Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 9780309256391
Category: Education
Page: 250
View: 797
Research Universities and the Future of America presents critically important strategies for ensuring that our nation's research universities contribute strongly to America's prosperity, security, and national goals. Widely considered the best in the world, our nation's research universities today confront significant financial pressures, important advances in technology, a changing demographic landscape, and increased international competition. This report provides a course of action for ensuring our universities continue to produce the knowledge, ideas, and talent the United States needs to be a global leader in the 21st century. Research Universities and the Future of America focuses on strengthening and expanding the partnership among universities and government, business, and philanthropy that has been central to American prosperity and security. The report focuses on the top 10 actions that Congress, the federal government, state governments, research universities, and others could take to strengthen the research and education missions of our research universities, their relationships with other parts of the national research enterprise, and their ability to transfer new knowledge and ideas to those who productively use them in our society and economy. This report examines trends in university finance, prospects for improving university operations, opportunities for deploying technology, and improvement in the regulation of higher education institutions. It also explores ways to improve pathways to graduate education, take advantage of opportunities to increase student diversity, and realign doctoral education for the careers new doctorates will follow. Research Universities and the Future of America is an important resource for policy makers on the federal and state levels, university administrators, philanthropic organizations, faculty, technology transfer specialists, libraries, and researchers.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789087903459
Category: Education
Page: 250
View: 108
Public research universities are an integral part of American society. They play the leading role in educating future leaders in agriculture, engineering, the arts and sciences, humanities, business, education, and other professions. Public research universities generate the new products, processes, inventions, discoveries, insights, and interpretations that advance the human condition.
Author: W. Smith
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9780230114708
Category: Education
Page: 229
View: 712
Public Universities and the Public Sphere argues that two crises facing America - a crisis of public discourse and a crisis of public higher education - are closely connected. Part of the solution, Smith argues in this timely work, to both crises lies in understanding and building on the connection.
Author: Scott M. Gelber
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 9780299284633
Category: Education
Page: 264
View: 828
The University and the People chronicles the influence of Populism—a powerful agrarian movement—on public higher education in the late nineteenth century. Revisiting this pivotal era in the history of the American state university, Scott Gelber demonstrates that Populists expressed a surprising degree of enthusiasm for institutions of higher learning. More fundamentally, he argues that the mission of the state university, as we understand it today, evolved from a fractious but productive relationship between public demands and academic authority. Populists attacked a variety of elites—professionals, executives, scholars—and seemed to confirm academia’s fear of anti-intellectual public oversight. The movement’s vision of the state university highlighted deep tensions in American attitudes toward meritocracy and expertise. Yet Populists also promoted state-supported higher education, with the aims of educating the sons (and sometimes daughters) of ordinary citizens, blurring status distinctions, and promoting civic engagement. Accessibility, utilitarianism, and public service were the bywords of Populist journalists, legislators, trustees, and sympathetic professors. These “academic populists” encouraged state universities to reckon with egalitarian perspectives on admissions, financial aid, curricula, and research. And despite their critiques of college “ivory towers,” Populists supported the humanities and social sciences, tolerated a degree of ideological dissent, and lobbied for record-breaking appropriations for state institutions.
Author: Christopher C. Morphew
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801891649
Category: Education
Page: 221
View: 358
With public colleges and universities facing substantial budget cuts and increased calls for accountability, more institutions now rely on private revenue streams for support. As market-driven policies and behaviors become more commonplace, some cautious critics sound the alarm, while others watching the bottom line cheer. But which perspective gets it right? Does the privatization of public higher education threaten its very mission or support it? In this collection of essays, economists, policy makers, political scientists, sociologists, and organizational researchers discuss the impact of privatization from their respective disciplinary perspectives and assess its implications for the future of higher education. Privatization may bring additional funds and services that are free from government regulations and oversight, but does it also allow private interests to have undue influence over public higher education? Should public universities have to compete in the economic marketplace as vigorously as they do in the marketplace of ideas? What are the implications when institutions of higher learning function like businesses? With privatization now a reality for most public colleges and universities, an objective examination of the issue from these diverse academic perspectives will be welcomed by those struggling with its challenges.
