scholarly journals Elite Higher Education Admissions in the Arts and Sciences: Is Cultural Capital the Key?

Sociology ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 648-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Zimdars ◽  
Alice Sullivan ◽  
Anthony Heath
1962 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Ben-David ◽  
Awraham Zloczower

Universities engage in teaching and research. They prepare students to become men of action in practical politics, the civil service, the practice of law, medicine, surgery etc. Others studying at universities want to become scholars and scientists whose style of work is far removed from the on-the-spot decisionmaking which is so important among the former category. The professions and disciplines taught and developed at universities require a great variety of manpower and organization of entirely different kinds. Universities nevertheless insist on comprising all of them, in the name of an idea stemming from a time when one person was really able to master all the arts and sciences. They, furthermore, attempt to perform all these complex tasks within the framework of corporate self-government reminiscent of medieval guilds. Indeed there have been serious doubts about the efficiency of the university since the 18th century. Reformers of the “Enlightenment” advocated the abolition of the universities as useless remnants of past tradition and establish in their stead specialized schools for the training of professional people and academies for the advancement of science and learning. This program was actually put into effect by the Revolution and the subsequent reorganization of higher education by Napoleon in France. The present day organization of higher education in the Soviet Union still reflects the belief in the efficiency of specialized professional schools as well as specialized academic research institutions.


Author(s):  
David Willetts

A beautiful large stained-glass window dominates the end of the Great Hall of Birmingham University. My great-grandfather was one of the glaziers who made it—my family were Birmingham artisans, craftsmen, and engineers. His son, my grandfather, remembered being taken to the opening of Birmingham University in 1902—Joe Chamberlain, the founder of the university, believed that the workers who had built it should be invited, not just the academics. From a distance it looks like the stained-glass window in an ancient cathedral with figures of saints, but close up you see the radicalism of Joe Chamberlain’s vision. It is dedicated to the arts and sciences. Instead of saints and bishops the figures represent disciplines like geometry or music, but alongside them, equally prominent, are contemporary trades: there is an electroplater, a rather Michelangelesque miner, and a demure bookkeeper too. It is a celebration of the range of trades and professions of the early twentieth century, ‘as practised in the university and in the City’, said the local paper. England’s first university in one of its great bustling industrial cities was claiming a new role for the university based on its civic commitment. This great window embodies a very different idea of the university from the Oxbridge tradition. It is a vigorous statement in an argument that was raging within Government at the very time that Chamberlain was planning his new university. The question was whether public funds should go to help pay for higher education courses outside Oxbridge on a systematic basis and if so which courses at which institutions. (At this point what would become our Redbrick universities were typically university colleges teaching for the external degree of the University of London and funded locally, though with occasional public grants.) The question came to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1895, who replied: ‘As an old Oxford man myself I must confess to a feeling, which you may call a prejudice, that University education, in the full sense of the term, can hardly be obtained except at our old Universities.’ The Treasury consulted Oxford and Cambridge on what they should fund.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 395-401
Author(s):  
Nathan Rousseau

One of the main goals of sociology is to identify and evaluate institutional changes in society. The concept of the sociological imagination has gained wide use as a means of observing how personal issues are affected by social arrangements. This article critically examines how many contemporary sociologists, particularly in the area of teaching and learning, are using their sociological imaginations to observe and evaluate the changes taking place in higher education due to a paradigm shift that emphasizes occupational-professional programs at the expense of the arts and sciences. It is argued that this shift toward neoliberal principles is so pervasive that social scientists tend to think and speak in neoliberal terms even when expressing the importance of maintaining a sociological imagination. While some educators celebrate this trend in higher education, C. Wright Mills, the sociologist who coined the term, “sociological imagination,” believed (like John Dewey) that a well-rounded education is vital to preserving a democracy.


Author(s):  
Tom McLeish

‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which takes a journey through the creative process in the arts as well as sciences. Visiting great creative people of the past, it also draws on personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians today to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. Tom McLeish finds that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not after all, the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. Instead, the three modes of visual, textual, and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, but using different tools. As well as panoramic assessments of creativity, calling on ideas from the ancient world, medieval thought, and twentieth-century philosophy and theology, The Poetry and Music of Science illustrates its emerging story by specific close-up explorations of musical (Schumann), literary (James, Woolf, Goethe) mathematical (Wiles), and scientific (Humboldt, Einstein) creation. The book concludes by asking how creativity contributes to what it means to be human.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 567-567
Author(s):  
Angel Duncan

Abstract This session identifies common misconceptions about identity for persons living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). Going beyond diagnostic brain imaging and neurocognitive testing, case studies and research in creativity from around the United States highlights consciousness of persons living with ADRD. Reviewing and discussing artworks is aimed to set dialogue in the question of where memory deposits emerge when engaged in creativity. Through art therapy techniques, this type of self-expression may provide new avenues in treatment for dementia care. Exploring the arts from those with Mild Cognitive Impairment to late stage Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, such as frontotemporal dementia, consciousness seems to remain intact despite neural death. This session aims to discourage poor spending allocations and establishing meaningful care. From clinical research trials to creativity of self-expression, the importance of why the arts and sciences matter are demonstrated as effective modalities that enhance quality of life.


1973 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-304
Author(s):  
Daymon W. Thatch ◽  
William L. Park

Rutgers University was chartered as Queen's College on November 10, 1766. It was the eighth institution of higher education founded in Colonial America prior to the Revolutionary War. From its modest beginning in the New Brunswick area the University has grown to eight separately organized undergraduate colleges in three areas of the State, with a wide range of offerings in liberal and applied arts and sciences.


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