Academic Pathfinders

Academic Pathfinders
Author: Patricia J. Gumport
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2002-03-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0313011044

From the 1960s to the 1980s, a range of academic possibilities for women developed, as their career histories and intellectual biographies reveal. Some women sought to generate a new knowledge specialty in their disciplines, often explicitly defying admonishments that the subject matter was an oxymoron. Others pursued academic paths that disregarded these new opportunities and developments. Together their accounts portray how feminist scholarship emerged and was facilitated by historically specific conditions: a critical mass of like-minded women, a national political movement, an abundance of financial support for doctoral candidates, a tolerance from established faculty for students to pursue the margins of disciplinary scholarship, and an organizational capacity to add new academic categories for courses, programs, academic positions, and extra-departmental groups. That historical era has since been supplanted by feminist infighting and backlash, as well as more cost-conscious academic management practices, which have altered the academic landscape for knowledge creation. Analyzing the accounts of academic women during this era yields a conceptual framework for understanding how new knowledge is created on multiple levels—through personal reflection on life experiences, disciplinary legacies, local organizational contexts, and wider societal expectations.

The Organization of Higher Education

The Organization of Higher Education
Author: Michael N. Bastedo
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 572
Release: 2012-05-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421405059

Colleges and universities are best understood as networks of departments working together to fulfill a mission of education, innovation, and community partnership. To better understand how these large and complex institutions function, scholars can apply organizational and strategic planning concepts made familiar by business management. This book follows that model and explores the new and emerging ways by which organizational theories address major contemporary concerns in higher education. The contributors to this volume are both influenced and inspired by the pioneering work of Marvin Peterson and his four-decade career researching higher education organization. Comprising a serious reexamination of the field, the essays review past and current thinking, address the field’s core theoretical traditions, and pursue exciting new lines of inquiry, including the organizational dynamics of diversity and social movement organizations. Ideal for courses in administration and theory, this book reinvigorates the study of higher education as an organization and encourages scholars to rediscover the value of organizational principles in all areas of higher education research. Contributors: Michael N. Bastedo, University of Michigan; Patricia J. Gumport, Stanford University; James C. Hearn, University of Georgia; Adrianna Kezar, University of Southern California; Jason Lane, State University of New York at Albany; Simon Marginson, University of Melbourne; Michael K. McLendon, Vanderbilt University; Anna Neumann, Columbia University; Brian Pusser, University of Virginia; Fabio Rojas, Indiana University; Daryl G. Smith, Claremont Graduate University; William G. Tierney, University of Southern California; and the late J. Douglas Toma, University of Georgia

Pathfinders

Pathfinders
Author: Jim Al-Khalili
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2010-09-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0141965010

For over 700 years the international language of science was Arabic. In Pathfinders, Jim al-Khalili celebrates the forgotten pioneers who helped shape our understanding of the world. All scientists have stood on the shoulders of giants. But most historical accounts today suggest that the achievements of the ancient Greeks were not matched until the European Renaissance in the 16th century, a 1,000-year period dismissed as the Dark Ages. In the ninth-century, however, the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Abu Ja'far Abdullah al-Ma'mun, created the greatest centre of learning the world had ever seen, known as Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom. The scientists and philosophers he brought together sparked a period of extraordinary discovery, in every field imaginable, launching a golden age of Arabic science. Few of these scientists, however, are now known in the western world. Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, a polymath who outshines everyone in history except Leonardo da Vinci? The Syrian astronomer Ibn al-Shatir, whose manuscripts would inspire Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system? Or the 13th-century Andalucian physician Ibn al-Nafees, who correctly described blood circulation 400 years before William Harvey? Iraqi Ibn al-Haytham who practised the modern scientific method 700 years before Bacon and Descartes, and founded the field of modern optics before Newton? Or even ninth-century zoologist al-Jahith, who developed a theory of natural selection a thousand years before Darwin? The West needs to see the Islamic world through new eyes and the Islamic world, in turn, to take pride in its extraordinarily rich heritage. Anyone who reads this book will understand why.

The Worldwide Transformation of Higher Education

The Worldwide Transformation of Higher Education
Author: David P. Baker
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2008-05-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1849505438

Enrollment in institutions of higher education around the world is growing. Some scholars have suggested that one reason for this expansion is that the role of higher education has shifted over the last 50 years from an elite to a mass institution. This book discusses the worldwide transformation of higher education from multiple perspectives.

Acting Otherwise

Acting Otherwise
Author: Peiying Chen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 569
Release: 2004-04-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1135934371

Acting Otherwise concerns the strategies of action that have been used by feminist scholars to attain the institutionalization of women's/gender studies in universities.

