Can university-based scientific research contribute to the economic development of a region? Can it generate wealth for the university? American universities are under increasing pressure to maximize their economic contributions. Tapping the Riches of Science offers a rigorous and far-sighted explanation of this controversial and little-understood movement.
Just how do universities contribute to innovation in industry? How have state legislatures promoted local university commitments to economic relevance? And how has the pressure to be economically productive affected the core academic missions of teaching and research? Drawing from a range of social science analyses, campus interviews, and examples of university-industry partnerships, Roger Geiger and Creso Sá reveal the ways that economic development has been incorporated into university commitments.
Noting enduring cultural differences between the academic and business worlds, Geiger and Sá deflate both suspicious and overconfident views. They show how elusive success can be for embryonic discoveries with as-yet-unclear applications. Warning against promising—and expecting—too much, Tapping the Riches of Science nonetheless makes a strong case for the long-term promise of practical uses for academic research.
“This is a book about the American Dream as it has become embodied in the university in general and in the English department in particular,” writes James Ray Watkins at the start of A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies. In it, Watkins argues that contemporary economic and political challenges require a clear understanding of the identity of English studies, making elementary questions about literacy, language, literature, education, and class once again imperative.
A personal history of university-level English studies in the twentieth century, A Taste for Language combines biography, autobiography, and critical analysis to explore the central role of freshman English and literary studies in the creation and maintenance of the middle class. It tells a multi-generational story of the author and his father, intertwined with close reading of texts and historical analysis. The story moves from depression-era Mississippi, where the author's father was born, to a contemporary English department, where the author now teaches.
Watkins looks at not only textbooks, scholars, and the academy but also at families and other social institutions. A rich combination of biography, autobiography, and critical analysis, A Taste for Language questions what purpose an education in English language and literature serves in the lives of the educated in a class-based society and whether English studies has become wholly irrelevant in the twenty-first century.
Teaching about race and racism can be a difficult business. Students and instructors alike often struggle with strong emotions, and many people have robust preexisting beliefs about race. At the same time, this is a moment that demands a clear understanding of racism. It is important for students to learn how we got here and how racism is more than just individual acts of meanness. Students also need to understand that colorblindness is not an effective anti-racism strategy.
In this book, Cyndi Kernahan argues that you can be honest and unflinching in your teaching about racism while also providing a compassionate learning environment that allows for mistakes and avoids shaming students. She provides evidence for how learning works with respect to race and racism along with practical teaching strategies rooted in that evidence to help instructors feel more confident. She also differentiates between how white students and students of color are likely to experience the classroom, helping instructors provide a more effective learning experience for all students.
Leonard Moore has been teaching Black history for twenty-five years, mostly to white people. Drawing on decades of experience in the classroom and on college campuses throughout the South, as well as on his own personal history, Moore illustrates how an understanding of Black history is necessary for everyone.
With Teaching Black History to White People, which is “part memoir, part Black history, part pedagogy, and part how-to guide,” Moore delivers an accessible and engaging primer on the Black experience in America. He poses provocative questions, such as “Why is the teaching of Black history so controversial?” and “What came first: slavery or racism?” These questions don’t have easy answers, and Moore insists that embracing discomfort is necessary for engaging in open and honest conversations about race. Moore includes a syllabus and other tools for actionable steps that white people can take to move beyond performative justice and toward racial reparations, healing, and reconciliation.
A practical and evidence-based teaching guide for graduate students across all fields.
In a book written directly for graduate students that includes graduate student voices and experiences, Aeron Haynie and Stephanie Spong establish why good teaching matters and offer a guide to helping instructors-in-training create inclusive and welcoming classrooms.
Teaching Matters is informed by recent research while being grounded in the personal perspectives of current and past graduate students in many disciplines. Graduate students can use this book independently to prepare to teach their courses, or it can be used as a guide for a teaching practicum. With a just-in-time checklist for graduate students who are assigned to teach courses right before the semester starts, step-by-step directions for writing a compelling teaching philosophy, and an emphasis on teaching well regardless of modality, Teaching Matters will remain relevant for graduate students throughout their careers.
