While he celebrated higher education as the engine of progress in every aspect of American life, George Keller also challenged academia’s sacred cows and entrenched practices with provocative ideas designed to induce “creative discomfort.” Completed shortly before his death in 2007, Higher Education and the New Society caps the career of one of higher education’s exceptional minds. Refining and expanding ideas Keller developed over his fifty-year career, this book is a clarion call for change. In the face of a transformed American society marked by population shifts, technological upheavals, and a volatile economic landscape, Keller urges leaders in higher education to see and confront their own serious problems. With characteristic forthrightness and inimitable wit, Keller targets critical areas where bold thinking is especially important, taking on such explosive issues as the configuration of academic disciplines, the runaway problem of big-time sports, the decline of the liberal arts, and the urgent problems of finances and costs. Keller expected this book to ignite discussion and controversy within academic circles, and he hoped fervently that it would also lead to real thinking, real analysis, and urgently needed transformation.
This book is essential for all those who study and work in today's colleges and for all those who seek a better education for their children, the nation, and the world. It is recommended for courses in higher education and society, contemporary issues in higher education, philosophy of higher education, academic issues in higher education, leadership and globalization and higher education.
"This book of contributed chapters is for educators who want to improve their understanding of the role higher education can play in developing students who are actively engaged in democratic processes and civic engagement opportunities"--
In recent decades, sociology of education has been dominated by quantitative analyses of race, class, and gender gaps in educational achievement. And while there’s no question that such work is important, it leaves a lot of other fruitful areas of inquiry unstudied. This book takes that problem seriously, considering the way the field has developed since the 1960s and arguing powerfully for its renewal. The sociology of education, the contributors show, largely works with themes, concepts, and theories that were generated decades ago, even as both the actual world of education and the discipline of sociology have changed considerably. The moment has come, they argue, to break free of the past and begin asking new questions and developing new programs of empirical study. Both rallying cry and road map, Education in a New Society will galvanize the field.
Higher Education in a Global Society delves deeply into the compelling challenges and opportunities facing higher education in cultivating world citizens. An exceptional range of scholars offers insights providing direction and guidance for colleges ready to respond to globalization from institutions crossing borders to creating international experiences at home, from students studying abroad to international students journeying to the United States, and from the critical demands on administrators to the vital contributions of faculty. J. Michael Adams, Fairleigh Dickinson University and International Association of University Presidents, US Higher Education in a Global Society should be of tremendous practical value to deans and provosts contemplating an international partnership or program. Written in a most accessible style by a combination of higher education scholars and veteran academic administrators, it provides a nuanced understanding of both the pitfalls and unanticipated benefits from such programs. Charles T. Clotfelter, Duke University, US Preparing students for the 21st century labor force requires exposure to other cultures and societies. This volume discusses ways to build richer campus experiences for achieving this requirement. Different chapters explore research connections, international visitors and students, campuses abroad, study abroad programs, and curriculum changes. By presenting case studies from different types of institutions, the editors and authors offer ideas that can be useful throughout higher education. Teresa A. Sullivan, President, University of Virginia, US This book is a very positive contribution to the literature on higher education internationalization. Written from a distinctly US perspective, it examines topics such as worldwide demographic and educational attainment trends; university R&D investments abroad and technology transfer issues; the interrelated dynamics of national policies regarding international education, migration and nation-human capacity building; and strategies to embed internationalization on campus. Debra W. Stewart, Council of Graduate Schools Higher education functions in a global environment of consumers, employees, competitors, and partners. It has been a force for globalization and a model for adaptation, but nonetheless faces challenges. This volume of essays examines emerging issues and opportunities for advancing education across borders. The demands upon and need for higher education have never been greater at both the individual and societal levels, and the avenues for pursuing the mission of higher education have greatly expanded due to globalization. This volume examines how strategically minded institutions can better fulfill their mission in a global environment while promoting international collaboration and strengthening the world economy. Chapter authors include prominent senior administrators from higher education and leading researchers on higher education and globalization. They provide new and actionable information to enhance decision making and inform strategic planning as well as a contemporary examination of the business of higher education and areas of potential new research. This book is an excellent resource for academic administrators, as well as for researchers and students in business, management, economics, education, and public sector economics.
In Poor Queer Studies Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.
In Liberal Arts Education in a Changing Society: A New Perspective on Chinese Higher Education You Guo Jiang, S. J. provides a unique focus on the re-emergence of liberal arts education in China. This is the first book that explores in depth the development of liberal arts education in China. Through the extensive use of first hand materials relating to the liberal arts and current viewpoints of Chinese scholars and higher education leaders, Jiang concludes that China must implement a good liberal arts education program to form responsible global citizens.
This book tracks the dramatic outcomes of the federal government's growing involvement in higher education between World War I and the 1970s, and the conservative backlash against that involvement from the 1980s onward. Using cutting-edge analysis, Christopher Loss recovers higher education's central importance to the larger social and political history of the United States in the twentieth century, and chronicles its transformation into a key mediating institution between citizens and the state. Framed around the three major federal higher education policies of the twentieth century--the 1944 GI Bill, the 1958 National Defense Education Act, and the 1965 Higher Education Act--the book charts the federal government's various efforts to deploy education to ready citizens for the national, bureaucratized, and increasingly global world in which they lived. Loss details the myriad ways in which academic leaders and students shaped, and were shaped by, the state's shifting political agenda as it moved from a preoccupation with economic security during the Great Depression, to national security during World War II and the Cold War, to securing the rights of African Americans, women, and other previously marginalized groups during the 1960s and '70s. Along the way, Loss reappraises the origins of higher education's current-day diversity regime, the growth of identity group politics, and the privatization of citizenship at the close of the twentieth century. At a time when people's faith in government and higher education is being sorely tested, this book sheds new light on the close relations between American higher education and politics.
Are colleges and universities in a period of unprecedented disruption? Is a bachelor's degree still worth the investment? Are the humanities coming to an end? What, exactly, is higher education good for? In For the Common Good, Charles Dorn challenges the rhetoric of America's so-called crisis in higher education by investigating two centuries of college and university history. From the community college to the elite research university—in states from California to Maine—Dorn engages a fundamental question confronted by higher education institutions ever since the nation's founding: Do colleges and universities contribute to the common good? Tracking changes in the prevailing social ethos between the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, Dorn illustrates the ways in which civic-mindedness, practicality, commercialism, and affluence influenced higher education's dedication to the public good. Each ethos, long a part of American history and tradition, came to predominate over the others during one of the four chronological periods examined in the book, informing the character of institutional debates and telling the definitive story of its time. For the Common Good demonstrates how two hundred years of political, economic, and social change prompted transformation among colleges and universities—including the establishment of entirely new kinds of institutions—and refashioned higher education in the United States over time in essential and often vibrant ways.
