Full Description
Slogans, myths, and isolated anecdotes are inadequate substitutes for documented history and contextual understanding.
Literature on the history of higher education is dominated by ahistorical and contextually ignorant slogans. Seldom acknowledged, in discussions of the "decline" or "failure" of the modern university, is 1) how long it has been going on (at least since the 1960s); and 2) universities' own complicity in this long, complicated, and contradictory process. Myths intertwine inseparably with slogans to echo yet another "lost cause." Our collective, as well as individual, pasts provide essential lessons if we know how to read and learn from them. More complicated is imagining a plausible better future for universities. In Reconstructing the "Uni-versity": From the Ashes of the "Mega- and Multi-versity" to the Futures of Higher Education, Harvey J. Graff, bringing experience from over 50 years as a professor, provides an accurate history of higher education, redefining the issues and terms to establish a new agenda.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. New Beginnings Based in Part on Re-interpreting and Learning from the Past
2. First Steps toward the new "Uni-versity"
3. Ways and Means: The impossible dream of changing "incentive structures" and
"business models"
4. The End of Slogans for Self-Promotion and Mis-direction of Multiple Publics: Can or Will
Administrators Rejoin Universities? Can Presidents Preside? Can Trustees be Trusted?
5. The Return, or Reconstruction/Remaking, of the Faculty, and the Disappearing "Missions"
of universities. Can Faculty "Share Governance"?
6. Student Life or Student Lives? Where, What, When, and How? Preparing for Both Lives
and work.
7. University Districts and Civic Lives: Universities. Communities, and Students
Conclusion. Pasts, Present, Futures
References and Bibliography
About the Author
Index
