A Life in History: Making the Team

This article traces the author’s path from early life in the United Kingdom to graduate school in Newfoundland and New Brunswick and then to a series of faculty positions – ultimately, at Saint Mary’s University. Early work in the seventeenth-century history of northern New England gave way to a more broadly comparative approach to this era and, eventually, to an effort to coordinate imperial, colonial, and Indigenous history in northeastern North America. A variety of career uncertainties and evolutions also led to involvement in the history of higher education, the history of Atlantic Canada, and the history of sport. Through it all, collaborative work developed as a recurrent approach, with Atlantic Canada themes frequently underpinning responses to a variety of historiographies.

Then & Now

This introduction provides an overview of the Then & Now: Arts at Warwick special issue. It outlines the origins of the Then & Now project and how the issue was developed in collaboration between staff and students. To highlight the distinctive contributions of this issue to existing research on the history of Higher Education and the student experience, it also provides a brief summary of the historiography in this field.

Towards Inclusivity at the University of Warwick

As part of the Then & Now project, oral histories were collected from staff and alumni about their experiences at the University of Warwick. During these interviews, participants often spoke about their own experiences of inclusion and exclusion at university, often in comparison to the perceived experience of students at university of today. Looking back to earlier decades of the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, those interviewed described the institution as primarily white, male, and middle-class. But, in their oral history testimonies participants reported feeling that that inclusivity at Warwick has undergone a transformation over the last 50 years. This article reviews these interviews and considers what the interviewees’ experiences can add to discussions about inclusivity and accessibility within universities. By focusing on three themes that were identified from these interviews - gender, race and ethnicity, and class - the article explores changing attitudes and experiences of inclusion and exclusion at the University of Warwick 1965-present. The interviews indicate that significant changes have taken place with regards to gender equality, but that less sustained changes have been perceived to have occurred in relation to class and race. By reviewing a small sample of interviews that were collated as part of Then & Now, this article demonstrates the potential that further oral histories could offer to our understanding of inclusivity at the University of Warwick and the history of Higher Education.

What Happened to Your College Town: The Changing Relationship of Higher Education and College Towns, 1940–2000

This essay examines the history of what is commonly called the town-gown relationship in American college towns in the six decades after the Second World War. A time of considerable expansion of higher education enrollment and function, the period also marks an increasing detachment of higher education institutions from their local communities. Once closely tied by university offices that advised the bulk of their students in off-campus housing, those bonds between town and gown began to come apart in the 1970s, due primarily to legal and economic factors that restricted higher education institutions’ outreach. Given the importance of off-campus life to college students, over half of whom have historically lived off campus, the essay argues for increased research on college towns in the history of higher education.

The Impact of Students’ Cultural Capital on their Learning Experiences in an EFL Programme in Higher Education

Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital is a potent theoretical device in the analysis of the correlation between familial educational background and individual student performance and outcomes in higher education. The theory of cultural capital enables culture to be conceived as an asset that furnishes its possessors with advantages that can be transferred from parent to child. This paper explores how the possession of cultural capital by students of English as a foreign language at a Saudi university can influence their subsequent learning. Specifically, this study examines how familial education shapes student outcomes in an EFL programme. This relationship has been investigated extensively in different contexts around the world, but not sufficiently within the Saudi context. The findings of the current study are significant as they indicate that Saudi students accrue certain advantages from the educational experiences and resources available to them in their social environments. Furthermore, the study reveals that students with a deficit of cultural capital and no family history of higher education encounter more problems in the EFL programme and demonstrate overall lower levels of language proficiency.

History of Universities: Volume XXXIV/1

This book’s chapters contain a mix of analysis and discussion looking in depth at the history of higher education. This text presents a global history of research education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chapters cover topics such as how disciplines are formed and research training, the rise of academic laboratory science, research mathematicians circa 1900 and research training in the humanities in British universities from 1870 to 1939. Other subjects include training language scholars between 1920 and 1940, training researchers in Ibero-Amerca, inventing laboratory science in Meiji Japan, and Chinese physics researchers in the period 1927-1941. The book includes an introduction and conclusion by Kevin Chang and Alan Rocke.

Applying Hagedorn’s Conceptual Framework to Examine Job Satisfaction among Faculty at the University of Sarajevo

Faculty around the world shares some underlying commonalities by virtue of sharing a profession, but we cannot draw informed parallels because culture, style and history of higher education, and faculty socialization play a significant role in how the faculty life is lived and experienced. We know quite a bit about faculty working in developed and developing nations, but the current snapshot lacks perspectives from academics living in transitional nations. This in-progress study will survey faculty employed at the University of Sarajevo, located in Bosnia and Hercegovina, to establish a baseline of their demographic profile and to describe their job satisfaction using Hagedorn’s conceptual framework. This study will test the applicability of Hagedorn’s framework in non-US settings and expand our understanding of the causes and outcomes related to faculty satisfaction.

The Project «Digital History of St.Petersburg Polytechnic University» and Prospects for Modeling the Institutional History of Higher Education

The report represents the implementation of the project «Digital History of St.Petersburg Polytechnic University» and analyzes related opportunities in the representation and the study of the institutional history of high schools. The authors dwell on the description and characteristics of the online resource that represents a virtual dynamic structure of the University in the form of an interactive genealogical tree, supplemented by reference materials, full-text historical sources, scientific commentary.