The Academic Revolution

The Academic Revolution describes the rise to power of professional scholars and scientists, first in America's leading universities and now in the larger society as well. Without attempting a full-scale history of American higher education, it outlines a theory about its development and present status. It is illustrated with firsthand observations of a wide variety of colleges and universities the country over-colleges for the rich and colleges for the upwardly mobile; colleges for vocationally oriented men and colleges for intellectually and socially oriented women; colleges for Catholics and colleges for Protestants; colleges for blacks and colleges for rebellious whites. The authors also look at some of the revolution's consequences. They see it as intensifying conflict between young and old, and provoking young people raised in permissive, middle-class homes to attacks on the legitimacy of adult authority. In the process, the revolution subtly transformed the kinds of work to which talented young people aspire, contributing to the decline of entrepreneurship and the rise of professionalism. They conclude that mass higher education, for all its advantages, has had no measurable effect on the rate of social mobility or the degree of equality in American society. Jencks and Riesman are not nostalgic; their description of the nineteenth-century liberal arts colleges is corrosively critical. They maintain that American students know more than ever before, that their teachers are more competent and stimulating than in earlier times, and that the American system of higher education has brought the American people to an unprecedented level of academic competence. But while they regard the academic revolution as having been an historically necessary and progressive step, they argue that, like all revolutions, it can devour its children. For Jencks and Riesman, academic professionalism is an advance over amateur gentility, but they warn of its dangers and limitations: the elitism and arrogance implicit in meritocracy, the myopia that derives from a strictly academic view of human experience and understanding, the complacency that comes from making technical competence an end rather than a means.

Maximizing student capacity and restoring motivation—the key to school success Brain research has the power to revolutionize education, but it can be difficult for educators to implement innovative strategies without the proper knowledge or resources. The Education Revolution bridges the gap between neuroscience, psychology, and educational practice. It delivers what educators need: current and relevant concrete applications to use in classrooms and schools. Readers will find Teaching strategies and model lessons designed to advance academic performance Solution-focused practices to address the root of negative behaviors Approaches to counteract the negative impact of technology on the brain Concrete methods to improve school climate

Advocates of academic freedom often view it as a variation of the right to free speech and an essential feature of democracy. Stanley Fish argues here for a narrower conception of academic freedom, one that does not grant academics a legal status different from other professionals. Providing a blueprint for the study of academic freedom, Fish breaks down the schools of thought on the subject, which range from the idea that academic freedom is justified by the common good or by academic exceptionalism, to its potential for critique or indeed revolution. Fish himself belongs to what he calls the “It's Just a Job” school: while academics need the latitude—call it freedom if you like—necessary to perform their professional activities, they are not free in any special sense to do anything but their jobs. Academic freedom, Fish argues, should be justified only by the specific educational good that academics offer. Defending the university “in all its glorious narrowness” as a place of disinterested inquiry, Fish offers a bracing corrective to academic orthodoxy.

Alone among America's major institutions, colleges and universities have traditional refused to adopt modern management and planning. Now they have entered a perilous new era of declining enrollments, inflated costs, and shifting academic priorities. The result: higher education is going through a planning and management revolution. This path breaking book describes in detail the nature and dimensions of education's dramatic reversal and the reasons behind it. It examines the new role of strategic planning and the resulting changes in the role of professors, trustees, and college presidents. It describes how colleges and universities can introduce the latest planning and management methods for their own benefit.

This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Part of the AHRC/British Library Academic Book of the Future Project, this book interrogates current and emerging contexts of academic books from the perspectives of thirteen expert voices from the connected communities of publishing, academia, libraries, and bookselling.

This book is a critique of the education system by talking about the main problems where one is that the world is changing and we need to change with it and try to find active solutions. When the pandemic came along it has been a great example of having to change and adapting to a new way to reshape the education system.

Patterns of globalization, the flow of students and scholars across borders, the impact of information technology, and other key forces are critically assessed. This book is a key resource for understanding the present and future of global higher education.