Download or read book Reflections on Academic Lives written by Staci M. Zavattaro and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together reflections from seventy academics – everyone from doctoral students to a retired provost – who share their lived experiences in graduate school and beyond. Career seekers, adjunct professors, those in or considering graduate school, and tenure-track professors alike will find truths revealed through these shared experiences of struggle, triumph, loss and hope.
Download or read book Rhythms of Academic Life written by Peter J. Frost and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 1996-07-16 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This invaluable source book offers guidance, support and advice for those contemplating or involved in academic careers. The contributions provide rich, personal, sometimes poignant and often humorous accounts of shared and unique experiences of those in the world of academia.
Download or read book An Academic Life written by Hanna Holborn Gray and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compelling memoir by the first woman president of a major American university Hanna Holborn Gray has lived her entire life in the world of higher education. The daughter of academics, she fled Hitler's Germany with her parents in the 1930s, emigrating to New Haven, where her father was a professor at Yale University. She has studied and taught at some of the world's most prestigious universities. She was the first woman to serve as provost of Yale. In 1978, she became the first woman president of a major research university when she was appointed to lead the University of Chicago, a position she held for fifteen years. In 1991, Gray was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in recognition of her extraordinary contributions to education. An Academic Life is a candid self-portrait by one of academia's most respected trailblazers. Gray describes what it was like to grow up as a child of refugee parents, and reflects on the changing status of women in the academic world. She discusses the migration of intellectuals from Nazi-held Europe and the transformative role these exiles played in American higher education—and how the émigré experience in America transformed their own lives and work. She sheds light on the character of university communities, how they are structured and administered, and the balance they seek between tradition and innovation, teaching and research, and undergraduate and professional learning. An Academic Life speaks to the fundamental issues of purpose, academic freedom, and governance that arise time and again in higher education, and that pose sharp challenges to the independence and scholarly integrity of each new generation.
Download or read book Academic Lives written by Cynthia G. Franklin and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s, there has been a proliferation of memoirs by tenured humanities professors. Although the memoir form has been discussed within the flourishing field of life writing, academic memoirs have received little critical scrutiny. Based on close readings of memoirs by such academics as Michael Bérubé, Cathy N. Davidson, Jane Gallop, bell hooks, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, Jane Tompkins, and Marianna Torgovnick, Academic Lives considers why so many professors write memoirs and what cultural capital they carry. Cynthia G. Franklin finds that academic memoirs provide unparalleled ways to unmask the workings of the academy at a time when it is dealing with a range of crises, including attacks on intellectual freedom, discontentment with the academic star system, and budget cuts. Franklin considers how academic memoirs have engaged with a core of defining concerns in the humanities: identity politics and the development of whiteness studies in the 1990s; the impact of postcolonial studies; feminism and concurrent anxieties about pedagogy; and disability studies and the struggle to bring together discourses on the humanities and human rights. The turn back toward humanism that Franklin finds in some academic memoirs is surreptitious or frankly nostalgic; others, however, posit a wide-ranging humanism that seeks to create space for advocacy in the academic and other institutions in which we are all unequally located. These memoirs are harbingers for the critical turn to explore interrelations among humanism, the humanities, and human rights struggles.
Download or read book Lives in Science written by Joseph C. Hermanowicz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What can we learn when we follow people over the years and across the course of their professional lives? Joseph C. Hermanowicz asks this question specifically about scientists and answers it here by tracking fifty-five physicists through different stages of their careers at a variety of universities across the country. He explores these scientists’ shifting perceptions of their jobs to uncover the meanings they invest in their work, when and where they find satisfaction, how they succeed and fail, and how the rhythms of their work change as they age. His candid interviews with his subjects, meanwhile, shed light on the ways career goals are and are not met, on the frustrations of the academic profession, and on how one deals with the boredom and stagnation that can set in once one is established. An in-depth study of American higher education professionals eloquently told through their own words, Hermanowicz’s keen analysis of how institutions shape careers will appeal to anyone interested in life in academia.
