Search

This collection of essays describes women's ongoing search for equity at Brown University, Rhode Island, since their first entrance there in 1891. After a preface by Joan W. Scott and an introduction by Polly Welts Kaufman, the volume contains the following 10 essays: "The Woman's Club Movement Creates and Defines the Women's College" by Karen J. Blair; "'Freedom to be Womanly': The Separate Culture of the Woman's College" by Linda Eisenmann; "From Coordination to Coeducation: Pembrokers' Struggle for Social Equality" by Louise M. Newman; "From Equity to Equality: Women's Athletics at Brown" by Cindy Himes; "The Costs of Partial Support: One Hundred Years of Brown Graduate Women" by Linda Eisenmann; "'A Place for A Good Woman': The Development of Women Faculty At Brown" by Lyde Cullen Sizer; "Finding a Voice: Women on the Brown Corporation" by Jean E. Howard; "The Challenge of Diversity: Undergraduate Women at Brown in the 1980s" by Shelley Mains and Sandy Martin with Martha Gardner; "A Network of Women: Alumnae Volunteerism in Rhode Island" by Karen M. Lamoree; and "A Wider World: Careers of Brown Alumnae" by Charlotte Lowney Tomas. Included are notes on the contributors and an index. All of the essays include extensive references and notes. (JB)

This workshop guidebook introduces teaching methods that allow students with different skills, aspirations, and interests to succeed in meeting the same standards. It is designed to facilitate workshops by the Secondary School Redesign team of The Education Alliance at Brown University but can be used easily by any educator or group of educators who want to support the growth and renewal of personalized instruction in their schools. Through experiential activities, study, and action planning, participants learn to reorient classroom teaching to allow students with different skills, aspirations, and interests to succeed in meeting uniform standards. The guidebook contains topical discussion materials, instructions, graphic organizers, exercises, protocols, and facilitator's guidelines. The workshop guidebook includes a CD-ROM with printable worksheets. (Contains a bibliography.) [This publication was written with Elizabeth Fox, Joan Landzberg, and Ann Papagiotas.]

A discussion of the federal court case between U.S. Department of Justice and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) due to price competition that relates to articles that appeared in the book "Aiding Students, Buying Students: Financial Aid in America," by Rupert Wilkinson is presented.

The College Pathways series grew out of the findings in "Beating the Odds," a study of thirteen high-performing New York City high schools by Carol Ascher and Cindy Maguire for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Each of the schools admitted ninth-graders with high poverty rates and far-below-average reading and math scores but produced four-year graduation rates and college acceptance above the district average, and well above other high schools serving similar students. To help other schools benefit from what these schools have learned, the Annenberg Institute has developed a set of tools that schools can use to assess their status in the key component areas and to strengthen their practices to put all their students on a path-way to college. The tools in this series are intended to be used together in order to involve the full school community--educators, families, students, and community members--in assessing their school's efforts and finding ways to strengthen them. This series include the following tools: (1) Framework and Rubric (Carol Ascher, Anne T. Henderson, and Cindy Maguire); (2) Student Survey Tool (Carol Ascher, Anne T. Henderson, and Sara McAlister); (3) Focus Group Protocol for Students (Anne T. Henderson and Carol Ascher); and (4) Focus Group Protocol for Families (Anne T. Henderson, Kavitha Mediratta, Carol Ascher, and Sara McAlister). [For related reports, see "Beating the Odds: How Thirteen NYC Schools Bring Low-Performing Ninth-Graders to Timely Graduation and College Enrollment" (ED522199) and "Beating the Odds: How Thirteen NYC Schools Bring Low-Performing Ninth-Graders to Timely Graduation and College Enrollment. Executive Summary" (ED522198).]

Summary: The impact of computer systems that can understand natural language will be tremendous. To develop this capability we need to be able to automatically and efficiently analyze large amounts of text. Manually devised rules are not sufficient to provide coverage to handle the complex structure of natural language, necessitating systems that can automatically learn from examples. To handle the flexibility of natural language, it has become standard practice to use statistical models, which assign probabilities for example to the different meanings of a word or the plausibility of grammatical constructions. This book develops a general coarse-to-fine framework for learning and inference in large statistical models for natural language processing. Coarse-to-fine approaches exploit a sequence of models which introduce complexity gradually. At the top of the sequence is a trivial model in which learning and inference are both cheap. Each subsequent model refines the previous one, until a final, full-complexity model is reached. Applications of this framework to syntactic parsing, speech recognition and machine translation are presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of the approach in terms of accuracy and speed. This book is intended for students and researchers interested in statistical approaches to Natural Language Processing.¡ Slav's work¡Coarse-to-Fine Natural Language Processing represents a major advance in the area of syntactic parsing, and a great advertisement for the superiority of the machine-learning approach. Eugene Charniak (Brown University).

