Metropolitan Universities


Book Description

A collection of articles forming a handbook of information on Metropolitan Universities, their unique mission and characteristics. It addresses the questions and concerns of faculty, students, administrators, state educational policy makers, and mayors or city managers, all of whom are involved in institutions located in or near the urban center of a metropolitan area. Johnson and Bell collected articles forming a handbook of information on metropolitan universities and their unique mission and characteristics. It addresses the questions and concerns of faculty, students, administrators, state educational policy makers, and mayors or city managers, all of whom are involved in institutions located in or near the urban center of a metropolitan area.




City Comp


Book Description

This is the first full-length collection in composition studies to tell the story of teaching and writing in urban universities in cities such as Birmingham, Pittsburgh, Chicago, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Detroit. Bruce McComiskey and Cynthia Ryan visit the fascinating history of various urban universities to illustrate how specific writing programs and instructors have engaged in the changing missions and priorities of their institutions. The authors address the complex interwoven components of city comp: the identities of individuals and institutions that contribute to the writing of verbal, visual, and spatial texts; the spaces that serve as resources for student writing, analysis, and critique; and the curriculum practices implemented in programs that attempt to help students recognize, and in some cases, transform their understandings of the cities in which they live, learn, and compose.




Ethnography Unbound


Book Description

These provocative new essays redefine the goals, methods, and assumptions of qualitative and ethnographic research in composition studies, making evident not only the crucial importance of ethnographic research, but also its resilience. As Ethnography Unbound makes evident, critical ethnographers are retheorizing their methodologies in ways that both redefine ethnographic practices and values and, at the same time, have begun to liberate ethnographic practices from the often-disabling stronghold of postmodern critique. Showing how ethnography works through dialogic processes and moves toward political ends, this collection opens the doors to rethinking ethnographic research in composition studies.




Universities and Their Cities


Book Description

The first broad survey of the history of urban higher education in America. Today, a majority of American college students attend school in cities. But throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, urban colleges and universities faced deep hostility from writers, intellectuals, government officials, and educators who were concerned about the impact of cities, immigrants, and commuter students on college education. In Universities and Their Cities, Steven J. Diner explores the roots of American colleges’ traditional rural bias. Why were so many people, including professors, uncomfortable with nonresident students? How were the missions and activities of urban universities influenced by their cities? And how, improbably, did much-maligned urban universities go on to profoundly shape contemporary higher education across the nation? Surveying American higher education from the early nineteenth century to the present, Diner examines the various ways in which universities responded to the challenges offered by cities. In the years before World War II, municipal institutions struggled to “build character” in working class and immigrant students. In the postwar era, universities in cities grappled with massive expansion in enrollment, issues of racial equity, the problems of “disadvantaged” students, and the role of higher education in addressing the “urban crisis.” Over the course of the twentieth century, urban higher education institutions greatly increased the use of the city for teaching, scholarly research on urban issues, and inculcating civic responsibility in students. In the final decades of the century, and moving into the twenty-first century, university location in urban areas became increasingly popular with both city-dwelling students and prospective resident students, altering the long tradition of anti-urbanism in American higher education. Drawing on the archives and publications of higher education organizations and foundations, Universities and Their Cities argues that city universities brought about today’s commitment to universal college access by reaching out to marginalized populations. Diner shows how these institutions pioneered the development of professional schools and PhD programs. Finally, he considers how leaders of urban higher education continuously debated the definition and role of an urban university. Ultimately, this book is a considered and long overdue look at the symbiotic impact of these two great American institutions: the city and the university.




Transforming the Urban University


Book Description

In Transforming the Urban University, Richard M. Freeland reviews how Northeastern University in Boston, historically an access-oriented, private urban university serving commuter students from modest backgrounds and characterized by limited academic ambitions and local reach, transformed itself into a selective, national, and residential research university. Having served as president during a critical decade in this transition, Freeland recounts the school's efforts to retain key features from Northeastern's urban history—an emphasis on undergraduate teaching and learning, a curriculum focused on preparing students for the workplace, its signature program of cooperative education, and its broad involvement in the life of the city—while at the same time raising admission standards, recruiting students on a regional and national basis, improving graduation rates, expanding opportunities for research and graduate education and dramatically improving its U.S. News ranking. Freeland situates the Northeastern story within the evolving context of urban higher education as well as broader trends among American universities during the second half of the twentieth century. He documents the way Northeastern maintained its historic values while making innovative use of modern marketing techniques to meet the competitive conditions of the academic marketplace. He shows how Northeastern rejected the standard model of the modern research university and instead reinvented itself as a new kind of urban university: making excellence in the undergraduate experience its top priority; stressing practice-oriented education and research; and emphasizing the academic benefits of its urban setting as well as the importance of contributing to the well-being of its host city. In chronicling Northeastern's recovery from what the school's trustees called a "near-death" experience, Freeland challenges the conventional narrative of what a university must do to achieve top-tier national status.




