In recent decades, American universities have begun to tout the “diversity” of their faculty and student bodies. But what kinds of diversity are being championed in their admissions and hiring practices, and what kinds are being neglected? Is diversity enough to solve the structural inequalities that plague our universities? And how might we articulate the value of diversity in the first place?  Transforming the Academy begins to answer these questions by bringing together a mix of faculty—male and female, cisgender and queer, immigrant and native-born, tenured and contingent, white, black, multiracial, and other—from public and private universities across the United States. Whether describing contentious power dynamics within their classrooms or recounting protests that occurred on their campuses, the book’s contributors offer bracingly honest inside accounts of both the conflicts and the learning experiences that can emerge from being a representative of diversity.  The collection’s authors are united by their commitment to an ideal of the American university as an inclusive and transformative space, one where students from all backgrounds can simultaneously feel intellectually challenged and personally supported. Yet Transforming the Academy also offers a wide range of perspectives on how to best achieve these goals, a diversity of opinion that is sure to inspire lively debate.  

America's colleges and universities are social institutions -- embedded in the wider society and subject in various ways to its constraining forces. In American Higher Education in the Twenty-first Century, researchers who share this understanding explore the new realities of higher education and consider its greatest challenges for the next century.Subject to increasing scrutiny by the media and the public, colleges and universities must wrestle with a wide range of issues generated by their various external constituencies. Academic leaders rearrange their curricula to meet demands for multiculturalism. They seek an appropriate response as race-based admissions procedures come under attack. They assess student learning and monitor faculty productivity--while simultaneously responding to calls for the end of tenure and for explanations of why the cost of attending college has risen so dramatically. Using the changing social, political, and economic contexts of colleges and universities as a lens for examining these complex issues, the contributors seek to understand the forces -- whether unique to our era or rooted in the past -- that currently influence higher education and will continue to do so in the next century. Whether discussing finance or technology or academic freedom or the canon, the authors find that relations between academic institutions and their surrounding societies have generally been ambivalent: both involved and withdrawn, servicing and criticizing, needing and being needed. Understanding the complex interplay between institutions and external forces, they conclude, is the key to guiding the endeavors of faculty, students, and administrative leaders alike.

Product Description: More students today are financing college through debt, but the burdens of debt are not equally shared. The least privileged students are those most encumbered and the least able to repay. All of this has implications for those who work in academia, especially those who are themselves from less advantaged backgrounds...read more

Many educational professionals agree that the time has come to expand their circle of inclusion and broaden their definition of diversity by increasing LGBTQ studies, but the question of how to do so is still debated. Although some colleges and universities have been incorporating LGBTQ studies for decades, courses and programs continue to be pockets of innovation rather than models of inclusion for all of higher education. Colleges and universities need to encourage faculty members to teach and research a wide range of LGBTQ topics, as well as support student life professionals in building inclusive campus communities. This book includes testimonies that alert educators to possible pitfalls and successes of their policies through an analysis of changing student attitudes. Based on these case studies, the contributors offer practical suggestions for the classroom and the provost's office, demonstrating not only the gains that have been made by LGBTQ students and the institutions that serve them, but also the tensions that remain.

Product Description: Higher education in the United States and elsewhere is being forced to respond to several disparate social and economic pressures: social trust and connectedness is down, empathy across citizens is deteriorating, political awareness and participation are low, and job prospects and financial security are sobering for many citizens, even the college educated...read more

Product Description: Student Involvement and Academic Outcomes links student involvement to tangible academic outcomes (i.e., GPAs, retention rates, graduation rates). This is particularly important for diverse student populations (e.g., underrepresented minority, first-generation college, and low-income students) who now make up a significant portion (and will soon become the majority) of U...read more

Six years after her mother's death, tomboyish Lauren Cooper continues to run her family's sprawling Arizona ranch with no thought of love and romance, until Alec MacKenzie acquires the neighboring ranch. Original.

Product Description: Racial Battle Fatigue is described as the physical and psychological toll taken due to constant and unceasing discrimination, microagressions, and stereotype threat. The literature notes that individuals who work in environments with chronic exposure to discrimination and microaggressions are more likely to suffer from forms of generalized anxiety manifested by both physical and emotional syptoms...read more

Product Description: Few books have ever made their presence felt on college campuses—and newspaper opinion pages—as quickly and thoroughly as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s 2011 landmark study of undergraduates’ learning, socialization, and study habits, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses...read more

Product Description: Set against the backdrop of democratization, increased opportunity, and access, income-based gaps in college entry, persistence, and graduation continue to grow, underlining a deep contradiction within American higher education. In other words, despite the well-intended, now mature process of democratization, the postsecondary system is still charged with high levels of inequality...read more

Product Description: This book examines the undergraduate teaching experiences and collegial relationships of university faculty who hold appointments in social science, humanities, or natural science and engineering, and who have received undergraduate teaching or service-to-diversity nominations and awards...read more

Product Description: Doing Civility: Breaking the Cycle of Incivility on the Campus, explores ways in which members of the college community can take proactive steps to break the cycle of incivility. Civility requires extending mutual respect to others, especially people with different values, beliefs, and ideas...read more

Product Description: The terms “civic engagement” and “community engagement” have various definitions, but they are united by the sense that individuals who are civically engaged not only are concerned about the quality of life in their communities but also take action to improve conditions for the common good...read more

Product Description: The changing demographics of students and educators in schools today suggest that much of what we do as educational leaders revolves around the complex issues related to our various cultural understandings. In this book the authors discuss the relationship between culture and conflict and provide a continuum to better understand the basis for much cultural conflict...read more

To date, scholars in higher education have examined the ways in which students' experiences in the classroom and the human capital they attain impact social class inequalities. In this book, Jenny Stuber argues that the experiential core of college life-the social and extra-curricular worlds of higher education-operates as a setting in which social class inequalities manifest and get reproduced. As college students form friendships and get involved in activities like Greek life, study abroad, and student government, they acquire the social and cultural resources that give them access to valuable social and occupational opportunities beyond the college gates. Yet students' social class backgrounds also impact how they experience the experiential core of college life, structuring their abilities to navigate their campus's social and extra-curricular worlds. Stuber shows that upper-middle-class students typically arrive on campus with sophisticated maps and navigational devices to guide their journeys-while working-class students are typically less well equipped for the journey. She demonstrates, as well, that students' social interactions, friendships, and extra-curricular involvements also shape-and are shaped by-their social class worldviews-the ideas they have about their own and others' class identities and their beliefs about where they and others fit within the class system. By focusing on student' social class worldviews, this book provides insight into how identities and consciousness are shaped within educational settings. Ultimately, this examination of what happens inside the college gates shows how which higher education serves as an avenue for social reproduction, while also providing opportunities for the contestation of class inequalities.

Product Description: ''In the face of much handwringing over higher education in America today, this eclectic set of essays offers an engaging call to sustain core values like civic education, the liberal arts, intellectual community and not pandering to fake science, even as a hugely different population with very different needs and desires fills college classrooms...read more