Winner of the Homer D. Babbidge Jr. (2016) In Wesleyan University, 1910–1970, David B. Potts presents an engaging story that includes a measured departure from denominational identity, an enterprising acquisition of fabulous wealth, and a burst of enthusiastic aspirations that initiated an era of financial stress. Threaded through these episodes is a commitment to social service that is rooted in Methodism and clothed in more humanistic garb after World War II. Potts gives an unprecedented level of attention to the board of trustees and finances. These closely related components are now clearly introduced as major shaping forces in the development of American higher education. Extensive examination is also given to student and faculty roles in building and altering institutional identity. Threaded throughout these probes within in the analytical narrative is a close look at the waxing and waning of presidential leadership. All these developments, as is particularly evident in the areas of student demography and faculty compensation, travel on a pathway through middle-class America. Within this broad context, Wesleyan becomes a window on how the nation's liberal arts colleges survived and thrived during the last century. This book concludes the author's analysis of changes in institutional identities that shaped the narrative for his widely praised first volume, Wesleyan University, 1831–1910: Collegiate Enterprise in New England. His current fully evidenced sequel supplies helpful insights and reference points as we encounter the present fiscal strain in higher education and the related debates on institutional mission.

After World War II, returning veterans with GI Bill benefits ushered in an era of unprecedented growth that fundamentally altered the meaning, purpose, and structure of higher education. This volume explores the multifaceted and tumultuous transformation of American higher education that occurred between 1945 and 1970, while examining the changes in institutional forms, curricula, clientele, faculty, and governance. A wide range of well-known contributors cover topics such as the first public university to explicitly serve an urban population, the creation of modern day honors programs, how teachers’ colleges were repurposed as state colleges, the origins of faculty unionism and collective bargaining, and the dramatic student protests that forever changed higher education. This engaging text explores a critical moment in the history of higher education, signaling a shift in the meaning of a college education, the concept of who should and who could obtain access to college, and what should be taught.

This lively narrative connects Wesleyan University to economic, religious, urban, and educational developments in nineteenth-century America. David B. Potts places Wesleyan's history in contexts that illuminate the dynamics of institutional change and contribute new perspectives on the nation's colleges, culture, and society. Potts explores Wesleyan's origins as a local enterprise in which citizens of Middletown, Connecticut, supplied land, buildings, and endowment pledges for a college that they organized in concert with Methodist clergy in New York and New England. He traces the dissolution of this alliance and the emergence of a thoroughly denominational institution that initiated coeducation in 1872. A second shift in identity, achieved by 1910, led Wesleyan to discard Methodist control and the education of women in return for status as a New England liberal arts college. Drawing on a wide range of manuscript collections, newspapers, and other sources, Potts describes faculty professionalization, trustee philanthropy, student discrimination against blacks and women, early rumblings of religious fundamentalism, and efforts of prestige-conscious alumni who pulled the country college into a financial and cultural orbit around New York City. Throughout he compares Wesleyan's history to developments at other New England colleges and universities.

A masterful history of the postwar transformation of American higher education In the decades after World War II, as government and social support surged and enrollments exploded, the role of colleges and universities in American society changed dramatically. Roger Geiger provides an in-depth history of this remarkable transformation, taking readers from the GI Bill and the postwar expansion of higher education to the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, desegregation and coeducation, and the ascendancy of the modern research university. He demonstrates how growth has been the defining feature of modern higher education, but how each generation since the war has pursued it for different reasons. Sweeping in scope and richly insightful, this groundbreaking book provides the context we need to understand the complex issues facing our colleges and universities today, from rising inequality and skyrocketing costs to deficiencies in student preparedness and lax educational standards.

In A New Moral Vision, Andrea L. Turpin explores how the entrance of women into U.S. colleges and universities shaped changing ideas about the moral and religious purposes of higher education in unexpected ways, and in turn profoundly shaped American culture. In the decades before the Civil War, evangelical Protestantism provided the main impetus for opening the highest levels of American education to women. Between the Civil War and World War I, however, shifting theological beliefs, a growing cultural pluralism, and a new emphasis on university research led educators to reevaluate how colleges should inculcate an ethical outlook in students—just as the proportion of female collegians swelled. In this environment, Turpin argues, educational leaders articulated a new moral vision for their institutions by positioning them within the new landscape of competing men's, women's, and coeducational colleges and universities. In place of fostering evangelical conversion, religiously liberal educators sought to foster in students a surprisingly more gendered ideal of character and service than had earlier evangelical educators. Because of this moral reorientation, the widespread entrance of women into higher education did not shift the social order in as egalitarian a direction as we might expect. Instead, college graduates—who formed a disproportionate number of the leaders and reformers of the Progressive Era—contributed to the creation of separate male and female cultures within Progressive Era public life and beyond. Drawing on extensive archival research at ten trend-setting men's, women's, and coeducational colleges and universities, A New Moral Vision illuminates the historical intersection of gender ideals, religious beliefs, educational theories, and social change in ways that offer insight into the nature—and cultural consequences—of the moral messages communicated by institutions of higher education today.

