The Ivory Tower And Beyond

The gap between academics and practitioners in international relations has widened in recent years, according to the authors of this book. Many international relations scholars no longer try to reach beyond the ivory tower and many policymakers disdain international relations scholarship as arcane and irrelevant. Joseph Lepgold and Miroslav Nincic demonstrate how good international relations theory can inform policy choices. Globalization, ethnic conflict, and ecological threats have created a new set of issues that challenge policymakers, and cutting-edge scholarship can contribute a great deal to the diagnosis and handling of potentially explosive situations.

Derek Bok examines the complex ethical and social issues facing modern universities today, and suggests approaches that will allow the academic institution both to serve society and to continue its primary mission of teaching and research.

"The five historians in this book were all, to varying degrees, participant historians, whose life within the ivory tower was complemented by an engagement with public affairs. Conversely, their activism and civil engagement fed back into the history they wrote. J.C. Beaglehole was the renowned editor of "Captain Cook's Journals" and a public intellectual and critical conscience in his native New Zealand. His student J.W. Davidson founded a distinctive school of Pacific Islands history and went on to be a constitutional adviser to Pacific territories on the threshold of independence. He bequeathed a tradition of the engaged scholar which he, in turn, inherited from Beaglehole. For Richard Gilson the cause was less political than a sometimes obsessive devotion to establishing the place of Samoans in their historical encounter with Europeans. Harry Maude started as a colonial official and made a long-awaited mid-career change to studying the people he had once administered. Brij V. Lal has deliberately lived at the interface of scholarship and action, particularly as one of the makers of Fiji's 1997 Constitution. "The Ivory Tower and Beyond" takes a biographical approach and more. It is also an excursion into intellectual and institutional history. It interweaves the subjects' interests and activities within and beyond the ivory tower and shows that these seemingly discrete activities are not disassociated from each other. In each case the public figure and the man of letters is inseparable. "The Ivory Tower and Beyond" also demonstrates that a proper appreciation of a historian's writings requires an understanding of the backgrounds and the structures within which the texts were created - upbringing, academic training, institutional pressures and the vagaries of patronage and preferment. Private lives and professional formations intertwine and are refracted by an institutional prism." --Publisher.

Most scientists and researchers aren’t prepared to talk to the press or to policymakers—or to deal with backlash. Many researchers have the horror stories to prove it. What’s clear, according to Nancy Baron, is that scientists, journalists and public policymakers come from different cultures. They follow different sets of rules, pursue different goals, and speak their own language. To effectively reach journalists and public officials, scientists need to learn new skills and rules of engagement. No matter what your specialty, the keys to success are clear thinking, knowing what you want to say, understanding your audience, and using everyday language to get your main points across. In this practical and entertaining guide to communicating science, Baron explains how to engage your audience and explain why a particular finding matters. She explores how to ace your interview, promote a paper, enter the political fray, and use new media to connect with your audience. The book includes advice from journalists, decision makers, new media experts, bloggers and some of the thousands of scientists who have participated in her communication workshops. Many of the researchers she has worked with have gone on to become well-known spokespeople for science-related issues. Baron and her protégées describe the risks and rewards of “speaking up,” how to deal with criticism, and the link between communications and leadership. The final chapter, ‘Leading the Way’ offers guidance to scientists who want to become agents of change and make your science matter. Whether you are an absolute beginner or a seasoned veteran looking to hone your skills, Escape From the Ivory Tower can help make your science understood, appreciated and perhaps acted upon.

Across America, universities have become big businesses—and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow. Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. They maintain private police forces that target the Black and Latinx neighborhoods nearby. They become the primary employers, dictating labor practices and suppressing wages. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes readers from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities. Through eye-opening conversations with city leaders, low-wage workers tending to students’ needs, and local activists fighting encroachment, scholar Davarian L. Baldwin makes clear who benefits from unchecked university power—and who is made vulnerable. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower is a wake-up call to the reality that higher education is no longer the ubiquitous public good it was once thought to be. But as Baldwin shows, there is an alternative vision for urban life, one that necessitates a more equitable relationship between our cities and our universities.

An unprecedented look at college women's risks of and experiences with sexual victimization Unsafe in the Ivory Tower examines the nature and dimensions of a salient social problem—the sexual victimization of female college students today, and how women respond when they are, in fact, sexually victimized. The authors discuss the research that scholars have conducted to illuminate the origins and extent of this controversial issue as well as what can be done to prevent it. Students and other interested readers learn about the nature of victimization while simultaneously gaining an understanding of the ways in which criminologists, victimologists, and social scientists conduct research that informs theory and policy debates. Key Features Provides detailed information about sexual victimization on college campuses today Introduces broad lessons about the interactions of ideology, science and methodology, and public policy Integrates current data, research, and theory, based on the authors' national studies of more than 8,000 randomly selected female college students Intended Audience This supplemental text is ideal for courses such as Sex Crimes, Violence and Abuse, Victimology, Gender and Crime, Sociology of Violence, Sociology of Women, and the Sociology of Sex and Gender in departments of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, and women's studies. It is also useful for those involved in studying or creating public policy related to this issue and for those interested in sexual victimization on campuses generally.

Exposes the intimate relationship between big finance and higher education inequality in America. Elite colleges have long played a crucial role in maintaining social and class status in America while public universities have offered a major stepping-stone to new economic opportunities. However, as Charlie Eaton reveals in Bankers in the Ivory Tower, finance has played a central role in the widening inequality in recent decades, both in American higher education and in American society at large. With federal and state funding falling short, the US higher education system has become increasingly dependent on financial markets and the financiers that mediate them. Beginning in the 1980s, the government, colleges, students, and their families took on multiple new roles as financial investors, borrowers, and brokers. The turn to finance, however, has yielded wildly unequal results. At the top, ties to Wall Street help the most elite private schools achieve the greatest endowment growth through hedge fund investments and the support of wealthy donors. At the bottom, takeovers by private equity transform for-profit colleges into predatory organizations that leave disadvantaged students with massive loan debt and few educational benefits. And in the middle, public universities are squeezed between incentives to increase tuition and pressures to maintain access and affordability. Eaton chronicles these transformations, making clear for the first time just how tight the links are between powerful financiers and America’s unequal system of higher education.