Teaching the Bible with Undergraduates offers concrete strategies for Bible instruction in college classrooms. Each essay pays special attention to the needs of tech-savvy students whose sensibilities, aspirations, expectations, and preferred ways of learning may differ significantly from those of their instructors. The volume’s contributors, all biblical scholars and undergraduate instructors, focus on best pedagogical practices using concrete examples while sharing effective strategies. Essays and quick tips treat topics, including general education, reading skills, student identities, experiential learning, and instructional technology. Contributors include Kimberly Bauser McBrien, George Branch-Trevathan, Callie Callon, Lesley DiFransico, Nicholas A. Elder, Timothy A. Gabrielson, Kathleen Gallagher Elkins, Susan E. Haddox, Seth Heringer, John Hilton III, Melanie A. Howard, Christopher M. Jones, Steve Jung, Katherine Low, Timothy Luckritz Marquis, Kara J. Lyons-Pardue, Jocelyn McWhirter, Sylvie T. Raquel, Eric A. Seibert, Hanna Tervanotko, Carl N. Toney, John Van Maaren, and Robby Waddell. This book provides an essential resource not only for instructors at the undergraduate level but also for anyone who teaches biblical studies in the classroom.
Your graduate work was on bacterial evolution, but now you're lecturing to 200 freshmen on primate social life. You've taught Kant for twenty years, but now you're team-teaching a new course on “Ethics and the Internet.” The personality theorist retired and wasn't replaced, so now you, the neuroscientist, have to teach the "Sexual Identity" course. Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas they don't know very well. The challenges are even greater when students don't share your cultural background, lifestyle, or assumptions about how to behave in a classroom.
In this practical and funny book, an experienced teaching consultant offers many creative strategies for dealing with typical problems. How can you prepare most efficiently for a new course in a new area? How do you look credible? And what do you do when you don't have a clue how to answer a question?
Encouraging faculty to think of themselves as learners rather than as experts, Therese Huston points out that authority in the classroom doesn't come only, or even mostly, from perfect knowledge. She offers tips for introducing new topics in a lively style, for gauging students' understanding, for reaching unresponsive students, for maintaining discussions when they seem to stop dead, and -yes- for dealing with those impossible questions.
Original, useful, and hopeful, this book reminds you that teaching what you don't know, to students whom you may not understand, is not just a job. It's an adventure.
In Telling Stories, more than a dozen longitudinal writing researchers look beyond conventional project findings to story their work and, in doing so, offer otherwise unavailable glimpses into the logics and logistics of long-range studies of writing. The result is a volume that centers interrelations among people, places, and politics across two decades of praxis and an array of educational sites: two-year colleges, a senior military college, an adult literacy center, a small liberal arts college, and both public and private four-year universities.
Contributors share direct knowledge of longitudinal writing research, citing project data (e.g., interview transcripts, research notes, and journals), descriptions drawn from memory, and extended personal reflections. The resulting stories, tempered by the research and scholarship of others, convey a sense of longitudinal research as a lived activity as well as a prominent and consequential approach to inquiry. Yet Telling Stories is not a how-to guide, nor is it written for longitudinal researchers alone. Instead, this volume addresses issues about writing research that are germane to all who conduct or count on it. Such topics include building and sustaining good interpersonal research relations, ethically negotiating the institutional power dynamics that undergird writing research, effectively using knowledge from longitudinal studies to advocate for writers and writing educators, and improving both conceptual and concrete resources for long-range research in writing studies.
Robben W. Fleming was President of the University of Michigan during the turmoil of the Vietnam era. He brought a clear and effective philosophy to the challenges he faced as manager and leader in a turbulent time. Fleming recounts the dramatic confrontations and demonstrations at Michigan over the war in Vietnam, military research in universities, the investment of university endowment funds in South African enterprises, and black student campaigns for improved conditions on campus.
