A Place-Based University?: The Land-Grant Mission in the 21st Century

2001 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betsy Taylor

The Project for the Civic and Environmental Commons is a cluster of initiatives, started by the Appalachian Center, University of Kentucky, in 1999, to support academic/ citizen partnerships in action research for equity and sustainability in the Appalachian region. It tries to serve as a bridge between movements within and outside academe. First, it attempts to link the university with the global movement for community-based development. A ferment of creativity in the nongovernmental sector in the last two decades has generated a rich variety of research methods (especially in participatory and place-based techniques for community assessment) and new organizational models for decentralized and democratic planning. The Project attempts to channel new techniques and models from this grassroots experimentation into university training and research, and to provide whatever support academics can give to citizen-led, community-based development. Second, the Project for the Civic and Environmental Commons tries to join this community-based work with reform movements within higher education that argue that institutional change is necessary for higher education to adequately respond to emerging problems of the 21st century. Those who call for a "New Academy" and for "public scholars" argue that much of academic research needs to be more targeted to meeting public needs and problems, and that the professionalization process needs to do a better job of producing scholars who are intellectually and emotionally able to engage in community-based work.

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-416
Author(s):  
Tao Xiong ◽  
Qiuna Li

Abstract The debate on the marketization of discourse in higher education has sparked and sustained interest among researchers in discourse and education studies across a diversity of contexts. While most research in this line has focused on marketized discourses such as advertisements, little attention has been paid to promotional discourse in public institutions such as the About us texts on Chinese university websites. The goal of the present study is twofold: first, to describe the generic features of the university About us texts in China; and second, to analyze how promotional discourse is interdiscursively incorporated in the discourse by referring to the broader socio-political context. Findings have indicated five main moves: giving an overview, stressing historical status, displaying strengths, pledging political and ideological allegiance, and communicating goals and visions. Move 3, displaying strengths, has the greatest amount of information and can be further divided into six sub-moves which presents information on campus facilities, faculty team, talent cultivation, disciplinary fields construction, academic research, and international exchange. The main linguistic and rhetorical strategies used in these moves are analyzed and discussed.


Author(s):  
Meagan Call-Cummings ◽  
Melissa Hauber-Özer ◽  
Jennifer Rainey

Participatory action research (PAR) is a community-based form of inquiry conducted with individuals affected by an issue or problem being studied rather than about them. Rather than a method of inquiry, PAR is an epistemological stance towards knowledge and knowledge creation that is rooted in critical, emancipatory pedagogy. Because it is an orientation, rather than a discrete method, PAR is difficult to teach. Here the authors explore the experiences of both undergraduate pre-service teachers and doctoral students as they seek to reconcile PAR principles and practice with their personal and professional backgrounds. The purpose is not to present the best approach for teaching PAR in the university classroom; rather, it is a reflective exploration of the experiences of the authors' participants, which reveals rich insights into what it feels like to become researchers within the ‘culture' of formal higher education in the United States.


F1000Research ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 133
Author(s):  
Nathan L. Vanderford ◽  
Elizabeth Marcinkowski

The commercialization of university-based research occurs to varying degrees between academic institutions. Previous studies have found that multiple barriers can impede the effectiveness and efficiency by which academic research is commercialized. This case study was designed to better understand the impediments to research commercialization at the University of Kentucky via a survey and interview with three successful academic entrepreneurs. The study also garnered insight from the individuals as to how the commercialization process could be improved. Issues with commercialization infrastructure; a lack of emphasis, at the university level, on the importance of research commercialization; a void in an entrepreneurial culture on campus; inhibitory commercialization policies; and a lack of business and commercialization knowledge among faculty were highlighted as the most significant barriers. The research subjects also suggested that commercialization activity may generally increase if a number of factors were mitigated. Such insight can be communicated to the administrative leadership of the commercialization process at the University of Kentucky. Long term, improving university-based research commercialization will allow academic researchers to be more active and successful entrepreneurs such that intellectual property will progress more freely to the marketplace for the benefit of inventors, universities and society.


