A caustic expose of the deeply state of our colleges-America's most expensive Ponzi scheme. What drives a former English major with a creative writing degree, several unpublished novels, three kids, and a straining marriage to take a job as a night teacher at a second-rate college? An unaffordable mortgage. As his house starts falling apart in every imaginable way, Professor X grabs first one, then two jobs teaching English 101 and 102-composition and literature-at a small private college and a local community college. He finds himself on the front lines of America's academic crisis. It's quite an education. This is the story of what he learns about his struggling pupils, about the college system-a business more bent on its own financial targets than the wellbeing of its students-about the classics he rediscovers, and about himself. Funny, wry, self-deprecating, and a provocative indictment of our failing schools, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower is both a brilliant academic satire and a poignant account of one teacher's seismic frustration-and unlikely salvation-as his real estate woes catapult him into a subprime crisis of an altogether more human nature.

"In the thirty years since Dick Hebdige published Subculture: The Meaning of Style, the seemingly antithetical worlds of punk rock and academia have converged in some rather interesting, if not peculiar, ways. A once marginal subculture documented in homemade 'zines and three chord songs has become fodder for dozens of scholarly articles, books, PhD dissertations, and conversations amongst well-mannered conference panelists. At the same time, the academic ranks have been increasingly infiltrated by professors and graduate students whose educations began not in the classroom, but in the lyric sheets of 7" records and the cramped confines of all-ages shows. Punkademics explores these varied intersections by giving voice to some of the people who arguably best understand the odd bedfellows of punk and academia. In addition to being one of the first edited collections of scholarly work on punk, it is a timely book that features original essays, interviews, and select reprints from notable writers, musicians, visual artists, and emerging talents who actively cut & paste the boundaries between punk culture, politics, and higher education"--Publisher's description

Many people fear that the ivory tower is crumbling. Of urgent concern are deteriorating standards, fewer jobs, waning professional prestige and new layers of inequity. Leadership in the tower is easy to spot. It is hierarchical, detached and mostly male. In this highly readable book, Joan Eveline turns her acute gaze to the ivory basement, where the corridors, departments, laboratories and offices are peopled. There she observes a greedy organization cannibalizing the efforts, energy and care of the basement's workers, most of whom are women. Voices from the basement - of the University of Western Australia, but it could be any university - speak about the devaluing of their work. Eveline detects a new linkage, through shared experience, of administrative staff, research assistants and the lower order of academics, who increasingly are casual workers. And she discerns a courageous and almost invisible exercise of leadership. This "post-heroic" leadership values personal relationship, loyalty and diversity. It is creative, flexible and, above all, collaborative. This book will hearten those dismayed by the restructuring pandemic. For ivory basement workers have, in adversity, forged a leadership model that might well be mobilized to revive Australia's ailing universities.

Nanny Maisy Edmonds is furious when a stranger tries to take her orphaned little charge—stealing a shockingly explicit kiss from her in the process! Can infamous tycoon Alexei Ranaevsky really be the child's godfather? Installed in Alexei's remote Italian villa, Maisy is intent on protecting little Kostya—and doing nothing else…. Alexei's childhood-turned-nightmare means he allows himself no emotional attachments. But Maisy's beguiling sweetness has the uncompromising Russian determined to seduce her down from her inexperienced pedestal….

The first book in the word-of-mouth phenomenon debut fantasy series about one man's dangerous journey through a labyrinthine world. "One of my favorite books of all time" -- Mark Lawrence The Tower of Babel is the greatest marvel in the world. Immense as a mountain, the ancient Tower holds unnumbered ringdoms, warring and peaceful, stacked one on the other like the layers of a cake. It is a world of geniuses and tyrants, of luxury and menace, of unusual animals and mysterious machines. Soon after arriving for his honeymoon at the Tower, the mild-mannered headmaster of a small village school, Thomas Senlin, gets separated from his wife, Marya, in the overwhelming swarm of tourists, residents, and miscreants. Senlin is determined to find Marya, but to do so he'll have to navigate madhouses, ballrooms, and burlesque theaters. He must survive betrayal, assassins, and the illusions of the Tower. But if he hopes to find his wife, he will have to do more than just endure. This quiet man of letters must become a man of action.

In Poor Queer Studies Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.

In the ancient Scottish ballad "Tam Lin," headstrong Janet defies Tam Lin to walk in her own land of Carterhaugh . . . and then must battle the Queen of Faery for possession of her lover’s body and soul. In this version of "Tam Lin," masterfully crafted by Pamela Dean, Janet is a college student, "Carterhaugh" is Carter Hall at the university where her father teaches, and Tam Lin is a boy named Thomas Lane. Set against the backdrop of the early 1970s, imbued with wit, poetry, romance, and magic, Tam Lin has become a cult classic—and once you begin reading, you’ll know why. This reissue features an updated introduction by the book’s original editor, the acclaimed Terri Windling.

"The most talked-about education book this semester." —New York Times From the author of Coming Apart, and based on a series of controversial Wall Street Journal op-eds, this landmark manifesto gives voice to what everyone knows about talent, ability, and intelligence but no one wants to admit. With four truths as his framework, Charles Murray, the bestselling coauthor of The Bell Curve, sweeps away the hypocrisy, wishful thinking, and upside-down priorities that grip America’s educational establishment. •Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn, but America’s educational system does its best to ignore this. •Half of the children are below average. Many children cannot learn more than rudimentary reading and math. Yet decades of policies have required schools to divert resources to unattainable goals. •Too many people are going to college. Only a fraction of students struggling to get a degree can profit from education at the college level. •America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted. It is time to start thinking about the kind of education needed by the young people who will run the country.

It's common knowledge few people save enough for retirement. What's unfortunate is those who do, rarely invest it well during retirement. To a degree, this squanders what has been diligently saved. There are too many wrong answers and not enough right guidance for retirees, and it's difficult to discern which is which. The art and science to getting it right is explained in this book.

Few writers ask us to question our fundamental assumptions about education as provocatively as Alfie Kohn. Time magazine has called him'perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades [and] test scores.' And the Washington Post says he is 'the most energetic and charismatic figure standing in the way of a major federal effort to make standardized curriculums and tests a fact of life in every U.S. school.' In this new collection of essays, Kohn takes on some of the most important and controversial topics in education of the last few years. His central focus is on the real goals of education-a topic, he argues, that we systematically ignore while lavishing attention on misguided models of learning and counterproductive techniques of motivation. The shift to talking about goals yields radical conclusions and wonderfully pungent essays that only Alfie Kohn could have written. From the title essay's challenge to conventional, conservative definitions of a good education to essays on standards and testing and grades that tally the severe educational costs of overemphasizing a narrow conception of achievement, Kohn boldly builds on his earlier work and writes for a wide audience. Kohn's new book will be greeted with enthusiasm by his many readers and by any teacher or parent looking for a refreshing perspective on today's debates about schools.