Robben W. Fleming has much to teach. There are lessons for all who face the challenges of leadership in this lively and readable autobiography of one who has displayed grace, style and effectiveness in difficult and sometimes threatening situations. Tempests into Rainbows also explores the influences on his life that nurtured his exceptional ability to create agreement and to solve conflict.
The story of his formative years is filled with both humor and pathos. Fleming writes about local personalities, the deaths of his "twin" brother and father, and the difficulties of the family during the economic recession of the 1920s and 1930s. Academic and athletic prowess enabled him to put himself through college and law school, emerging just in time to serve as a military government officer with troops in North Africa and Europe.
After World War II, Fleming became a specialist in labor-management relations, teaching at the University of Illinois and serving as a professional mediator and arbitrator of labor disputes. Then in 1964 he became Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and later President of the University of Michigan until 1979. Although he remains active as a consultant deploying his mediation skills, his last career position was as President of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
This unusual autobiography, appealing in its honesty and in the original story it has to tell, is also instructive in showing how a thoughtful person with a humane, consistent philosophy can manage when chaos and turmoil threaten. It will thus appeal not only to those who knew Fleming and who have ties to the universities in which he served, but also to all who manage and study the management of complex institutions.
"Robben Fleming has written a fascinating memoir, especially his intensely personal account of the trials and terrors that faced this university president as Ann Arbor's student body--and he came to grips with the civil rights revolution and the Vietnam War."
---Mike Wallace
"To relive Robben Fleming's life is to relive an American epoch. There was a time when America was at war with its enemies, and a time when America was at war with itself. He writes perceptively from both battlegrounds."
---Daniel Schorr
"Robben Fleming is a giant--a creative and imaginative leader of exceptional talent. All of us can learn from the lessons of his life. His book is a treasure."
---Newton N. Minow
Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University exposes the poor working conditions of contingent composition faculty and explores practical alternatives to the unfair labor practices that are all too common on campuses today.
Editors Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, and Leo Parascondola bring together diverse perspectives from pragmatism to historical materialism to provide a perceptive and engaging examination of the nature, extent, and economics of the managed labor problem in composition instruction—a field in which as much as ninety-three percent of all classes are taught by graduate students, adjuncts, and other “disposable” teachers. These instructors enjoy few benefits, meager wages, little or no participation in departmental governance, and none of the rewards and protections that encourage innovation and research. And it is from this disenfranchised position that literacy workers are expected to provide some of the core instruction in nearly everyone's higher education experience.
Twenty-six contributors explore a range of real-world solutions to managerial domination of the composition workplace, from traditional academic unionism to ensemble movement activism and the pragmatic rhetoric, accommodations, and resistances practiced by teachers in their daily lives.
Contributors are Leann Bertoncini, Marc Bousquet, Christopher Carter, Christopher Ferry, David Downing, Amanda Godley, Robin Truth Goodman, Bill Hendricks, Walter Jacobsohn, Ruth Kiefson, Paul Lauter, Donald Lazere, Eric Marshall, Randy Martin, Richard Ohmann, Leo Parascondola, Steve Parks, Gary Rhoades, Eileen Schell, Tony Scott, William Thelin, Jennifer Seibel Trainor, Donna Strickland, William Vaughn, Ray Watkins, and Katherine Wills.
In the wake of their defeat in the Civil War, many southern intellectuals recognized that their institutions had failed to supply antebellum graduates with the skills needed to compete with the North. Thus, educators who had previously served as Confederate officers led an effort to promote academic reform throughout the region.
In Thinking Confederates, Dan R. Frost details how these men set about transforming southern higher education, shifting their schools from a classical orientation to a new emphasis on science and engineering. Although they espoused a reverence for the past, they recognized that the eradication of slavery had been necessary for southern progress, and they upheld an idea of a New South that embraced beliefs both in the “Lost Cause” and in national reconciliation.
