Search

Queer Campus Climate: An Ethnographic Fantasia is a visceral and provocative account of the lives of ten queer college men living in the Deep South. The book serves many goals. It is an emancipatory research document told in the raucous, fiery voices of these queer men whose narratives are presented free from the sanitizing impulses of traditional scholarship. It is a manifesto on postqualitative paradigms applied to a queer subject. It is a public history of the life and times of queers subjects living under an alt-right political assault. And it is an analysis of how a hostile campus climate impacts psychosocial development of marginalized students. Blurring the line between literature and research, Queer Campus Climate: An Ethnographic Fantasia contains a cast of characters (including a bear, a twink, and three drag queens) who dish on sex, gender performance, mental wellness, relationships, harassment, addiction, professional development, and politics. Their stories are told against a musical backdrop that includes selections from Puccini to Frank Ocean, which provides a multisensory experience unlike anything else in sociological research.

It has long been assumed that college admission should be a simple matter of sorting students according to merit, with the best heading off to the Ivy League and highly ranked liberal arts colleges and the rest falling naturally into their rightful places. Admission to selective institutions, where extremely fine distinctions are made, is characterized by heated public debates about whether standardized exams, high school transcripts, essays, recommendation letters, or interviews best indicate which prospective students are'worthy.'And then there is college for everyone else. But what goes into less-selective college admissions in an era when everyone feels compelled to go, regardless of preparation or life goals?'Ravenwood College,'where Alex Posecznick spent a year doing ethnographic research, was a small, private, nonprofit institution dedicated to social justice and serving traditionally underprepared students from underrepresented minority groups. To survive in the higher education marketplace, the college had to operate like a business and negotiate complex categories of merit while painting a hopeful picture of the future for its applicants. Selling Hope and College is a snapshot of a particular type of institution as it goes about the business of producing itself and justifying its place in the market. Admissions staff members were burdened by low enrollments and worked tirelessly to fill empty seats, even as they held on to the institution's special spirit. Posecznick documents what it takes to keep a'mediocre'institution open and running, and the struggles, tensions, and battles that members of the community tangle with daily as they carefully walk the line between empowering marginalized students and exploiting them.

Thinking about American higher education as an economic market changes everything.It is no surprise that college tuition and student debt are on the rise. Universities no longer charge tuition to simply cover costs. They are market enterprises that charge whatever the market will bear. Institutional ambition, along with increasing competition for students, now shape the economics of higher education.In The Market Imperative, Robert Zemsky and Susan Shaman argue that too many institutional leaders and policy makers do not understand how deeply the consumer markets they promoted have changed American higher education. Instead of functioning as a single integrated industry, higher education is in fact a collection of segmented and more or less separate markets. These markets have their own distinctive operating constraints and logics, especially regarding price. But those most responsible for federal higher education policy have made a muck of the enterprise, while state policy making has all but disappeared, the victim of weak imaginations, insufficient funding, and an aversion to targeted investment. Chapter by chapter, this compelling text draws on new data developed by the authors in a Gates Foundation–funded project to describe the landscape: how the market for higher education distributes students among competing institutions; what the job market is looking for; how markets differ across the fifty states; and how the higher education market determines the kinds of faculty at different kinds of institutions. The volume concludes with a three-pronged set of policies for making American higher education mission centered as well as market smart. Although there is no'one-size-fits-all'approach for reforming higher education, this clearly written book will productively advance understanding of the challenges colleges and universities face by providing a mapping of the configuration of the market for an undergraduate education.

At the end of World War II, an American military intelligence team retrieved an original copy of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, signed by Hitler, and turned over this rare document to General George S. Patton. In 1999, after fifty-five years in the vault of the Huntington Library in southern California, the Nuremberg Laws resurfaced and were put on public display for the first time at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. In this far-ranging, interdisciplinary study that is part historical analysis, part cultural critique, part detective story, and part memoir, Tony Platt explores a range of interrelated issues: war-time looting, remembrance of the holocaust, German and American eugenics, and the public responsibilities of museums and cultural centers. This book is based on original research by the author and co-researcher, historian Cecilia O'Leary, in government, military, and library archives; interviews and oral histories; and participant observation. It is both a detailed, scholarly analysis and a record of the author's activist efforts to correct the historical record.

Written in an accessible and clear manner, Sexualities in Context presents focused overviews and explorations of some of the most timely issues in the social construction of sex. This brief text is the only book of its kind to address sexualities from a social perspective, Plante's analysis of the context of sexuality, sexual behaviors, and identities is both intelligent and readable. With contemporary topics, such as'hooking up,'sexual fantasies, and bisexualities, along with examples of how to apply critical thinking, students are empowered to think outside their comfort zones and encouraged to explore the topic of sex in a new context.

