The Attack on Higher Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Musto
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Budget Cuts ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
Comprehensive Account ◽  
Arts And Humanities

American higher education is under attack today as never before. A growing right-wing narrative portrays academia as corrupt, irrelevant, costly, and dangerous to both students and the nation. Budget cuts, attacks on liberal arts and humanities disciplines, faculty layoffs and retrenchments, technology displacements, corporatization, and campus closings have accelerated over the past decade. In this timely volume, Ronald Musto draws on historical precedent - Henry VIII's dissolution of British monasteries in the 1530s - for his study of the current threats to American higher education. He shows how a triad of forces - authority, separateness, and innovation - enabled monasteries to succeed, and then suddenly and unexpectedly to fail. Musto applies this analogy to contemporary academia. Despite higher education's vital centrality to American culture and economy, a powerful, anti-liberal narrative is severely damaging its reputation among parents, voters, and politicians. Musto offers a comprehensive account of this narrative from the mid-twentieth century to the present, as well as a new set of arguments to counter criticisms and rebuild the image of higher education.

scholarly journals Centering the Margins: Knowledge Production in the Introductory Archaeology Course

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kylie Quave ◽  
Shannon Fie ◽  
AmySue Qing Qing Greiff ◽  
Drew Alis Agnew
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Students Of Color ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Liberal Arts College ◽  
Course Structure ◽  
Student Reflection ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Us ◽  
Full Picture

Teaching introductory archaeology courses in US higher education typically falls short in two important ways: the courses do not represent the full picture of who contributes to reconstructing the past and do not portray the contemporary and future relevance of the archaeological past. In this paper, we use anti-colonial and decolonial theories to explain the urgency of revising the introductory archaeology curriculum for promoting equity in the discipline and beyond. We detail the pedagogical theories we employed in revising an introductory archaeology course at a small liberal arts college in the US and the specific changes we made to course structure, content, and teaching strategies. To examine the impacts on enrolled students and on who chose to enroll in the revised archaeology curriculum, we analyze student reflection essays and enrollment demographics. We find that students developed more complex understandings of the benefits and harms of archaeological knowledge production and could articulate how to address archaeology’s inequities. We also found that enrollment in archaeology courses at the college shifted to include greater proportions of students of color. These results support the notion that introductory archaeology courses should be substantially and continually revised.

Educating researchers in the metadiscipline of foresight

foresight ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (5/6) ◽  
pp. 703-715
Author(s):  
James P. Kahan
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Educational Innovations ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scientific Disciplines ◽  
Logical Type ◽  
The Usa

Purpose The science of Foresight differs from the commonplace notion of what a science is because it is a metadiscipline – a logical type of science higher than the logical type of disciplinary sciences. It is practical, uses transdisciplinary processes that combine scientific disciplines and often examines counterfactuals in a scientific manner. This study aims to demonstrate that Foresight is a science, by presenting a number of best practices and potential innovations in higher education that could facilitate obtaining skills for Foresight science. Design/methodology/approach The methods of scientific education that have served us well in the past are inadequate for metadisciplinary sciences such as Foresight. The paper discusses what metadisciplinarity is, using a variety of examples, and distinguishes it from disciplines and ways of crossing disciplinary boundaries. Understanding the essential characteristics of Foresight as a metadisciplinary science leads to identifying current best practices and possible educational innovations in undergraduate education that will facilitate obtaining Foresight skills. Throughout the paper, examples are drawn from the education and professional experience of the author in the USA and Europe. Findings This paper demonstrates that Foresight is a science and presents a number of best practices and potential innovations in higher education that could facilitate obtaining skills for Foresight science. It identifies barriers to those innovations and approaches to overcome them. Originality/value This viewpoint paper clarifies the meaning of the terms interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and metadisciplinarity to identify the essential characteristics of Foresight as a science. Then, it identifies and advocates needed changes in North American higher education to provide earlier and more efficient opportunities for Foresight researchers and users to obtain the skills they need.

scholarly journals Competitiveness and Research-Oriented Teaching in Romanian Universities: The Neo-Liberal Transformation of the Higher Education System

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sorin Gog
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Education System ◽  
Higher Education Institutions ◽  
Budget Cuts ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
Academic Governance ◽  
Role Quality ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Management ◽  
Structural Mechanisms

Abstract This paper focuses on the recent neo-liberal transformation in the Romanian education system and analyzes the genealogy of a new form of academic governance that has been implemented in higher education institutions in the past decade. It examines the role quality indicators and supplementary funding have played in the gradual embedding and naturalization of neo-liberal disciplinary reforms in universities and the specific quality enhancement policies that aimed at increasing the productivity of academic workers by stimulating the competition among them. The main argument of the paper is that in order to understand the extensive academic management based on scientometrics and recurrent evaluation of academics we need to look at the structural mechanisms that have shaped higher education institutions in accordance with market rules and at the generalization of competitiveness throughout the system in the context of budget cuts and decreasing resources allocated to education.