Just like its predecessor, Thinking Critically helps students improve reading, writing, and research skills while exploring and analyzing major global issues. Although many of the same topics are explored in this second edition—world hunger, global health, gender equality, regional conflict, cultural heritage, and immigration policies—all 31 authentic readings in the second edition are new. New topics included in this edition are cybersecurity, climate change, education reform, leadership, and human rights.
Each chapter contains two or three readings (from print and online news sources, journals, and blogs) designed to raise rather than provide answers; a vocabulary review and discussion questions for each reading; a reaction writing task; a question on the topic to research; a writing assignment for a specific academic or business genre (with models in an appendix); speaking activities (oral presentation, debate, or role-play); and a Thinking about It task. The Thinking about It task calls on students’ ability to evaluate a complex issue with objectivity and to propose a realistic approach, making this textbook good preparation for academic courses that require critical-thinking skills to express opinions both orally and in writing.
Several new academic/business written genres (abstract, fact sheet, briefing paper, report on a survey) have also been added.
Each fall, thousands of eager freshmen descend on college and university campuses expecting the best education imaginable: inspiring classes taught by top-ranked professors, academic advisors who will guide them to a prestigious job or graduate school, and an environment where learning flourishes outside the classroom as much as it does in lecture halls. Unfortunately, most of these freshmen soon learn that academic life is not what they imagined. Classes are taught by overworked graduate students and adjuncts rather than seasoned faculty members, undergrads receive minimal attention from advisors or administrators, and potentially valuable campus resources remain outside their grasp.
Andrew Roberts’ Thinking Student’s Guide to College helps students take charge of their university experience by providing a blueprint they can follow to achieve their educational goals—whether at public or private schools, large research universities or small liberal arts colleges. An inside look penned by a professor at Northwestern University, this book offers concrete tips on choosing a college, selecting classes, deciding on a major, interacting with faculty, and applying to graduate school. Here, Roberts exposes the secrets of the ivory tower to reveal what motivates professors, where to find loopholes in university bureaucracy, and most importantly, how to get a personalized education. Based on interviews with faculty and cutting-edge educational research, The Thinking Student’s Guide to College is a necessary handbook for students striving to excel academically, creatively, and personally during their undergraduate years.
This one-volume history of Harvard is not so much a summary of Samuel Eliot Morison’s monumental work [The Tercentennial History of Harvard College and University, 1636–1936] as it is an entirely fresh handling of his vast material.
With a mind saturated in the lore and tradition at his command, Professor Morison has sat down to tell the whole story of Harvard informally and briefly. Documentation and all the learned apparatus of scholarly research are therefore omitted; but the same genial humor, the same ability to see the human implications of past events, that characterize his larger, multi-volume series on Harvard are preserved in this. The result is a marvelously entertaining volume, the history of Harvard that everyone has been waiting for, a model of vitalized historical writing.
Readers of Thriving as a Graduate Writer will:
- Learn how to establish an effective writing practice
- Discover how to position themselves as competent and engaged writers
- Learn how to structure their writing, craft effective sentences, and create movement with a text
- Develop processes for draft revisions
- Create individual writing strategies that will last throughout their careers
"To Serve a Larger Purpose" calls for the reclamation of the original democratic purposes of civic engagement and examines the requisite transformation of higher education required to achieve it. The contributors to this timely and relevant volume effectively highlight the current practice of civic engagement and point to the institutional change needed to realize its democratic ideals.
Using multiple perspectives, "To Serve a Larger Purpose" explores the democratic processes and purposes that reorient civic engagement to what the editors call "democratic engagement." The norms of democratic engagement are determined by values such as inclusiveness, collaboration, participation, task sharing, and reciprocity in public problem solving and an equality of respect for the knowledge and experience that everyone contributes to education, knowledge generation, and community building. This book shrewdly rethinks the culture of higher education.
Lambda Literary Award for Best Book in Transgender Nonfiction, 2013
If feminist studies and transgender studies are so intimately connected, why are they not more deeply integrated? Offering multidisciplinary models for this assimilation, the vibrant essays in Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies suggest timely and necessary changes for institutions of higher learning.
