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Cope and Feinberg draw on conversations, narratives, and archival research that reveal how different generations explored their role in defining and carrying out the College’s multifaceted mission. Their account raises critical questions about the character of learning, the aims of teaching, and the nature of teaching as a profession. At the same time, the authors address issues that range from the role of schools in fostering individual and collective identity to the introduction of computer-mediated and online learning. Cope and Feinberg examine changes in self-understanding about fundamental ideas and chart how the College evolved from its original narrow mission of training children’s schoolteachers to embracing global perspectives.

A wide-ranging portrait of an institution, Arguments for Learning uses the School of Education to tell the stories of thinkers dedicated to the idea that education can change the world for the better.

In 1904, Edmund J. James inherited the leadership of an educational institution in search of an identity. His sixteen-year tenure transformed the University of Illinois from an industrial college to a major state university that fulfilled his vision of a center for scientific investigation.

Winton U. Solberg and J. David Hoeveler provide an account of a pivotal time in the university’s evolution. A gifted intellectual and dedicated academic reformer, James began his tenure facing budget battles and antagonists on the Board of Trustees. But as time passed, he successfully campaigned to address the problems faced by women students, expand graduate programs, solidify finances, create a university press, reshape the library and faculty, and unify the colleges of liberal arts and sciences. Combining narrative force with exhaustive research, the authors illuminate the political milieu and personalities around James to draw a vivid portrait of his life and times.

The authoritative conclusion to a four-part history, Edmund J. James and the Making of the Modern University of Illinois, 1904–1920 tells the story of one man’s mission to create a university worthy of the state of Illinois.

An edited volume reflecting on different aspects of teaching in prison and different points of view.

This book seeks to address some of the major issues faced by faculty who are teaching college classes for incarcerated students. Composed of a series of case studies meant to showcase the strengths and challenges of teaching a range of different disciplines in prison, this volume brings together scholars who articulate some of the best practices for teaching their expertise inside alongside honest reflections on the reality of educational implementation in a constrained environment. The book not only provides essential guidance for faculty interested in developing their own courses to teach in prisons, but also places the work of higher education in prisons in philosophical context with regards to racial, economic, social, and gender-based issues. Rather than solely a how-to handbook, this volume also helps readers think through the trade-offs that happen when teaching inside, and about how to ensure the full integrity of college access for incarcerated students.

Higher education is at a moment of real uncertainty. Colleges and universities are being asked to respond to changing student needs, financial pressure, and growing questions about value and purpose. Innovating Higher Education at a Small University offers a grounded and hopeful response to these challenges. Through a series of real, lived case studies, the book shows how one small, mission driven institution is rethinking how it teaches, partners, and serves its community. Spanning interdisciplinary work across teacher preparation, literacy, healthcare, and the arts, the chapters highlight what becomes possible when faculty and leaders are trusted to innovate with intention and care. Each chapter shares not only what was built, but also what was learned along the way, offering clear insights that others can adapt to their own contexts. Not a book about abstract trends or emerging technologies, it is grounded in program design, relationships, and project implementation. It is a book about people doing the work, and a reminder that meaningful change in higher education is already happening in places willing to lead with both humanity and purpose.

Catherine and Darius Brubeck’s 1983 move to South Africa launched them on a journey that helped transform jazz education. Blending biography with storytelling, the pair recount their time at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, where they built a pioneering academic program in jazz music and managed and organized bands, concerts, and tours around the world.

The Brubecks and the musicians faced innumerable obstacles, from the intensification of apartheid and a lack of resources to the hardscrabble lives that forced even the most talented artists to the margins. Building a program grounded in multi-culturalism, Catherine and Darius encouraged black and white musicians to explore and expand the landscape of South African jazz together Their story details the sometimes wily, sometimes hilarious problem-solving necessary to move the institution forward while offering insightful portraits of South African jazz players at work, on stage, and providing a soundtrack to the freedom struggle and its aftermath.

Frank and richly detailed, Playing the Changes provides insiders’ accounts of how jazz intertwined with struggle and both expressed and resisted the bitter unfairness of apartheid-era South Africa.

Suhrbur pays particular attention to the impact of race, gender, religion, and tax policy on the IEA and public schools. He also examines the IEA’s evolution from a professional organization controlled by administrations and officials through its radical transformation into a teacher-led independent labor union. As a workers’ organization, the IEA successfully fought for collective bargaining and organized K–12 and higher education while continually standing against right-wing efforts to privatize education and undermine public schools with vouchers, for-profit institutions, and tax credits.

Multifaceted and up to date, Public Education and Social Reform tells the story of the organization and figures dedicated to sustaining and advancing Illinois public education.

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.

An important historical account of Tuskegee University’s significant advances in health care, which affected millions of lives worldwide.

Alabama’s celebrated, historically black Tuskegee University is most commonly associated with its founding president, Booker T. Washington, the scientific innovator George Washington Carver, or the renowned Tuskegee Airmen. Although the university’s accomplishments and devotion to social issues are well known, its work in medical research and health care has received little acknowledgment. Tuskegee has been fulfilling Washington’s vision of “healthy minds and bodies” since its inception in 1881. In To Raise Up the Man Farthest Down, Dana R. Chandler and Edith Powell document Tuskegee University’s medical and public health history with rich archival data and never-before-published photographs. Chandler and Powell especially highlight the important but largely unsung role that Tuskegee University researchers played in the eradication of polio, and they add new dimension and context to the fascinating story of the HeLa cell line that has been brought to the public’s attention by popular media.

Tuskegee University was on the forefront in providing local farmers the benefits of agrarian research. The university helped create the massive Agricultural Extension System managed today by land grant universities throughout the United States. Tuskegee established the first baccalaureate nursing program in the state and was also home to Alabama’s first hospital for African Americans. Washington hired Alabama’s first female licensed physician as a resident physician at Tuskegee. Most notably, Tuskegee was the site of a remarkable development in American biochemistry history: its microbiology laboratory was the only one relied upon by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (the organization known today as the March of Dimes) to produce the HeLa cell cultures employed in the national field trials for the Salk and Sabin polio vaccines. Chandler and Powell are also interested in correcting a long-held but false historical perception that Tuskegee University was the location for the shameful and infamous US Public Health Service study of untreated syphilis.

Meticulously researched, this book is filled with previously undocumented information taken directly from the vast Tuskegee University archives. Readers will gain a new appreciation for how Tuskegee’s people and institutions have influenced community health, food science, and national medical life throughout the twentieth century.