How Professors Think

How Professors Think
Author: Michle Lamont
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2010-01-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674057333

Excellence. Originality. Intelligence. Everyone in academia stresses quality. But what exactly is it, and how do professors identify it? In the academic evaluation system known as Òpeer review,Ó highly respected professors pass judgment, usually confidentially, on the work of others. But only those present in the deliberative chambers know exactly what is said. Michle Lamont observed deliberations for fellowships and research grants, and interviewed panel members at length. In How Professors Think, she reveals what she discovered about this secretive, powerful, peculiar world. Anthropologists, political scientists, literary scholars, economists, historians, and philosophers don't share the same standards. Economists prefer mathematical models, historians favor different kinds of evidence, and philosophers don't care much if only other philosophers understand them. But when they come together for peer assessment, academics are expected to explain their criteria, respect each other's expertise, and guard against admiring only work that resembles their own. They must decide: Is the research original and important? Brave, or glib? Timely, or merely trendy? Pro-diversity or interdisciplinary enough? Judging quality isn't robotically rational; it's emotional, cognitive, and social, too. Yet most academics' self-respect is rooted in their ability to analyze complexity and recognize quality, in order to come to the fairest decisions about that elusive god, Òexcellence.Ó In How Professors Think, Lamont aims to illuminate the confidential process of evaluation and to push the gatekeepers to both better understand and perform their role.

Knowledge Production in European Universities

Knowledge Production in European Universities
Author: Kwiek Marek
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2012-11-23
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3631624034

The book studies transformations of European universities in the context of globalization and Europeanization, the questioning of the foundations of the «Golden Age» of the Keynesian welfare state, public sector reforms, demographic changes, the massification and diversification of higher education, and the emergence of knowledge economies. Such phenomena as academic entrepreneurialism and diversified channels of knowledge exchange in European universities are linked to transformations of the state and changes in public sector services. The first, contextual part of the book studies the changing state/university relationships, and the second, empirically-informed part draws from several recent large-scale comparative European research projects.

Inside Graduate Admissions

Inside Graduate Admissions
Author: Julie R. Posselt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2016-01-11
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674088697

How does graduate admissions work? Who does the system work for, and who falls through its cracks? More people than ever seek graduate degrees, but little has been written about who gets in and why. Drawing on firsthand observations of admission committees and interviews with faculty in 10 top-ranked doctoral programs in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, education professor Julie Posselt pulls back the curtain on a process usually conducted in secret. “Politicians, judges, journalists, parents and prospective students subject the admissions policies of undergraduate colleges and professional schools to considerable scrutiny, with much public debate over appropriate criteria. But the question of who gets into Ph.D. programs has by comparison escaped much discussion. That may change with the publication of Inside Graduate Admissions...While the departments reviewed in the book remain secret, the general process used by elite departments would now appear to be more open as a result of Posselt’s book.” —Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed “Revealing...Provide[s] clear, consistent insights into what admissions committees look for.” —Beryl Lieff Benderly, Science

Integral Knowledge Creation and Innovation

Integral Knowledge Creation and Innovation
Author: Elizabeth Mamukwa
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2020-07-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 042984929X

This work focuses on the creation of new knowledge, and how this has happened throughout all ages, as far back as the time of ancient philosophy to today. A product of integral research, it covers the process of creating new knowledge, leveraging existing knowledge, sometimes resulting in cutthroat innovations. It also includes knowledge systems such as conventional university systems to Mode 2 university concepts, culminating on integral research to innovation. This book will help the reader to realise that the subject of knowledge creation is no longer business as usual. Many innovations have been created for human benefit in general, but such innovations may have benefited only parts of society. The challenge in the world is that, while new innovations may be brilliant, there are sections of society who continue to slip into poverty. Modern innovators must also consider such communities and come up with appropriate interventions. This book will open the eyes of innovators to new possibilities. In addition, the subject of knowledge should not be an elitist affair. One may stand to gain a lot by seeing the knowledge in other people, whatever their station in life. This realisation can enable serious innovators to widen their scope in terms of the sources of existing knowledge which can be improved and reassessed as new knowledge. Such existing knowledge can be identified by engaging the very communities that may be affected by a problem or challenge. Such communities will have had time to interrogate their situations and think of possible solutions to such, though they might not have the economic capacity to implement such solutions. This is always a useful starting point if one is seeking a solution to a community problem. This book will be useful to students interested in the subject of knowledge and innovation, from under-graduate to PhD level. It will also benefit captains of industry, executives and managers who are interested in improving their knowledge improvement cycles in their companies.

Handbook of Research on the Role of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Achieving Civic Engagement and Social Justice in Smart Cities

Handbook of Research on the Role of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Achieving Civic Engagement and Social Justice in Smart Cities
Author: Taher, Mohamed
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 565
Release: 2021-11-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1799883655

In achieving civic engagement and social justice in smart cities, literacy programs are offered in the society by three essential information service providers: libraries, archives, and museums. Although the library and museum services are documented in literature, there is little evidence of community-led library or museum services that make a full circle in understanding community-library, community-archive, and community-museum relationships. The Handbook of Research on the Role of Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Achieving Civic Engagement and Social Justice in Smart Cities examines the application of tools and techniques in library and museum literacy in achieving civic engagement and social justice. It also introduces a new outlook in the services of libraries and museums. Covering topics such as countering fake news, human rights literacies, and outreach activities, this book is essential for community-based organizations, librarians, museum administrations, education leaders, information professionals, smart city design planners, digital tool developers, policymakers engaged in diversity, researchers, and academicians.