Author(s):  
Meghan Perdue

In the midst of the current technological revolution, there is a thriving conversation about how society should adapt to the future of work taking place in the national media, universities, policy organizations, think tanks, consulting firms and companies. One such model for work and education under consideration is that of the role of higher education in workforce development. How well does a bachelor’s degree prepare an individual for a career in this shifting landscape of work? What is the responsibility of the university to the student – to prepare them for a career? Or to help them build the intellectual framework to build a meaningful life Incorporating the practice and development of 21st century skills into the higher education classroom does not necessarily require a great rethinking of the education model or content delivery. Rather, it could be as simple as encouraging faculty to use proven educational principles such as active learning and group-based learning into the classroom. This would allow students to practice some of the necessary skills such as communication, respect, teamwork, and problem solving into their higher education curriculum.


F1000Research ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan L. Vanderford ◽  
Elizabeth Marcinkowski

The commercialization of university-based research occurs to varying degrees between academic institutions. Previous studies have found that multiple barriers can impede the effectiveness and efficiency by which academic research is commercialized. This case study was designed to analyze the status of the commercialization activity at the University of Kentucky via a survey and interview with a successful academic entrepreneur in order to determine the impediments the individual perceived during the commercialization process. The study also garnered insight from the individual as to how the commercialization process could be improved. Issues with infrastructure were highlighted as the most significant barrier faced by the individual. The research subject also suggested that commercialization activity may generally increase if a number of factors were mitigated. Such insight can be communicated to the administrative leadership of the commercialization process at the University of Kentucky. Long term, improving university-based research commercialization will allow academic researchers to be more active and successful entrepreneurs such that intellectual property will progress more freely to the marketplace for the benefit of inventors, universities, and society.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
Budd L. Hall ◽  
Baptiste Godrie ◽  
Isabel Heck

The focus of the article is on how knowledge is created, who creates knowledge, how knowledge is co-constructed, whose knowledge is excluded and how knowledge is being used to challenge inequalities and strengthen social movement capacity. This article grew from a fascinating conversation that the three of us had in Montreal in September of 2019. We decided to share our stories about knowledge and justice with a wider audience in part as a way for us to reflect further on the meaning of our initial conversation, but also to invite others into the discussion. Baptiste Godrie works in a research centre (CREMIS) affiliated  with Quebec’s health care and social services system, Isabel Heck works with the anti-poverty organization Parole d’excluEs, both affiliated to universities, and Budd Hall works at the University of Victoria and is the Co-Chair of the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based research and social responsibility in higher education.


2004 ◽  
Vol 26 (6) ◽  
pp. 16-19
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Lowe

Europe is striving to become the world's most competitive knowledgebased economy by 2010. The higher education sector will play a key role by providing the ideas and skilled manpower to effect this transition, but will require organizational and cultural change to be truly effective. The Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge is used as an example of how these issues can be addressed in a single organization that is able to provide a seamless mechanism to exploit its pure science base to create knowledge-based business spin-offs.


Author(s):  
V.S. Akimova ◽  
◽  
S.S. Atlasova ◽  
K.E. Ershova

Japan is a developing country but is getting diffi cult to hold in leadership 21st century. The domestic lack of raw materials fosters the government to count on competitive power of science and the higher education system. Japanese system of higher education must become demanded in the world. The history of Hokkaido University, the oldest institution in the country and is being modernized at present, is reviewed. It is noted that various mid-term and long-term measures have been developed and implemented. The university partakes in diff erent activities to raise the university international rating.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Ronis ◽  
Travis Proctor

We argue that Civic Engagement is fundamental to the stated work of the university, the humanities, and the project of religious studies. We trace the historical connections between Civic Engagement and higher education in the American context to the present, highlighting a consistency of focus on Civic Engagement across diverse university contexts even as educational priorities and instantiations shift. We then explore the particular role of Civic Engagement in Religious Studies pedagogy. We contend that being explicit about integrating Civic Engagement in the religion classroom enhances our students’ ability to understand complex concepts in late antique religion and underscores for them how relevant the study of late ancient religion is to students’ lives today. We offer three ways that instructors in Religious Studies can incorporate Civic Engagement into their classes: cultivating naming practices, focusing pedagogical exercises on honing students’ Civic Engagement skills, and, where practicable, engaging in community-based learning.


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