Results by title

4 books match the query 'Geiger, Roger L.'

cover of A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education

A New Deal for the Humanities

Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education

Hutner, Gordon

Rutgers University Press, 2015

Many in higher education fear that the humanities are facing a crisis. But even if the rhetoric about “crisis” is overblown, humanities departments do face increasing pressure from administrators, politicians, parents, and students. In A New Deal for the Humanities, Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed bring together twelve prominent scholars who address the history, the present state, and the future direction of the humanities. These scholars keep the focus on public higher education, for it is in our state schools that the liberal arts are taught to the greatest numbers and where their neglect would be most damaging for the nation.
 
The contributors offer spirited and thought-provoking debates on a diverse range of topics. For instance, they deplore the push by administrations to narrow learning into quantifiable outcomes as well as the demands of state governments for more practical, usable training. Indeed, for those who suggest that a college education should be “practical”—that it should lean toward the sciences and engineering, where the high-paying jobs are—this book points out that while a few nations produce as many technicians as the United States does, America is still renowned worldwide for its innovation and creativity, skills taught most effectively in the humanities. Most importantly, the essays in this collection examine ways to make the humanities even more effective, such as offering a broader array of options than the traditional major/minor scheme, options that combine a student’s professional and intellectual interests, like the new medical humanities programs.
 
A democracy can only be as energetic as the minds of its citizens, and the questions fundamental to the humanities are also fundamental to a thoughtful life. A New Deal for the Humanities takes an intrepid step in making the humanities—and our citizens—even stronger in the future.
[more]
cover of Private Sectors in Higher Education: Structure, Function, and Change in Eight Countries

Private Sectors in Higher Education

Structure, Function, and Change in Eight Countries

Roger L. Geiger

University of Michigan Press, 1986

Private Sectors in Higher Education examines how the tasks of higher education have been divided between public and private institutions, and with what consequences. In doing so, the author analyzes both the comparative structures of educational systems and their social relations. Besides correcting the widespread misperception that private higher education is predominately an American phenomenon, this study should enlarge the range of experience that can be brought to bear on issues currently facing public policy and private higher education. It constitutes the first scholarly treatment of private higher education outside the United States. Case studies of private sectors in seven countries—Belgium, France, Great Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, the Philippines, and Sweden—form the core of this work. This material provides a perspective for probing several underlying rationales for private higher education in the United States. And finally, the author analyzes the issue of government financial support for private higher education. This book should significantly contribute to enlarging the framework of discussion of this question by broadening the understanding of the social and political underpinnings of public/private division in higher education.
[more]
cover of Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930

Science as Service

Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930

Edited by Alan I Marcus

University of Alabama Press, 2015

Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865–1930 is the first of a two-volume study that traces the foundation and evolution of America’s land-grant institutions. In this expertly curated collection of essays, Alan I Marcus has assembled a tough-minded account of the successes and set-backs of these institutions during the first sixty-five years of their existence. In myriad scenes, vignettes, and episodes from the history of land-grant colleges, these essays demonstrate the defining characteristic of these institutions: their willingness to proclaim and pursue science in the service of the publics and students they serve.
 
The Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 created a series of institutions—at least one in every state and territory—with now familiar names: Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Purdue University, Rutgers University, the University of Arizona, and the University of California, to name a few. These schools opened educational opportunities and pathways to a significant segment of the American public and gave the United States a global edge in science, technical innovation, and agriculture.
 
Science as Service provides an essential body of literature for understanding the transformations of the land-grant colleges established by the Morrill Act in 1862 as well as the considerable impact they had on the history of the United States. Historians of science, technology, and agriculture, along with rural sociologists, public decision and policy makers, educators, and higher education administrators will find this an essential addition to their book collections.
[more]
cover of The American College in the Nineteenth Century

The American College in the Nineteenth Century

Roger L. Geiger

Vanderbilt University Press, 2000

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.

[more]