Download or read book Academic Life written by John B. Bennett and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this profound look at the academy, John Bennett reminds us that our leadership decisions always presuppose our philosophies of life and that understanding precedes practice. How we understand the communities we lead informs the many practical judgments we make about directions to take, structures to create, processes to initiate, and values to uphold. Bennett argues that faculty may understand their departments or institutions in one of two ways: as simply aggregations of individuals or as communities of intertwined persons. From these views, two different leadership values and positions emerge. The first disposes us toward seeing academic conflict as inevitable and elevates heroic leadership styles where power is understood in terms of advancing one agenda over competitors. The second underwrites leadership as supposing openness to others and emphasizes the vital contributions that can follow. By providing specific illustrations of the two modes of leadership and the nature of hospitality and openness, Academic Life presents a strong platform from which to build a rich and rewarding academic community. Contents include: The nature of insistent individualism Why the prevalence of insistent individualism? Hospitality as an essential virtue Self, others, institutions, and the common good Conversation as an essential metaphor The uses of conversation Community and covenant Engaged, but not heroic, leadership
Download or read book Colleges That Change Lives written by Loren Pope and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-07-25 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prospective college students and their parents have been relying on Loren Pope's expertise since 1995, when he published the first edition of this indispensable guide. This new edition profiles 41 colleges—all of which outdo the Ivies and research universities in producing performers, not only among A students but also among those who get Bs and Cs. Contents include: Evaluations of each school's program and "personality" Candid assessments by students, professors, and deans Information on the progress of graduates This new edition not only revisits schools listed in previous volumes to give readers a comprehensive assessment, it also addresses such issues as homeschooling, learning disabilities, and single-sex education.
Download or read book Mad at School written by Margaret Price and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2011-02-17 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the contested boundaries between disability, illness, and mental illness in higher education
Download or read book Mama PhD written by Elrena Evans and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year, American universities publish glowing reports stating their commitment to diversity, often showing statistics of female hires as proof of success. Yet, although women make up increasing numbers of graduate students, graduate degree recipients, and even new hires, academic life remains overwhelming a man's world. The reality that the statistics fail to highlight is that the presence of women, specifically those with children, in the ranks of tenured faculty has not increased in a generation. Further, those women who do achieve tenure track placement tend to report slow advancement, income disparity, and lack of job satisfaction compared to their male colleagues. Amid these disadvantages, what is a Mama, PhD to do? This literary anthology brings together a selection of deeply felt personal narratives by smart, interesting women who explore the continued inequality of the sexes in higher education and suggest changes that could make universities more family-friendly workplaces. The contributors hail from a wide array of disciplines and bring with them a variety of perspectives, including those of single and adoptive parents. They address topics that range from the level of policy to practical day-to-day concerns, including caring for a child with special needs, breastfeeding on campus, negotiating viable maternity and family leave policies, job-sharing and telecommuting options, and fitting into desk/chair combinations while eight months pregnant. Candid, provocative, and sometimes with a wry sense of humor, the thirty-five essays in this anthology speak to and offer support for any woman attempting to combine work and family, as well as anyone who is interested in improving the university's ability to live up to its reputation to be among the most progressive of American institutions.
Download or read book Academic Working Lives written by Lynne Gornall and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-01-30 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Provides a fine-grained, multidisciplinary, multi-context and inclusive set of approaches to the challenges and complexities within contemporary academic working lives"--
Download or read book Making the Grade written by Howard S. Becker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on three years of detailed anthropological observation, this account of undergraduate culture portrays students' academic relations to faculty and administration as one of subjection. With rare intervals in crisis moments, student life has always been dominated by grades and grade point averages. The authors of Making the Grade maintain that, though it has taken different forms from tune to time, the emphasis on grades has persisted in academic life. From this premise they argue that the social organization giving rise to this emphasis has remained remarkably stable throughout the century. Becker, Geer, and Hughes discuss various aspects of college life and examine the degree of autonomy students have over each facet of their lives. Students negotiate with authorities the conditions of campus political and organizational life--the student government, independent student organizations, and the student newspaper--and preserve substantial areas of autonomous action for themselves. Those same authorities leave them to run such aspects of their private lives as friendships and dating as they wish. But, when it comes to academic matters, students are subject to the decisions of college faculties and administrators. Becker deals with this continuing lack of autonomy in student life in his new introduction. He also examines new phenomena, such as the impact of -grade inflation- and how the world of real adult work has increasingly made professional and technical expertise, in addition to high grades, the necessary condition for success. Making the Grade continues to be an unparalleled contribution to the studies of academics, students, and college life. It will be of interest to university administrators, professors, students, and sociologists.