As part of a multi-nation research project on the institutionalization of political economy in European, Japanese, and North American universities, the 14 essays in this volume explore the roots of academic economics in the United States during the 19th century. The organization of the essays is designed to show the catalytic role economists played in reshaping American higher education as they worked to lay solid foundations for their discipline within the academy. In addition, the case-study format of many of the papers lends itself to capturing the flavor of the personal dramas that gave definition to the new discipline. Paper titles and authors are: (1) "Political Economy and the Academic Setting before 1900: An Introduction" (William J. Barber); (2) "Early Flowering in the Old Dominion: Political Economy at the College of William and Mary and the University of Virginia" (John K. Whitaker); (3) "Faithful Index to the Ambitions and Fortunes of the State: The Development of Political Economy at South Carolina College" (Michael D. Bordo and William H. Phillips); (4) "Political Economy From the Top Down: Brown University" (William J. Barber); (5) "A Quest for National Leadership: Institutionalization of Economics at Harvard" (Byrd L. Jones); (6) "The Fortunes of Political Economy in an Environment of Academic Conservatism: Yale University" (William J. Barber); (7) "From Recitation Room to Research Seminar: Political Economy at Columbia University" (Franek Rozwadowski); (8) "Political Economy in the Flagship of Postgraduate Studies: The Johns Hopkins University" (William J. Barber); (9) "An Uneasy Relationship: The Business Community and Academic Economists at the University of Pennsylvania" (Steven A. Sass); (10) "Political Economy in an Atmosphere of Academic Entrepreneurship: The University of Chicago" (William J. Barber); (11) "Political Economy in the Far West: The University of California and Stanford University" (Mary E. Cookingham); (12) "Mind and Hand: Economics and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology" (Richard P. Adelstein); (13) Political Economy and the Service of the State" The University of Wisconsin" (John P. Henderson); and (14) "The Educational Revolution and the Professionalization of American Economics" (A. W. Coats). Includes notes, index, and information on the contributors. (Most papers contain extensive references.) (JB)

This book follows the debates over Asian-American admissions at Berkeley University (California), the University of California at Los Angeles, Brown University in Providence (Rhode Island), Stanford University (California), Harvard University in Cambridge (Massachusetts), and Princeton University (New Jersey). The book explores important developments in the politics of race including changes in ethnic coalitions, reconstruction of the debate over affirmative action, and the conservative challenge to the civil rights agenda of the 1960s. Also examined are the history and significance of the Asian-American admission controversy on American race relations both inside and outside of higher education. The book argues that the controversy encouraged a shift in affirmative action policy away from racial preferences toward class preferences. This development is identified as a retreat from race, which signals not only a policy shift but also the increasing reluctance of intellectuals and politicians to identify social problems as explicitly racial problems. Moving beyond the university setting, the author explores the significance of the retreat from race as likely to fail at its promise of easing racial tension and promoting racial equality. Extensive notes are provided. (Contains over 350 references.) (JB)

A biography of Andrew Sean Greer, a short fiction and novels author who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for the 2017 novel "Less" is presented. He was born in 1970 in Washington, D.C. with his identical twin brother named Michael. Son of chemists Sandra and William Greer, he earned a bachelor's degree at Brown University in Rhode Island and pursued graduate studies in creative writing at University of Montana. Greer's books won numerous awards from regional and national organizations.

A biography is presented for author Jim Shepard. He was born in 1956 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and attended Catholic grade school. He earned a master of fine arts (MFA) degree in creative writing, which he selected over a concentration on film studies at Brown University. In 1983 he began a teaching job at Williams College in Massachusetts and published his first novel, "Flights." Several of his other works are also noted including "Paper Doll" and "Lights Out in the Reptile House."

A biography of the poet Walter K. Lew is presented. He was born December 4, 1955. His book "Treadwinds: Poems and Intermedia Texts" was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2002. Lew received a master's degree in creative writing from Brown University as well as a master's in Korean studies from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Much of Lew's work deals with the displacements of modern Asian history and the experience of the Asian American immigrant.

A biography of playwright Lynn Nottage is presented. Nottage was born in Brooklyn, New York City on November 2, 1964. She attended the High School of Music and Art and Brown University, where she originally intended to prepare herself for a career in journalism. Her works include "Crumbs from the Table of Joy," "Mud, River, Stone," and "One More River to Cross: A Verbatim Fugue." Her achievements are also mentioned.

A biography of author Marilynne Robinson is presented. Robinson was born on November 26, 1943 in Sandpoint, Idaho. She taught for a year in France at the Université de Haute-Bretagne after she graduated from Brown University before returning to the U.S. to pursue graduate work in English at the University of Washington. Her first novel "Housekeeping" was published to great acclaim in 1980. Her books "Gilead, "Mother Country," and "The Death of Adam" are also mentioned.