This article presents an interview with Alice G. Dewey, professor emeritus at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and granddaughter of the renowned American philosopher John Dewey. She is an economic anthropologist who did ground-breaking research on local markets in Indonesia in the 1950s. She recently co-edited "Surviving Against the Odds:…

Western Governors University was conceptualized in 1995 at a meeting of the Western Governors Association, and founded soon after in an effort to increase degree production in higher education at a lower cost. It has expanded significantly over the past few years, driven both by increased demand for online education and by drastic state budget…

The ideal of community engagement suggests that both a student's career and his college's mission are (or ought to be) inextricable from the community in which they are embedded. That students, faculty, and academic institutions should serve community purposes, actively engage in community affairs, and network themselves in real and virtual…

The Center for an Urban Future (CUF) released a report last November asserting that, with a six-year graduation rate of 28 percent, City University of New York (CUNY) community colleges "should be doing much better." The report declared graduation rates "lackluster" and criticized community colleges for "not yet delivering on their potential." But…

The Princeton Teaching Initiative at Princeton University is an all-volunteer group formed to teach for-credit college courses in the New Jersey state prison system. The courses are coordinated with the Mercer County Community College (MCCC), which accredits the courses and maintains the students' transcripts. Volunteer professors, postdoctoral…

In this article, the author shares her reflections on teaching and learning. The author's teaching philosophy is rooted in her studies of developmental psychology and educational psychology. The theoretical approach most compatible with her view of teaching and learning advocates a contextualist and interactionist view that Tharp and Gallimore…

The author went to graduate school during the height of the culture wars, when the debate over the place of cultural literacy in the curriculum and the legitimacy of the great books approach was still raging. The first college class that he taught was structured around the theme "education and the making of knowledge," with E.D. Hirsch and Paulo…

The author wants to know more about the appreciation of and respect for pluralities, in places where differences in race and ethnic background are rare. Given the lack of regular and even intimate contact with a variety of peoples, what can teachers expect? Further, with the de facto separation of races in many rural area of the United States,…

Historically, faculty of color have been woefully underrepresented in higher education. Since the 1980s, though, numbers for these academics have begun to increase. To bring attention to the some of the struggles that faculty of color face, the authors created a counternarrative by drawing on their collective experience to deconstruct and…

Education is an international must, a veritable human right, yet education--especially higher education--in the land of the free is still remarkably elusive. The author has witnessed the many obstacles associated with preparing students for college. Advanced courses are rarely offered in these schools due to a lack of perceived eligible students,…

When one considers the possibilities for a new progressive era in American higher education, the author contends that it is wise to review the past because there are lessons to be learned. In fact, the latter part of the 20th century was one of great progress for diversity in higher education, generally speaking, and for African Americans in…

Traditionally, academic freedom has been understood as an individual right and a negative liberty. As William Tierney and Vincente Lechuga explain, "Academic freedom, although an institutional concept, was vested in the individual professor." The touchstone document on academic freedom, the American Association of University Professor's (AAUP)…

Those who are in higher education dream of a world of changed values where the inchoate, contested, but urgent constellation of things that they collectively believe in, work for, and seek on college campuses has spread well beyond any specific "quad" and has instead become something of a global norm. Imagine that higher education is no longer…

In 2002, during yet another budget crisis produced in large measure by the state's tax-cutting mania, Massachusetts proposed a massive cut in the university's budget. Through an early retirement incentive, the state wanted to reduce the faculty by 10 percent. No one was prepared to fight back. Despite UMass Amherst's long history of activism, and…

As anyone who has ever defended a thesis or been on a tenure track must know, American institutions of higher education have rigorous and finely calibrated ways of according respect to those who work in them. What they do not have enough of is respect from those beyond their gates. The author argues that the system that created the two-tiered…