Download or read book Prestige in Academic Life written by Paul Blackmore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The achievement of academic excellence is inherently competitive. Deliberate government policies, globalisation and changes in communication technologies mean that competitiveness in the academic world is sharper than ever before. At the centre of this is the seeking of prestige, at all levels from the national system to the individual. Prestige in Academic Life aims to increase understanding of motivation in universities by exploring the part that prestige plays, for good and ill. The book’s focus on motivation and prestige helps to answer fundamental questions that run through much discussion on universities, such as why some problems are never solved; why change can be so difficult to achieve; and how individuals and groups can enable it to happen. Issues explored include: • What role does prestige play in academic life? • How does prestige play out in the working lives of academics, students, administrators and institutional leaders? • How can the positive aspects of prestige be encouraged and the negative ones diminished? University leaders and managers, academics, administrators and students, indeed all who are interested in universities, will find this valuable reading. It will help those in leadership positions to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness and wellbeing of their institutions, and will support academic staff in negotiating their career path. Paul Blackmore is Professor of Higher Education in the International Centre for University Policy Research, Policy Institute at King’s, at King’s College London.
Download or read book Rhythms of Academic Life written by Peter J. Frost and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1996-07-16 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This invaluable compendium offers guidance, support and advice for those contemplating or involved in academic careers. The contributors provide rich, personal and often humerous accounts of shared and unique experiences in the world of academia.
Download or read book Academic Life in the Measured University written by Tai Peseta and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While a life in academia is still one bestowed with enormous privilege and opportunity, on the inside, its cracks and fragility have been on display for some time. We see evidence of this in researchers bemoaning time spent applying for grants rather than doing research; teachers frustrated at the ways student feedback data are deployed to feed judgements about them; and doctoral students realising that they have little chance of securing full-time academic work. Yet in the public policy domain, the opposite appears true: academics left to their own devices in their elite ivory towers, rarely ever do enough. This collection addresses the fact that academic life deserves to be rigorously researched. Its emphasis on the measured university traces how academic life had ceded itself to the logics of perverse measures, and raises questions about whether the contemporary university may well have become too measured to adequately counter the political times now upon us. The contributors explore the ways in which measurement inhabits paradoxical positions in these spaces. It sketches the contours and consequences of mismeasurement, including the personal costs to academic staff. It examines our desires and fumbled efforts at institutional transformation, and it puts on display our own ethical conduct. The collection concludes with a call to chart a course for a revitalized moral economy of academic labour. This book was originally published as a special issue of Higher Education Research & Development.
Download or read book Biographies and Careers throughout Academic Life written by Jesús F Galaz-Fontes and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book draws on the 2007 Changing Academic Profession international survey in order to document the personal characteristics, career trajectories, sense of identity/commitment and job satisfaction of academics in 14 countries with different levels of economic and social development and different higher education systems. With nearly 26,000 academics surveyed in 19 countries (of which 14 are reporting their results in this volume), the empirical basis of the book is the most up-to-date and far-reaching in the area. With major changes taking place both in the local and global contexts of higher education and in the working conditions within individual universities, as exemplified by increasing managerialism and performance-based funding, it is important to consider the impact of these changes on the profiles and working lives of the academic profession across different countries. But it is also important to look at the ways in which the faculty’s changing profile impacts on the organisation and management of universities and on the delivery of their central functions. Although not always obvious in the short-term, academic work and its conditions attract, incorporate and promote different types of individuals who, in turn, exert considerable influence on the nature of academic work, higher education institutions and, potentially, society. As faculty members are central to the teaching, research and service enterprise activities of higher education, it is important to understand their personal characteristics, career trajectories, sense of identity and commitment, and job satisfaction. These are central for understanding the academic profession in general and, in particular, the factors affecting their involvement and productivity in the work of their institutions. These are a complex result of a mixture of contextual factors (e.g. the status and regulatory framework of the higher education system, the features and atmosphere of the particular institution) and personal factors (e.g. gender, educational attainment, family background, attitudes to work and broader social values).This book examines the different situations facing the academic profession in individual countries and provides comparative studies of country differences.
Download or read book The Changing Face of Academic Life written by J. Enders and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together an international line-up of contributors, this collection provides a transnational examination of recent developments within the academic profession in the light of changes to higher education systems, globalization and marketization.
Download or read book An Academic Life written by Robert Harley Cantwell and published by Aust Council for Ed Research. This book was released on 2010 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Academic life is complex and adjusting to life as a new academic requires a range of skills and abilities to fulfil the multiple roles the academic must play as researcher, teacher and administrator.
