The two-year community college is a hundred-year-old phenomenon, locally funded and distinctly American, yet increasingly exportable. Serving ever more varied roles while being challenged economically, legislatively, and academically to meet progressively higher expectations in the United States, the American community college has been discovered…

Multinational colleges and universities pose numerous challenges to the traditional models of quality assurance that are designed to validate domestic higher education. When institutions cross international borders, at least two quality assurance protocols are involved. To guard against fraud and abuse, quality assurance in the host country is…

Universities have been attracted to the creation of international branch campuses (IBCs) for many reasons, including cultural immersion of students and faculty and global brand recognition for a university seeking to enhance its reputation and strengthen its academic standards. This chapter provides specific advice for how IBCs can negotiate entry…

International branch campuses (IBCs) operate in national and international policy environments that are still rapidly evolving. While IBCs have been operating for several decades, most of that time they have operated below the domestic regulatory radar of either the exporting (home) or importing (host) governments. As the number of such…

This chapter provides an annotated bibliography of resources pertaining to international branch campuses (IBCs). This collection of references has been selected to represent the breadth of emerging scholarship on cross-border higher education and is intended to provide further resources on a range of concerns surrounding cross-border higher…

Incivility can obstruct constructive public discourse and problem solving. Restoring civility is a task for higher education, but it may require tradeoffs with other democratic values. Civility is one value that matters, but it is not the only value. It is important to understand the tradeoffs and tensions. One way for higher education to…

Throughout the last 50 years, the debate over engaging politics in the college classroom has raged on, sparked in part by the belief that liberal biases saturate scholarship and teaching in universities, which in turn lays the bedrock for the left-wing indoctrination of students. Polarizing and vitriolic debates abound regarding if, when, and how…

For the last five years, the Higgins School of Humanities has worked to develop a culture of dialogue at Clark University through its Difficult Dialogues Initiative. People know that genuine communication, creative collaboration, and effective problem solving are necessary to address the challenges they face as a nation and world; a renewed…

Academic communities must learn to address many of the social divisions, misunderstandings, and inequities of society as a whole. Although challenging, this offers tremendous opportunities for educators to develop, study, and learn from innovative programs that respond effectively to these social issues on college and university campuses. This…

In January 2003, the Northwest Area Foundation (NWAF) contacted land grant universities in Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Washington to involve them in a program initiative to address rural poverty. After a strategic planning process, NWAF had shifted from traditional grant making to operating programs that…

Facing significant budget deficits and stagnant enrollments, a local school district realized that they would likely need to close some schools, which is always a difficult issue for communities to consider. The school district, hoping to find a way to have a productive community conversation about this difficult issue, turned to a local,…

Attempts to involve citizens more productively in public life have proliferated so rapidly that scholars are struggling to catch up. Around the world, community leaders are experimenting with ways to engage residents in public deliberation, decision making, and problem solving. A number of questions and challenges facing public officials, civic…

Scholars, practitioners, and proponents of community-university engagement insist that reciprocity, mutual benefit, and peer relationships are essential to creating truly democratic partnerships between campus and community leaders. These same principles are seen as important to creating environments where university students learn democratic…

American higher education is afflicted by a condition of successful failure. In terms of academic knowledge production, America's colleges and universities are success stories, yet there is a disturbing neglect of the civic life eroding all around Americans. At a time of widespread public distrust of politics, institutions, and officials, a time…

Political pressure against higher education is nothing new but, as in the broader public square, the discourse seems to have reached a new level of invective, particularly since 9/11. Much has been written about allegations against the academy for its systemic left-leaning political bias in teaching and for protecting, under the banner of academic…