Author: Penny A. Pasque
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9781317213819
Category: Education
Page: 178
View: 949
Qualitative Inquiry in Higher Education Organization and Policy Research provides readers with the theoretical foundations and innovative perspectives for undertaking qualitative research to influence policy and practice discussions. Well-known chapter authors discuss innovative strategies for investigating complex problems, helping readers understand how research can consider the culture of the institution, administrative hierarchy, students, faculty, and external constituencies. From both an organizational and policy perspective, chapter pairings explore a range of methodologies, including ethnography, case study, critical qualitative inquiry, and the notion of "grit." This volume explores how qualitative inquiry can advance understanding of organizational inequities in higher education, and it offers graduate students and educational researchers the tools to improve the organizational function of institutions while contributing to meaningful change.
Author: Walter Truett Anderson
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412806151
Category: Education
Page: 154
View: 297
The accelerating technological transformation in learn- ing has necessitated an ability to search and differentiate among the one billion web pages, libraries, databases, books, newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, and opinion columns available online. This volume focuses on the normative challenges that the current technological transformation presents to all professionals engaged in higher education. Part I concentrates on the current social and technological trends. David Snyder presents an outline of technologies that have made open knowledge systems possible. Majid Tehranian argues that the new technological environment has made learning to seek out information more possible than ever before. Robert Fuller calls for an egalitarian rather than hierarchical approach to communication systems. Harlan Cleveland proposes integrative learning, broad thinking, and globally aware citizenship through "education for wisdom." Part II focuses on problems of governance and finance in the new technological environment. John Hinchcliff takes up the problem of values and argues for the maintenance of traditional altruistic rather than Promethean goals. Karou Yamaguchi comes to the problem of the futures with the tools of system dynamics. William Bergquist calls for a reorganization of higher education to meet the needs for creation, transfer, and inculcation of knowledge and skills. Hamid Shirvani calls for the core values of transparency, integrity, open communication, and dignitarian approach as the guideposts in educational leadership. Walter Truett Anderson concludes by attempting to bring the complex technological, social, economic, and political variables into a holistic approach for the management of higher education. In 2005, at the Universities of the Future Conference, participants were asked to envision the future of higher education. Part III, presents their visions.
Author: Christopher Newfield
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674060364
Category: Education
Page: 406
View: 676
An essential American dream—equal access to higher education—was becoming a reality with the GI Bill and civil rights movements after World War II. But this vital American promise has been broken. Christopher Newfield argues that the financial and political crises of public universities are not the result of economic downturns or of ultimately valuable restructuring, but of a conservative campaign to end public education’s democratizing influence on American society. Unmaking the Public University is the story of how conservatives have maligned and restructured public universities, deceiving the public to serve their own ends. It is a deep and revealing analysis that is long overdue. Newfield carefully describes how this campaign operated, using extensive research into public university archives. He launches the story with the expansive vision of an equitable and creative America that emerged from the post-war boom in college access, and traces the gradual emergence of the anti-egalitarian “corporate university,” practices that ranged from racial policies to research budgeting. Newfield shows that the culture wars have actually been an economic war that a conservative coalition in business, government, and academia have waged on that economically necessary but often independent group, the college-educated middle class. Newfield’s research exposes the crucial fact that the culture wars have functioned as a kind of neutron bomb, one that pulverizes the social and culture claims of college grads while leaving their technical expertise untouched. Unmaking the Public University incisively sets the record straight, describing a forty-year economic war waged on the college-educated public, and awakening us to a vision of social development shared by scientists and humanists alike.
Author: Mark Silk
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231549431
Category: Religion
Page: 368
View: 889
Catholics constitute the largest religious community in the United States. Yet most American Catholics have never known a time when their church was not embroiled in controversies over liturgy, religious authority, cultural change, and gender and sexuality. Today, these arguments are taking place against the backdrop of Pope Francis’s progressive agenda and the resurgence of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. What is the future of Catholicism in America? This volume considers the prospects at a pivotal moment. Contributors—scholars from sociology, theology, religious studies, and history—look at the church’s evolving institutional structure, its increasing ethnic diversity, and its changing public presence. They explore the tensions among members of the hierarchy, between clergy and laity, and along lines of ethnicity, immigration status, class, generation, political affiliation, and degree of religious commitment. They conclude that American Catholicism’s future will be pluriform—reflecting the variety of cultural, political, ideological, and spiritual points of view that typify the multicultural, democratic society of which Catholics constitute so large a part.
Author: Judith Summerfield
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 0820481521
Category: Education, Higher
Page: 314
View: 703
To reclaim the public university is to focus our energies on teaching all our students well, educating them for a new, increasingly complicated age. To deliver on this promise, we must interrogate the general education we provide for our students, for that is the vast, unrecognized ground we stand on. It is what students and faculty do most in common. If we can get educating our students right, generally and liberally, then we will have laid a claim to what the public university needs to be.