BiblioVault - Books by Bailey, Thomas

A North Country Almanac

Reflections of an Old-School Conservationist in a Modern World

Thomas C Bailey

Michigan State University Press, 2018

A North Country Almanac: Reflections of an Old-School Conservationist in a Modern World includes the musings of an independent mind on wilderness, the conservation ethic, and the joys of loving the outdoors. Although a lifelong conservationist, Thomas C. Bailey has never unquestioningly accepted environmental dogma. The essays here often challenge familiar assumptions about stewardship of natural resources. The former National Park ranger, fishing guide, and conservancy director offers a rich variety of perspectives on an interesting array of topics, returning always to his fundamental belief that conservation pioneers such as John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold had it right when they affirmed Walt Whitman’s observation that “the secret of making the best person . . . is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.”

[more]

Redesigning America’s Community Colleges

A Clearer Path to Student Success

Thomas R. Bailey, Shanna Smith Jaggars, and Davis Jenkins

Harvard University Press, 2015

In the United States, 1,200 community colleges enroll over ten million students each year—nearly half of the nation’s undergraduates. Yet fewer than 40 percent of entrants complete an undergraduate degree within six years. This fact has put pressure on community colleges to improve academic outcomes for their students. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges is a concise, evidence-based guide for educational leaders whose institutions typically receive short shrift in academic and policy discussions. It makes a compelling case that two-year colleges can substantially increase their rates of student success, if they are willing to rethink the ways in which they organize programs of study, support services, and instruction.

Community colleges were originally designed to expand college enrollments at low cost, not to maximize completion of high-quality programs of study. The result was a cafeteria-style model in which students pick courses from a bewildering array of choices, with little guidance. The authors urge administrators and faculty to reject this traditional model in favor of “guided pathways”—clearer, more educationally coherent programs of study that simplify students’ choices without limiting their options and that enable them to complete credentials and advance to further education and the labor market more quickly and at less cost.

Distilling a wealth of data amassed from the Community College Research Center (Teachers College, Columbia University), Redesigning America’s Community Colleges offers a fundamental redesign of the way two-year colleges operate, stressing the integration of services and instruction into more clearly structured programs of study that support every student’s goals.

[more]

Theodore Roosevelt

A Literary Life

Thomas Bailey and Katherine Joslin

University Press of New England, 2018

Of all the many biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, none has presented the twenty-sixth president as he saw himself: as a man of letters. This fascinating account traces Roosevelt’s lifelong engagement with books and discusses his writings from childhood journals to his final editorial, finished just hours before his death. His most famous book, The Rough Riders—part memoir, part war adventure—barely begins to suggest the dynamism of his literary output. Roosevelt read widely and deeply, and worked tirelessly on his writing. Along with speeches, essays, reviews, and letters, he wrote history, autobiography, and tales of exploration and discovery. In this thoroughly original biography, Roosevelt is revealed at his most vulnerable—and his most human.

[more]