What Universities Owe Democracy

What Universities Owe Democracy

Author: Ronald J. Daniels

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1421442698

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Introduction -- American dreams : access, mobility, fairness -- Free minds : educating democratic citizens -- Hard facts : knowledge creation and checking power -- Purposeful pluralism : dialogue across difference on campus -- Conclusion.


Democracy, Civic Engagement, and Citizenship in Higher Education

Democracy, Civic Engagement, and Citizenship in Higher Education

Author: William V. Flores

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2019-05-24

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1498590950

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In the most recent Democracy Index, the Economic Intelligence Unit downgraded the United States from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy.” Democracy, Civic Engagement, and Citizenship in Higher Education takes a hard look at the state of American democracy today through the lens of one of the nation’s most important actors: colleges and universities. Democracy is more than voting: it includes a wide range of democratic practices and depends on a culture of civic participation. Critical for strengthening democracy is the role that higher education leaders play in educating their constituencies about their responsibilities of citizenship. During a period of time when higher education is under pressure to meet 21st century workforce needs, the authors here exhort to remember the public mission of education to serve the needs of the democracy, a government by the people means that the people must be ready to govern. It is in this spirit that these stories are offered to show how institutions across the country are reclaiming and reinvigorating one of the essential pillars upon which American democracy is based.


The Channels of Student Activism

The Channels of Student Activism

Author: Amy J. Binder

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2022-05-16

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0226819868

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An eye-opening analysis of collegiate activism and its effects on the divisions in contemporary American politics. The past six years have been marked by a contentious political atmosphere that has touched every arena of public life, including higher education. Though most college campuses are considered ideologically progressive, how can it be that the right has been so successful in mobilizing young people even in these environments? As Amy J. Binder and Jeffrey L. Kidder show in this surprising analysis of the relationship between political activism on college campuses and the broader US political landscape, while liberal students often outnumber conservatives on college campuses, liberal campus organizing remains removed from national institutions that effectively engage students after graduation. And though they are usually in the minority, conservative student groups have strong ties to national right-leaning organizations, which provide funds and expertise, as well as job opportunities and avenues for involvement after graduation. Though the left is more prominent on campus, the right has built a much more effective system for mobilizing ongoing engagement. What’s more, the conservative college ecosystem has worked to increase the number of political provocations on campus and lower the public’s trust in higher education. In analyzing collegiate activism from the left, right, and center, The Channels of Student Activism shows exactly how politically engaged college students are channeled into two distinct forms of mobilization and why that has profound consequences for the future of American politics.


Educating for Democracy

Educating for Democracy

Author: Anne Colby

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-01-06

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 9780470623589

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Educating for Democracy reports the results of the Political Engagement Project, a study of educational practices at the college level that prepare students for responsible democratic participation. In this book, coauthors Anne Colby, Elizabeth Beaumont, Thomas Ehrlich, and Josh Corngold show that education for political development can increase students’ political understanding, skill, motivation, and involvement while contributing to many aspects of general academic learning.


Get Real

Get Real

Author: William G. Tierney

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2020-12-01

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1438481292

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Higher education always seems to be in crisis. Governments, foundations, professional associations, and the occasional scornful professor all tend to lament one or another problem plaguing America's colleges and universities. The more apocalyptic claims state that the United States is a "nation at risk," that our students' minds have been closed, or that radical faculty have run amok and are brainwashing our youth. In Get Real, William G. Tierney, a leading scholar of higher education, cuts through this noise, drawing on his experience and expertise to provide a thought-provoking overview of the many challenges confronting higher education and how to deal with them. In forty-nine short, engaging essays, he aims not to stoke the flames of controversy or promote a particular stance but to provoke creative, forward-looking public discussion about what higher education could and should look like in the twenty-first century. Tierney clearly distills and offers his take on critical issues—from diversity and free speech to the rise of for-profit colleges and student debt—but the goal is always to give readers the background and tools to form their own opinions. Written in a conversational tone and laced with personal anecdotes, Get Real is informed by scholarly literature without being weighed down by it and includes suggestions for further reading.


Degrees of Inequality

Degrees of Inequality

Author: Suzanne Mettler

Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)

Published: 2014-03-11

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0465044964

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America’s higher education system is failing its students. In the space of a generation, we have gone from being the best-educated society in the world to one surpassed by eleven other nations in college graduation rates. Higher education is evolving into a caste system with separate and unequal tiers that take in students from different socio-economic backgrounds and leave them more unequal than when they first enrolled. Until the 1970s, the United States had a proud history of promoting higher education for its citizens. The Morrill Act, the G.I. Bill and Pell Grants enabled Americans from across the income spectrum to attend college and the nation led the world in the percentage of young adults with baccalaureate degrees. Yet since 1980, progress has stalled. Young adults from low to middle income families are not much more likely to graduate from college than four decades ago. When less advantaged students do attend, they are largely sequestered into inferior and often profit-driven institutions, from which many emerge without degrees—and shouldering crushing levels of debt. In Degrees of Inequality, acclaimed political scientist Suzanne Mettler explains why the system has gone so horribly wrong and why the American Dream is increasingly out of reach for so many. In her eye-opening account, she illuminates how political partisanship has overshadowed America’s commitment to equal access to higher education. As politicians capitulate to corporate interests, owners of for-profit colleges benefit, but for far too many students, higher education leaves them with little besides crippling student loan debt. Meanwhile, the nation’s public universities have shifted the burden of rising costs onto students. In an era when a college degree is more linked than ever before to individual—and societal—well-being, these pressures conspire to make it increasingly difficult for students to stay in school long enough to graduate. By abandoning their commitment to students, politicians are imperiling our highest ideals as a nation. Degrees of Inequality offers an impassioned call to reform a higher education system that has come to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, socioeconomic inequality in America.


Advancing Democracy

Advancing Democracy

Author: Amilcar Shabazz

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2005-11-16

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0807875988

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As we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), it is important to consider the historical struggles that led to this groundbreaking decision. Four years earlier in Texas, the Sweatt v. Painter decision allowed blacks access to the University of Texas's law school for the first time. Amilcar Shabazz shows that the development of black higher education in Texas--which has historically had one of the largest state college and university systems in the South--played a pivotal role in the challenge to Jim Crow education. Shabazz begins with the creation of the Texas University Movement in the 1880s to lobby for equal access to the full range of graduate and professional education through a first-class university for African Americans. He traces the philosophical, legal, and grassroots components of the later campaign to open all Texas colleges and universities to black students, showing the complex range of strategies and the diversity of ideology and methodology on the part of black activists and intellectuals working to promote educational equality. Shabazz credits the efforts of blacks who fought for change by demanding better resources for segregated black colleges in the years before Brown, showing how crucial groundwork for nationwide desegregation was laid in the state of Texas.


Schoolhouse Burning

Schoolhouse Burning

Author: Derek W. Black

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 1541774388

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The full-scale assault on public education threatens not just public education but American democracy itself. Public education as we know it is in trouble. Derek W. Black, a legal scholar and tenacious advocate, shows how major democratic and constitutional developments are intimately linked to the expansion of public education throughout American history. Schoolhouse Burningis grounded in pathbreaking, original research into how the nation, in its infancy, built itself around public education and, following the Civil War, enshrined education as a constitutional right that forever changed the trajectory of our democracy. Public education, alongside the right to vote, was the cornerstone of the recovery of the war-torn nation. Today's current schooling trends -- the declining commitment to properly fund public education and the well-financed political agenda to expand vouchers and charter schools -- present a major assault on the democratic norms that public education represents and risk undermining one of the unique accomplishments of American society.