From the president of Wesleyan University, an illuminating history of the student, spanning from antiquity to Zoom In this sweeping book, Michael S. Roth narrates a vivid and dynamic history of students, exploring some of the principal models for learning that have developed in very different contexts, from the sixth century BCE to the present. Beginning with the followers of Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus and moving to medieval apprentices, students at Enlightenment centers of learning, and learners enrolled in twenty-first-century universities, he explores how students have been followers, interlocutors, disciples, rebels, and children becoming adults. There are many ways to be a student, Roth argues, but at their core is developing the capacity to think for oneself by learning from others, and thereby finding freedom. In an age of machine learning, this book celebrates the student who develops more than mastery, cultivating curiosity, judgment, creativity, and an ability to keep learning beyond formal schooling. Roth shows how the student throughout history has been someone who interacts dynamically with the world, absorbing its lessons and creatively responding to them.

The first full-length history of college teaching in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present, this book sheds new light on the ongoing tension between the modern scholarly ideal—scientific, objective, and dispassionate—and the inevitably subjective nature of day-to-day instruction. American college teaching is in crisis, or so we are told. But we've heard that complaint for the past 150 years, as critics have denounced the poor quality of instruction in undergraduate classrooms. Students daydream in gigantic lecture halls while a professor drones on, or they meet with a teaching assistant for an hour of aimless discussion. The modern university does not reward teaching, so faculty members at every level neglect it in favor of research and publication. In the first book-length history of American college teaching, Jonathan Zimmerman confirms but also contradicts these perennial complaints. Drawing upon a wide range of previously unexamined sources, The Amateur Hour shows how generations of undergraduates indicted the weak instruction they received. But Zimmerman also chronicles institutional efforts to improve it, especially by making teaching more "personal." As higher education grew into a gigantic industry, he writes, American colleges and universities introduced small-group activities and other reforms designed to counter the anonymity of mass instruction. They also experimented with new technologies like television and computers, which promised to "personalize" teaching by tailoring it to the individual interests and abilities of each student. But, Zimmerman reveals, the emphasis on the personal inhibited the professionalization of college teaching, which remains, ultimately, an amateur enterprise. The more that Americans treated teaching as a highly personal endeavor, dependent on the idiosyncrasies of the instructor, the less they could develop shared standards for it. Nor have they rigorously documented college instruction, a highly public activity which has taken place mostly in private. Pushing open the classroom door, The Amateur Hour illuminates American college teaching and frames a fresh case for restoring intimate learning communities, especially for America's least privileged students. Anyone who wants to change college teaching will have to start here.

The New England Small College Athletic Conference has won glowing appraisals in the sporting press since its founding in 1971. Established to strengthen intercollegiate sports in harmony with the high academic standards of its members--11 prestigious liberal arts colleges--the NESCAC is committed to equity and inclusion in athletic programs, and to providing only need-based financial aid. The Conference's reputation attracts many gifted student athletes. Drawing extensively on campus archives, media reports and interviews, this book compares the NESCAC's lofty strategy to reality, with a focus on recruiting, admissions, financial aid and diversity goals.

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Amherst College, a group of scholars and alumni explore the school’s substantial past in this volume. Amherst in the World tells the story of how an institution that was founded to train Protestant ministers began educating new generations of industrialists, bankers, and political leaders with the decline in missionary ambitions after the Civil War. The contributors trace how what was a largely white school throughout the interwar years begins diversifying its student demographics after World War II and the War in Vietnam. The histories told here illuminate how Amherst has contended with slavery, wars, religion, coeducation, science, curriculum, town and gown relations, governance, and funding during its two centuries of existence. Through Amherst’s engagement with educational improvement in light of these historical undulations, it continually affirms both the vitality and the utility of a liberal arts education. Contributions by Martha Saxton, Gary J. Kornblith, David W. Wills, Frederick E. Hoxie, Trent Maxey, Nicholas L. Syrett, Wendy H. Bergoffen, Rick López, Matthew Alexander Randolph, Daniel Levinson Wilk, K. Ian Shin, David S. Reynolds, Jane F. Thrailkill, Julie Dobrow, Richard F. Teichgraeber III, Debby Applegate, Michael E. Jirik, Bruce Laurie, Molly Michelmore, and Christian G. Appy.

Student Plagiarism in Higher Education is a crucial read for any university teacher concerned about plagiarism. It provides the tools and information needed to assess this often complex international phenomenon constructively and effectively from a variety of angles, and provides a framework for further discussion and research. Each chapter poses a question about an essential aspect of plagiarism and examines the central theoretical, ethical and technical questions which surround it. Providing a unique perspective on the topic of academic plagiarism, this book: addresses questions which are vexing in teaching practice, but for which ready answers are not available in professional skills development materials; relates plagiarism to wider issues of learning and intellectual development; collates the thinking of international leading experts on the topic of plagiarism from different areas of the academy. Student Plagiarism in Higher Education provides an excellent insight which thoroughly interrogates all aspects of the plagiarism argument. Theoretically based and carefully considered contributions from international experts ensure that this volume is an invaluable asset to anyone wishing to read more, learn more and think more about plagiarism.