Responding to the more visible presence of transgender persons as well as gender theories, the contributing essayists focus on how gender is practiced in academia, health care, social services, and even national border patrols. Working from the premise that transgender is both material and cultural, the contributors address such aspects of the university as administration, sports, curriculum, pedagogy, and the appropriate location for transgender studies.
Combining feminist theory, transgender studies, and activism centered on social diversity and justice, these essays examine how institutions as lived contexts shape everyday life.
"If you have thrown up your hands in despair after trying to retain women science and engineering in the academy, read this book. It offers detailed descriptions of a wide array of tried-and-true programs that have been tested out by the NSF ADVANCE program."
---Joan C. Williams, 1066 Foundation Chair & Distinguished Professor of Law Director, Center for WorkLife Law University of California
"Solid and practical, this volume details the first years of NSF funded institutional change to remake gender dynamics inside U.S. science. What works? What doesn't? And why?"
---Londa Schiebinger, John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science and Barbara D. Finberg Director, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, and author of Has Feminism Changed Science?
"This book's time has come. Transforming Science and Engineering is important, and lots of people can learn from what has happened in the ADVANCE universities."
---Lotte Bailyn, Professor of Management, Behavioral and Policy Sciences Department, Sloan School of Management, MIT; author of Breaking the Mold: Redesigning Work for Productive and Satisfying Lives; and coauthor of Beyond Work-Family Balance: Advancing Gender Equity and Workplace Performance
"This collection profiles 16 NSF ADVANCE grant successes, sandwiched between an interview with Dr. Alice Hogan and Dr. Lee Harle's summary of cost-effective practices from ADVANCE programs, giving so many 'biggest bang for the buck' examples in so few pages that it will easily justify both the cost of the book and the reading time. These accounts do not continue the too-common vague referrals to 'unhealthy environment' or 'chilly climate,' but rather expound the situations before and after the interventions, something necessary in order to transplant the programs, or even to use the programs for idea generation. Transforming Science and Engineering is a model of excellence, and will be extremely useful for those women, men, faculty, or administrators wanting to help their universities move into the 21st century and attract to their campuses qualified women and men who want opportunities to attain their full potentials."
---Donna J. Nelson, Associate Professor of Chemistry, University of Oklahoma
In 2001, the National Science Foundation's ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program began awarding five-year grants to colleges and universities to address a common problem: how to improve the work environment for women faculty in science and engineering. Drawing on the expertise of scientists, engineers, social scientists, specialists in organizational behavior, and university administrators, this collection is the first to describe the variety of innovative efforts academic institutions around the country have undertaken.
Focusing on a wide range of topics, from how to foster women's academic success in small teaching institutions, to how to use interactive theater to promote faculty reflection about departmental culture, to how a particular department created and maintained a healthy climate for women's scientific success, the contributors discuss both the theoretical and empirical aspects of the initiatives, with emphasis on the practical issues involved in creating these approaches. The resulting evidence shows that these initiatives have the desired effects. The cases represented in this collection depict the many issues women faculty in science and engineering face, and the solutions that are presented can be widely accepted at academic institutions around the United States. The essays in Transforming Science and Engineering illustrate that creating work environments that sustain and advance women scientists and engineers benefits women, men, and underrepresented minorities.
Abigail J. Stewart is Sandra Schwartz Tangri Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan.
Janet E. Malley is a psychologist and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan.
Danielle LaVaque-Manty, former Research Associate at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, teaches composition at U-M's Sweetland Writing Center.
Cover photo: Joanne Leonard
Colleges and universities across North America are facing difficult questions about automobile use and transportation. Lack of land for new parking lots and the desire to preserve air quality are but a few of the factors leading institutions toward a new vision based upon expanded transit access, better bicycle and pedestrian facilities, and incentives that encourage less driving.
Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities presents a comprehensive examination of techniques available to manage transportation in campus communities. Authors Will Toor and Spenser W. Havlick give readers the understanding they need to develop alternatives to single-occupancy vehicles, and sets forth a series of case studies that show how transportation demand management programs have worked in a variety of campus communities, ranging from small towns to large cities. The case studies in Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities highlight what works and what doesn't, as well as describing the programmatic and financial aspects involved.
No other book has surveyed the topic and produced viable options for reducing the parking, pollution, land use, and traffic problems that are created by an over-reliance on automobiles by students, faculty, and staff. Transportation and Sustainable Campus Communities is a unique source of information and ideas for anyone concerned with transportation planning and related issues.
Once upon a time, virtually no one in the academy thought to sue over campus disputes, and, if they dared, judges bounced the case on grounds that it was no business of the courts. Tenure decisions, grading curves, course content, and committee assignments were the stuff of faculty meetings, not lawsuits.
Not so today. As Amy Gajda shows in this witty yet troubling book, litigation is now common on campus, and perhaps even more commonly feared. Professors sue each other for defamation based on assertions in research articles or tenure review letters; students sue professors for breach of contract when an F prevents them from graduating; professors threaten to sue students for unfairly criticizing their teaching.
Gajda’s lively account introduces the new duo driving the changes: the litigious academic who sees academic prerogative as a matter of legal entitlement and the skeptical judge who is increasingly willing to set aside decades of academic deference to pronounce campus rights and responsibilities.
This turn to the courts is changing campus life, eroding traditional notions of academic autonomy and confidentiality, and encouraging courts to micromanage course content, admissions standards, exam policies, graduation requirements, and peer review.
This book explores the origins and causes of the litigation trend, its implications for academic freedom, and what lawyers, judges, and academics themselves can do to limit the potential damage.
If children were little scientists who learn best through firsthand observations and mini-experiments, as conventional wisdom holds, how would a child discover that the earth is round—never mind conceive of heaven as a place someone might go after death? Overturning both cognitive and commonplace theories about how children learn, Trusting What You’re Told begins by reminding us of a basic truth: Most of what we know we learned from others.
Children recognize early on that other people are an excellent source of information. And so they ask questions. But youngsters are also remarkably discriminating as they weigh the responses they elicit. And how much they trust what they are told has a lot to do with their assessment of its source. Trusting What You’re Told opens a window into the moral reasoning of elementary school vegetarians, the preschooler’s ability to distinguish historical narrative from fiction, and the six-year-old’s nuanced stance toward magic: skeptical, while still open to miracles. Paul Harris shares striking cross-cultural findings, too, such as that children in religious communities in rural Central America resemble Bostonian children in being more confident about the existence of germs and oxygen than they are about souls and God.
We are biologically designed to learn from one another, Harris demonstrates, and this greediness for explanation marks a key difference between human beings and our primate cousins. Even Kanzi, a genius among bonobos, never uses his keyboard to ask for information: he only asks for treats.
America’s colleges and universities are the best in the world. They are also the most expensive. Tuition has risen faster than the rate of inflation for the past thirty years. There is no indication that this trend will abate.
Ronald G. Ehrenberg explores the causes of this tuition inflation, drawing on his many years as a teacher and researcher of the economics of higher education and as a senior administrator at Cornell University. Using incidents and examples from his own experience, he discusses a wide range of topics including endowment policies, admissions and financial aid policies, the funding of research, tenure and the end of mandatory retirement, information technology, libraries and distance learning, student housing, and intercollegiate athletics.
He shows that colleges and universities, having multiple, relatively independent constituencies, suffer from ineffective central control of their costs. And in a fascinating analysis of their response to the ratings published by magazines such as U.S. News & World Report, he shows how they engage in a dysfunctional competition for students.
In the short run, colleges and universities have little need to worry about rising tuitions, since the number of qualified students applying for entrance is rising even faster. But in the long run, it is not at all clear that the increases can be sustained. Ehrenberg concludes by proposing a set of policies to slow the institutions’ rising tuitions without damaging their quality.
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