In The Qualified Student Harold S. Wechsler focuses on methods of student selection used by institutions of higher education in the United States. More specifically, he discusses the way that college and university reformers employed those methods to introduce higher education into a broader cross-section of America, by extending access to an increased number of students from nontraditional backgrounds. Implicit in much of this book is an underlying social and ethical question: How legitimate was and is higher education's regulation of social mobility? Public concern over colleges'and universities'practices became inevitable once they became regulators between social classes. The challenging of colleges'admissions policies in the courts augments similar concerns that have been present in legislatures for decades. The volume is divided into three main sections: Prerequisites, Columbia and the Selective Function, and Implications. It focuses mainly on four universities, The University of Michigan, Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the City University of New York. Wechsler maintains that unlike other universities, these institutions were pacesetters; they did not adopt a new policy simply because some other college had already adopted it. A new introduction brings the book, originally published in 1977, up to date and demonstrates its continuing importance in today's academic world of selective admissions.

How can libraries and librarians across the educational continuum work together to support student transitions from high school to college, utilizing free or low-cost resources? This book supplies the answers.Informed Transitions: Libraries Supporting the High School to College Transition identifies the ways in which libraries and librarians can work together and create valuable resources that help students transition successfully to college—despite the challenges of increasing demand and diminishing resources.The book is organized into three sections: background, expectations, and skills; conversations and collaborations; and programs and resources. Section 1 establishes a foundational understanding of the libraries'role in supporting college transitions. Section 2 shares model conversations that move this work forward, stressing its collaborative nature. The third section highlights some well-established programs and resources that effectively support high school to college transitions. Practical information is provided throughout, pinpointing what high school students need to know to smoothly transition to college, spotlighting the expectations of college professors, and discussing audience-specific methods of working with students at the high school and college levels.

Christian Schierenbeck makes a provocative case that higher education across the globe suffers from a profound productivity crisis which prevents broad access to affordable and high-quality educational services. He shows how the vast productivity gap in higher education could be closed if academic managers borrowed some of the managerial practices applied by the world's leading business enterprises. In order for this to happen in practice, the author argues for radical changes in the policy framework for higher education.

Teaching Undergraduate Research in Religious Studies offers an introduction to the philosophy and practice of Undergraduate Research in Religious Studies and takes up several significant ongoing questions related to it. For those new to Undergraduate Research, it provides an overview of fundamental issues and pedagogical questions and practical models for application in the classroom. For seasoned mentors, the book acts as a dialogue partner on emerging issues and offers insight into pertinent questions in the field based on experience of recognized experts.

Pilipino Cultural Nights at American campuses have been a rite of passage for youth culture and a source of local community pride since the 1980s. Through performances—and parodies of them—these celebrations of national identity through music, dance, and theatrical narratives reemphasize what it means to be Filipino American. In The Day the Dancers Stayed, scholar and performer Theodore Gonzalves uses interviews and participant observer techniques to consider the relationship between the invention of performance repertoire and the development of diasporic identification. Gonzalves traces a genealogy of performance repertoire from the 1930s to the present. Culture nights serve several functions: as exercises in nostalgia, celebrations of rigid community entertainment, and occasionally forums for political intervention. Taking up more recent parodies of Pilipino Cultural Nights, Gonzalves discusses how the rebellious spirit that enlivened the original seditious performances has been stifled.

Realizing Our Intentions addresses educators, church leaders, board members, and supporters who believe that distinctive, faith-based colleges and universities will be important voluntary associations in a postmodern society. Many works have documented the history of higher education in the West, showing how churches have started colleges and universities and then how the churches and schools gradually have distanced themselves from each other. However, Realizing our Intentions goes one step further by offering specific and practical strategies for healthy and long-term relationships between faith-based colleges and churches.

Im Wettbewerb um Studenten und Sponsoren ist das Image einer Hochschule ein zentraler Wettbewerbsfaktor. Hagen Habicht untersucht die Imagebildung am Beispiel der TU München. Er entwickelt und erprobt eine für die Imageforschung neue Metho-den¬kombination aus narrativer Image-Erhebung und der Imageanalyse auf Basis von Cognitive Maps. Dieser innovative Ansatz erlaubt eine auf Erlebniswelten basierende Imageanalyse, aus der sich neue Formen des Imagemanagements ableiten lassen. Das beschriebene Instrumentarium zielt auf die Verbesserung von Authentizität und Konsistenz im Image einer Organisation ab.