American Academic Cultures

At a time when American higher education seems ever more to be reflecting on its purpose and potential, we are more inclined than ever to look to its history for context and inspiration. But that history only helps, Paul H. Mattingly argues, if it’s seen as something more than a linear progress through time. With American Academic Cultures, he offers a different type of history of American higher learning, showing how its current state is the product of different, varied generational cultures, each grounded in its own moment in time and driven by historically distinct values that generated specific problems and responses. Mattingly sketches out seven broad generational cultures: evangelical, Jeffersonian, republican/nondenominational, industrially driven, progressively pragmatic, internationally minded, and the current corporate model. What we see through his close analysis of each of these cultures in their historical moments is that the politics of higher education, both inside and outside institutions, are ultimately driven by the dominant culture of the time. By looking at the history of higher education in this new way, Mattingly opens our eyes to our own moment, and the part its culture plays in generating its politics and promise.

In the half century since World War II, American academic culture has changed profoundly. Until now, those changes have not been charted, nor have their implications for current discussions of the academy been appraised. In this book, however, eminent academic figures who have helped to produce many of the changes of the last fifty years explore how four disciplines in the social sciences and humanities--political science, economics, philosophy, and literary studies--have been transformed. Edited by the distinguished historians Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske, the book places academic developments in their intellectual and socio-political contexts. Scholarly innovators of different generations offer insiders' views of the course of change in their own fields, revealing the internal dynamics of disciplinary change. Historians examine the external context for these changes--including the Cold War, Vietnam, feminism, civil rights, and multiculturalism. They also compare the very different paths the disciplines have followed within the academy and the consequent alterations in their relations to the larger public. Initiated by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the study was first published in Daedalus in its 1997 winter issue. The contributors are M. H. Abrams, William Barber, Thomas Bender, Catherine Gallagher, Charles Lindblom, Robert Solow, David Kreps, Hilary Putnam, José David Saldívar, Alexander Nehamas, Rogers Smith, Carl Schorske, Ira Katznelson, and David Hollinger.

A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, American Idyll argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones. Throughout most of American history, antielitist sentiment was reserved for attacks against an entrenched aristocracy or rapacious plutocracy, but it has now become a revolt against meritocracy itself, directed against what insurgents see as a ruling class of credentialed elites with degrees from exclusive academic institutions. Catherine Liu reveals that, within the academy and stemming from the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, animosity against expertise has animated much of the Left’s cultural criticism. By unpacking the disciplinary formation and academic ambitions of American cultural studies, Liu uncovers the genealogy of the current antielitism, placing the populism that dominates headlines within a broad historical context. In the process, she emphasizes the relevance of the historical origins of populist revolt against finance capital and its political influence. American Idyll reveals the unlikely alliance between American pragmatism and proponents of the Frankfurt School and argues for the importance of broad frames of historical thinking in encouraging robust academic debate within democratic institutions. In a bold thought experiment that revives and defends Richard Hofstadter’s theories of anti-intellectualism in American life, Liu asks, What if cultural populism had been the consensus politics of the past three decades? American Idyll shows that recent antielitism does nothing to redress the source of its discontent—namely, growing economic inequality and diminishing social mobility. Instead, pseudopopulist rage, in conservative and countercultural forms alike, has been transformed into resentment, content merely to take down allegedly elitist cultural forms without questioning the real political and economic consolidation of powers that has taken place in America during the past thirty years.

The American Drug Culture uses sociological and other perspectives to examine drug and alcohol use in U.S. society. The text is arranged topically rather than by drug categories and explores diverse aspects of drug use, including popular culture, sexuality, legal and criminal justice systems, other social institutions, and mental and physical health. It covers alcohol, the most widely used drug in the United States, more extensively than other texts on this subject. The authors include case studies from their own field research that give students empathetic insights into the situations of those suffering from substance and alcohol abuse.

In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.

Adaptation to the United States Academic Culture for International Students provides readers with engaging articles that illuminate key differences between the culture of America and that of foreign nations, especially with regard to the higher education system. The collection empowers students to analyze and discuss cultural differences, develop skillsets that will help them thrive in the American educational system, and build their cross-cultural communication skills and competencies. The anthology is divided into three parts. In Part I, students are introduced to cultural concepts, key terms and ideas in human communication, and the main cultural differences international students are likely to discover when studying at a university in the United States. Part II focuses on cross-cultural adaptation, featuring articles about interacting with American professors, time management, effective study and attendance habits, and America's emphasis on academic integrity. The final part includes readings that examine nonverbal communication and the relationship between language and culture. Featuring invaluable content and scholarly insight, Adaptation to the United States Academic Culture for International Students is an ideal resource for students who've recently begun studies in the U.S., as well as university programs that seek to support the adaptation and overall experience of international students at their institution. Mei Zhong earned her Ph.D. from Kent State University. She is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Media Studies at San Diego State University, where she also serves as the advisor for the international studies minor in the College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts. Dr. Zhong has been involved in promoting international education for over 20 years and serves as a faculty coordinator for several educational exchange programs between SDSU and international universities. In addition, she has served as the president of the Association for Chinese Communication Studies, an affiliated organization of the National Communication Association.

In The Four Cultures of the Academy, William H. Bergquist identified four different, yet interrelated, cultures found in North American higher education: collegial, managerial, developmental, and advocacy. In this new and expanded edition of that classic work, Bergquist and coauthor Kenneth Pawlak propose that there are additional external influences in our global culture that are pressing upon the academic institution, forcing it to alter the way it goes about its business. Two new cultures are now emerging in the academic institution as a result of these global, external forces: the virtual culture, prompted by the technological and social forces that have emerged over the past twenty years, and the tangible culture, which values its roots, community, and physical location and has only recently been evident as a separate culture partly in response to emergence of the virtual culture. These two cultures interact with the previous four, creating new dynamics.

Academic discourse has recently become a blooming field of research for linguists interested in genre and discourse analysis, as well as pragmatics. The methodology and conventions employed in academic discourse, however, vary across cultures to a certain degree, and often represent obstacles for publishing in international journals for authors whose native language is not English, as top journals tend to centre on the Anglo-Saxon academic writing norms. This is one of the major reasons why national academic discourses need to be linguistically profiled and studied and contrastively compared against these norms. This volume contributes to this very objective by shedding light on academic discourse as effectuated in various, mostly Balkan countries, and contrasts it against the corresponding western, English discourse. Furthermore, academic discourse is studied through a variety of genres it can assume, such as research articles, conference proceedings, and university lectures. Through exploring the cultural differences in academic discourse and the standards of international academic writing, this volume offers readers a chance to become better equipped in publishing abroad. Opening with a chapter focusing on the general structure of research articles and national writing habits as a potential hindrance to publishing abroad, the book goes on to study the rhetorical structure of the abstracts, introductions and conclusions of research articles in linguistics, economics and civil engineering. The second part of the book deals with hedging, contrastively studied in international and national journals, with the following chapters studying cohesion as accomplished in academic writing. Part three deals with the syntactic and semantic features of academic discourse. This book will be of particular interest to linguists interested in genre and discourse analysis in general and academic discourse, and will also appeal to scholars from other research backgrounds wishing to familiarise themselves with international and national academic conventions, and thus overcome the hurdles relating to academic writing conventions when publishing abroad.