Involving Colleges

Involving Colleges details the extracurricular environments of fourteen diverse involving colleges and universities and shows how and where successful conditions and characteristics can be adapted to institutions—whether a small liberal arts college or an urban campus—to complement the institution's unique educational purpose and mission.

Student retention continues to be a vexing problem for all colleges and universities. In spite of the money spent on creating programs and services to help retain students until they achieve their academic and personal goals, and graduate, the figures have not improved over time. This is particularly true for minority students, who have a greater attrition rate than majority students. Demographic information shows that the minority population in the United States is growing at a faster rate than the majority. It is imperative that educational institutions find ways to help improve retention rates for all students but particularly minority students. Retention rates should not differ appreciably among different racial/ethnic groups."The Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory and Practice" is the only scholarly, peer-reviewed journal devoted solely to college student retention. It has published many articles on minority student retention, and this topic continues to garner much attention. This book is a compilation of the very best of these articles, selected on the basis of reviews by a cadre of experts in the education field. The articles discuss African American, Latino/Latina, Asian and Asian Pacific, Native American, and biracial students, and institutional commitments to retaining a diverse student population. For those interested in this vital area, the collection will teach and inspire them to achieve greater heights and pay additional attention to retaining minority students in our colleges and universities.

A humorous collection of the most clever college pranks ever committed describes how Harvard students hoisted the Soviet flag over the U.S. Supreme Court building during the Red Scare and other pranks and includes documentary photographs. Original.

The first real exposé of how universities have trademarked, copyrighted, branded, and patented everything they do. Universities generate an enormous amount of intellectual property, including copyrights, trademarks, patents, Internet domain names, and even trade secrets. Until recently, universities often ceded ownership of this property to the faculty member or student who created or discovered it in the course of their research. Increasingly, though, universities have become protective of this property, claiming it for their own use and licensing it as a revenue source instead of allowing it to remain in the public sphere. Many universities now behave like private corporations, suing to protect trademarked sports logos, patents, and name brands. Yet how can private rights accumulation and enforcement further the public interest in higher education? What is to be gained and lost as institutions become more guarded and contentious in their orientation toward intellectual property? In this pioneering book, law professor Jacob H. Rooksby uses a mixture of qualitative, quantitative, and legal research methods to grapple with those central questions, exposing and critiquing the industry’s unquestioned and growing embrace of intellectual property from the perspective of research in law, higher education, and the social sciences. While knowledge creation and dissemination have a long history in higher education, using intellectual property as a vehicle for rights staking and enforcement is a relatively new and, as Rooksby argues, dangerous phenomenon for the sector. The Branding of the American Mind points to higher education’s love affair with intellectual property itself, in all its dimensions, including newer forms that are less tied to scholarly output. The result is an unwelcome assault on the public’s interest in higher education. Presuming no background knowledge of intellectual property, and ending with a call to action, The Branding of the American Mind explores applicable laws, legal regimes, and precedent in plain English, making the book appealing to anyone concerned for the future of higher education.

How does the Council of Europe put into practice its commitment to the promotion of a culture of democracy through education? Over the past decade or so, our societies have been facing increasing difficulties in reconciling acceptance of diversity and social inclusion with the need for community. The search for simple solutions to complex problems, the fact that “fake news” and “alternative facts” are no longer seen as nonsensical expressions, our responses to migration and the “refugee crisis”, and the growth of populism in many parts of Europe present challenges to our societies, and not least to education. Authors from Europe, North America and South Africa outline how higher education could respond to these challenges. The first section makes a strong case for the continuing importance of higher education and research to modern society. The second focuses on higher education institutions and the need for inclusive and diverse campuses. The third section considers opportunities to improve the inclusion of refugees and immigrants in higher education. Whereas the focus in Europe is mostly on refugees, in the United States it is largely on immigrants, further accentuated by the debate on the Dreamers.

Disability is a widespread phenomenon, indeed a potentially universal one as life expectancies rise. Within the academic world, it has relevance for all disciplines yet is often dismissed as a niche market or someone else’s domain. This collection explores how academic avoidance of disability studies and disability theory is indicative of social prejudice and highlights, conversely, how the academy can and does engage with disability studies. This innovative book brings together work in the humanities and the social sciences, and draws on the riches of cultural diversity to challenge institutional and disciplinary avoidance. Divided into three parts, the first looks at how educational institutions and systems implicitly uphold double standards, which can result in negative experiences for staff and students who are disabled. The second part explores how disability studies informs and improves a number of academic disciplines, from social work to performance arts. The final part shows how more diverse cultural engagement offers a way forward for the academy, demonstrating ways in which we can make more explicit the interdisciplinary significance of disability studies – and, by extension, disability theory, activism, experience, and culture. Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance will interest students and scholars of disability studies, education studies and cultural studies.