The Diverse US Higher Education System

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert B. Archibald
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Education System ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Higher Education Institutions ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Higher Education System ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
System P

The American higher education system consists of over 4,700 institutions educating over twenty-one million students. The most striking feature of this system is its diversity. There is no “typical college.” Much of the story about the future of America’s four-year higher education institutions is found in their differences, not their similarities. Schools are public and private, large and small, elite and open enrollment, tuition dependent and well endowed, liberal arts oriented and vocational. The challenges facing America’s colleges and universities will affect the diverse parts of this system in very different ways. Generalizing about this system can be very dangerous.

Structure and Governance in American Higher Education: Historical and Comparative Analysis in State Policy

1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Davis Graham
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Baby Boom ◽  
National Level ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
State Level ◽  
Manhattan Project ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
American Higher Education

Historians of public policy, who typically share a conviction that historical analysis can clarify the options available to policymakers, have witnessed this decade's quickening debate over the role and control of American higher education with, in one of Yogi Berra's immortal phrases, a sense of “déjà vu all over again.” Political leaders have continued, in a near vacuum of historical knowledge, to manipulate present variables and project them into the future with little awareness, beyond current political memory, of their past consequences, or of a legacy of political and cultural tradition that would constrain their manipulation. At the national level of debate, which is not where educational policy in the United States historically has been made, the level of historical awareness generally has been greater than at the state level. In the flurry of national commissions and foundation reports that probed the deficiencies of American higher education in 1984–85, the historical evolution of the college curriculum was addressed in reasonably informed historical terms.1 Even though the urgency of debate in the 1980s was fueled by the common pain of recession and post-baby-boom retrenchment, and also by fears of increasing vulnerability to oil boycotts and Japanese economic competition, the national elites who wrote the reports were mindful of the roots of Big Science in the Manhattan Project. Their ties to the academic establishment were intimate, and their historical memories embraced the wisdom of the liberal arts as well as the efficacy of land-grant agriculture and Silicon Valley.

Teaching Religious Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene V. Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Religious Literacy ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
Contemplative Pedagogy ◽  
Multiple Contexts ◽  
Teaching About Religion ◽  
The Ideal

Teaching about religion in American higher education has been shaped by multiple contexts, from the personal and institutional through the national and international. One persistent question concerns the purposes of teaching about religion, from Christian character formation to broad religious literacy as a prerequisite for informed citizenship. As the number of departments grew throughout the twentieth century, fundamental disagreements about the purposes of collegiate study of religion, the ideal curriculum, and the role of the teacher persisted. Contemporary movements, like advocating for religious literacy, “contemplative pedagogy,” and the push for infusing “spirituality” into higher education actually reprise earlier arguments. The field remains divided on several fundamental issues.

The College Presidency

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
College Presidency ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Significant Time ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter explores the defining events and leaders in American higher education during the past 75 years. Special attention is directed at the defining events and leaders of the 1960s and 1970s that have shaped so much of the current landscape of higher education. The chapter begins by exploring the idea of a 'career president', a recent trend during the past four or five decades, and includes both influential leaders who have spent significant time at one institution, to those who move to different institutions throughout their career entirely in the role of president. The chapter concludes by offering critical questions about the future of the academy.

Religion in Mainline and Independent Private Higher Education

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Jacobsen ◽  
Rhonda Hustedt Jacobsen
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Private Higher Education ◽  
Educational Programming ◽  
Independent Colleges ◽  
Religious Literacy ◽  
Quest For Meaning ◽  
Independent Colleges And Universities

The story of mainline and independent colleges parallels the narrative of American higher education as a whole. Until the twentieth century, these institutions dominated higher education, and religion in general (Protestantism in particular) played a huge role in their early history. During the twentieth century many scholars began to assume that secularization was inevitable, and religion was deemed irrelevant to higher education. Recent cultural shifts have reversed this trend. Globalization reveals the need for religious literacy and interfaith competencies, and the quest for meaning, personal development, and civic engagement that has always been part of the liberal arts is being reframed in ways that are appropriate for traditionally religious, spiritual, and nonreligious students. Religion is being reintegrated into the educational programming of mainline and independent colleges and universities—which still attract more than a quarter of all American college students—in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

Faculty Mentoring Programs: Reenvisioning Rather Than Reinventing the Wheel

2008 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 552-588 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darlene F. Zellers ◽  
Valerie M. Howard ◽  
Maureen A. Barcic
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mentoring Programs ◽  
Faculty Mentoring ◽  
American Higher Education ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Cultures ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Development Practice

In this review, the authors trace the evolution of mentoring programs in the United States in business and academe, provide insight on the challenges associated with the study of mentoring, and identify the limited research-based studies of faculty mentoring programs that currently inform our understanding of this professional development practice in American higher education. The findings indicate that the sophistication of research has not advanced over the past decade. However, evidence does suggest that academe should be cautious in overgeneralizing the findings of studies conducted in corporate cultures. Although mentoring is recognized to be contextual, only recently have investigators considered the impact of organizational culture on the effectiveness of corporate mentoring programs. More rigorous investigation of this practice in higher education is warranted. As more studies point to the need to foster an employment culture that supports mentoring, understanding faculty mentoring programs within the context of their academic cultures is critical.

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