The New American College Town


Book Description

A new perspective on the relationships among colleges, universities, and the communities with which they are now partnering. Colleges and universities have always had interesting relationships with their external communities, whether they are cities, towns, or something in between. In many cases, they are the main economic driver for their regions—State College, Pennsylvania, or Raleigh, North Carolina, for example—and in others, they exist side by side with thriving industries. In The New American College Town, James Martin, James E. Samels & Associates provide a practical guide for planning a new kind of American college town—one that moves beyond the nostalgia-tinged stereotype to achieve collaborative objectives. What exactly is a college town in America today? Examining the broad range of partnerships transforming campuses and the communities around them, the book opens by detailing twenty characteristics of new American college towns. Subsequent chapters invite presidents, provosts, planners, mayors, architects, and association directors to share their views on how college town relationships are shaping new generations of students and citizens. The book tackles urban and rural institutions, as well as community colleges, and closes with predictions about what college towns will look like in twenty-five years. Contributors include presidents from Lehigh, Portland State, New Jersey City, and Connecticut College, along with five college town mayors and the current or former executive directors from the International Town-Gown Association, the Association for the Study of Higher Education, and others. The book also traces how town-gown relations are expanding into innovative areas nationally and internationally, moving beyond familiar student life programs and services to hundred-million-dollar downtown developments. The first comprehensive, single-volume resource designed for leaders on both sides of these conversations, The New American College Town includes action plans, lessons learned, and pitfalls to avoid in developing transformative relationships between colleges and their extended communities. Contributors: Robert C. Andringa, Aaron Aska, Beth Bagwell, Katherine Bergeron, Kelly A. Cherwin, Phillip DiChiara, Lorin Ditzler, Mauri A. Ditzler, Kevin E. Drumm, Erin Flynn, Michael Fox, Joel Garreau, Susan Henderson, Andrew W. Hibel, Patrick Hyland, Jr., Jay Kahn, James Martin, Miguel Martinez-Saenz, Fred McGrail, Kim Nehls, Krisan Osterby, Tracee Reiser, Stuart Rothenberger, Kate Rousmaniere, James E. Samels, Rick Seltzer, John D. Simon, Jefferson A. Singer, Allison Starer, Wim Wiewel, Eugene L. Zdziarski II




Student Affairs in Urban-Serving Institutions


Book Description

Student Affairs in Urban-Serving Institutions: Voices from Senior Leaders addresses a critical gap in literature concerning the unique structure, students, and missions of urban-serving institutions (USIs). Examining the challenges and contributions of student affairs professionals in serving and meeting the needs of urban students, this volume discusses how services and interventions must reflect the reality of students, understand the sociopolitical forces that affect students’ lives, and bring together a network that includes family and community. Each chapter in this volume captures the voices of student affairs leaders who not only share a range of important professional experiences, insights, and lessons learned but also unpack research and literature on competencies, knowledge bases, and experiences needed to work in urban universities and community colleges. This important book will help graduate students as well as new and continuing professionals, faculty, and scholars impact practice and policy and become agents of change in their communities.




Neighborhood Democracy


Book Description

Published in association with Higher education and America stand at a perilous moment brought about by economic and social inequality, racism, and the fracture of civic cohesion and structures.From its origins, the mission of American higher education was to promote democratic governance and a free, fair, and orderly society through the education of responsible citizens. Just as its mission has become more urgent, it is being undermined as colleges and universities find themselves trapped in a fiscal crisis that threatens their very institutional viability—a crisis in large part brought about by the very perpetuation of economic and racial inequity, and the consequent erosion of consensus about civic purpose and vision.This book argues that higher education can and must again take leadership in promoting the participatory processes and instilling the democratic values needed to build a vibrant and fair society. How to do that when, as Guarasci argues, a majority of colleges and universities are floundering under a business model that generates insufficient net revenue while making college unaffordable?Guarasci offers a model of civic mission and engagement whereby, through relatively modest investment, colleges can develop reciprocal partnerships with local institutions, civic, and business groups to raise the quality and outcomes of K-12 education, promote local entrepreneurship and community involvement, raise incomes, and increase the attainment of postsecondary education to benefit the wider national economy and colleges around the region and country. He demonstrates how civic engagement can revitalize communities and generate developmental and foundation funding.Vividly illustrated by the examples of success of students from the shadow community to which Wagner College committed its energies and resources, by the stories of the local schools and their principals, and the voices of local partners, this book offers a compelling and detailed account of what it takes to transform an institution and a neighborhood—and a model of renewal.




The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sustainability in Higher Education


Book Description

This Handbook illustrates that universities per se and higher education in general are essential to catalyze and action the transformative change needed for sustainability and delivery of the Sustainable Development Goals. Part One shows how sustainability can be adopted as a driver of change within higher education institutions (HEIs), as they react and respond to influencing factors outside the academy. Part Two examines how a university working with and for sustainability can influence, effect and amplify change beyond the institution, working with and through others. International contributors explore regional, national and international perspectives, presenting a variety of critically assessed accounts case studies that reflect different local and national contexts, institutional archetypes and academic missions. Frameworks of sustainability-led transformation are illustrated at the level of the institution (executive/administrative), organization, culture, place-based (anchor) and student in various countries including Aruba, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, Japan, Lebanon, Nepal, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, Spain, Uganda, United Kingdom and the United States of America. The book concludes with a manifesto for change and a call to action. It identifies that the sustainability journey of a HEI is influenced by context and place, with mission, leadership and strategy playing a vital role and change agency by students a key ingredient. Recognizing the patience and resolve to effect change, communication, dialogue and inclusion were central to community building and partnership.




Diversifying the Teacher Workforce


Book Description

Diversifying the Teacher Workforce critically examines efforts to diversify the teaching force and narrow the demographic gap between who teaches and who populates U.S. classrooms. While the demographic gap is often invoked to provide a needed rationale for preparing all teachers, and especially White teachers, to work with students of color, it is far less often invoked in an effort to examine why the teaching force remains predominantly White in the first place. Based on work the National Association for Multicultural Education is engaged in on this phenomenon, this edited collection brings together leading scholars to look closely at this problem. They examine why the teaching force is predominantly White from historical as well as contemporary perspectives, showcase and report available data on a variety of ways this problem is being tackled at the pre-service and teacher credentialing levels, and examine how a diverse and high-quality teaching force can be retained and thrive. This book is an essential resource for any educator interested in exploring race within the context of today’s urban schools.