlighting its significance across all aspects of University culture, from University policy to campus architecture. During his two decades of presiding at commencement exercises, first as Dean of Boston College Law School and then as President of The Catholic University of America, Garvey made a single virtue the centerpiece of his remarks each year. The Virtues is the fruit of those addresses. More reflective than analytical, its purpose is to invite conversation about what it means to live well. Following Catholic tradition, The Virtues places the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love at the center of the moral life, and the cardinal virtues — justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence — with them. Alongside these major virtues, Garvey considers a collection of “little virtues,” habits that assist and accompany us in small but important ways on the path to goodness. Though he treats each virtue individually, a common thread unites his reflections. “The intellectual life depends on the moral life,” Garvey writes. “Without virtue we cannot sustain the practices necessary for advanced learning. In fact, without virtue, it’s hard to see what the purpose of the university is. Learning begins with love (for the truth). If we don’t have that, it’s hard to know why we would bother with education at all.” The Virtues invites its readers, especially students, to appreciate that the cultivation of virtue is indispensable to success, academic or otherwise, and more importantly, essential to their ultimate aim, a life well lived.
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cover of The Vocation of a Teacher: Rhetorical Occasions, 1967-1988

The Vocation of a Teacher

Rhetorical Occasions, 1967-1988

Wayne C. Booth

University of Chicago Press, 1989

This critically acclaimed collection is both a passionate celebration of teaching as a vocation and an argument for rhetoric as the center of liberal education. While Booth provides an eloquent personal account of the pleasures of teaching, he also vigorously exposes the political and economic scandals that frustrate even the most dedicated educators.

"[Booth] is unusually adept at addressing a wide variety of audiences. From deep in the heart of this academic jungle, he shows a clear eye and a firm step."—Alison Friesinger Hill, New York Times Book Review

"A cause for celebration. . . . What an uncommon man is Wayne Booth. What an uncommon book he has provided for our reflection."—James Squire, Educational Leadership

"This book stands as a vigorous reminder of the traditional virtues of the scholar-teacher."—Brian Cox, Times Literary Supplement
 
[more]
cover of The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education

The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education

Michael Bernard-Donals

The Ohio State University Press, 2023

Reduced state funding to public institutions. The removal of tenure from state statutes. Attempts to silence faculty. Michael Bernard-Donals takes on these issues and other crises in higher education in The Vulnerability of Public Higher Education, exploring how values once used to justify higher education—the democratization of knowledge, the fostering of expertise, the creation of well-informed citizens, and critical engagement with issues—have been called into question.

Bernard-Donals argues that public higher education, especially the work of faculty, has become vulnerable—socially, politically, professionally—and this book takes seriously the idea of vulnerability, suggesting that university faculty see it not as an encumbrance to their work but as an opportunity to form relations of solidarity with one another through mutual recognition and shared, albeit different forms of, precarity. Through a series of case studies on faculty rights and responsibilities, the efficacy of diversity initiatives, and tenure and academic freedom, Bernard-Donals employs a rhetorical perspective to show how vulnerability can reshape faculty work and provide ways to shift the relations of materiality and power while opening up new forms of deliberation, engagement, and knowledge production.

[more]
cover of The Way It Was

The Way It Was

Duane C. Spriestersbach

University of Iowa Press, 1999

The fall of 1964 was an exciting time at the University of Iowa. Its fourteenth president, Howard Bowen, had just arrived, and on a sunny October afternoon he made his first speech to the faculty. This occasion was note worthy enough—former president Virgil Hancher had held the job for twenty-four years—to attract the attention of a professor of speech pathology who had previously confined his considerable energies to teaching and research. Bowen's vision of what the university could become was so intriguing, so compelling, that this professor wrote and offered to help him achieve his objectives in any way possible. This quixotic offer changed Duane Spriestersbach's life and becomes the starting point for his story of his years as a University of Iowa administrator.

Drawing upon his personal files, the university archives, and interviews with many faculty members and administrators, Spriestersbach has created both an institutional and a personal history of the university. Judged by any standard, these years were tumultuous ones for higher education. Economic pressures from the state legislature, issues surrounding grants from such agencies as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, the civil rights movement, student and faculty protests during the Vietnam era, massive changes in the physical and administrative shape of the campus, and the computerization of all parts of campus life had far-reaching consequences. Spriestersbach was at the center of these events at the University of Iowa; his perspective is unique, refreshing, and educational.

Spriestersbach's account of the Vietnam years and of the evolution of computers at Iowa will be particularly interesting to readers. He reported to four presidents, served as acting president, managed hundreds of meetings both dramatic and mundane, and reacted to many administrative restructurings. In this story of his life at the University of Iowa, he reveals the truth behind these words from his 1964 letter to President Bowen: “I think I am an idealist, a person with imagination, and a guy in a hurry. I believe investigation will show that I am a person with competitive administrative and executive abilities.”

[more]
cover of The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities

The Work of Art in the World

Civic Agency and Public Humanities

Doris Sommer

Duke University Press, 2014

Celebrating art and interpretation that take on social challenges, Doris Sommer steers the humanities back to engagement with the world. The reformist projects that focus her attention develop momentum and meaning as they circulate through society to inspire faith in the possible. Among the cases that she covers are top-down initiatives of political leaders, such as those launched by Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, and also bottom-up movements like the Theatre of the Oppressed created by the Brazilian director, writer, and educator Augusto Boal. Alleging that we are all cultural agents, Sommer also takes herself to task and creates Pre-Texts, an international arts-literacy project that translates high literary theory through popular creative practices. The Work of Art in the World is informed by many writers and theorists. Foremost among them is the eighteenth-century German poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller, who remains an eloquent defender of art-making and humanistic interpretation in the construction of political freedom. Schiller's thinking runs throughout Sommer's modern-day call for citizens to collaborate in the endless co-creation of a more just and more beautiful world.
[more]