Campuses Books

One of the key benefits to this catechism is that it follows the format and order of St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa: (1) an objection, (2) an authoritative response, and (3) a reasoned explanation.

And the objections aren't easily refuted straw men. Fr. McBride take challenges to the faith seriously and phrases them in the best possible light. A perfect example is found in the chapter on Christ's resurrection. There the challenge takes the form of highly subjective interpretations that suggest the resurrection is the product of the faith of the apostles rather than the other way around. This "Resurrection of Faith" can be found in many mainstream Catholic publications, making Fr. McBride's treatment of the subject all the more relevant.

Moreover, despite the title, this book is a great teaching tool for students of all ages, including graduates. While it's a shame the book has now gone out of print, it thankfully is available via Amazon marketplace.

Allow me to second the praise other reviewers have for this book. Fr. McBride has established himself as a master catechist, and his "College Catechism" in one of his best.

Though designed for college students, this thirty-something reviewer found it informative and age-appropriate. Fr. McBride weaves interesting stories, narration, Q&A catechesis and prayerful reflection into a comprehensive and orthodox presentation of the Faith. The black-and-white illustrations and typeface make the volume aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eyes.

The book is fine for individual study, but could also easily be used as a class or group text. Citations to and selections from the Catechism of the Catholic Church are found throughout, allowing readers to pursue additional catechesis.

Fr. Alfred McBride had written this wonderful work as a guide to the Catechism. Split into thirty three chapters each of these deals with a section of the Catechism. Each chapter begins with a short story on the topic, a presentation of objections that people have to that particular Church teaching and then a response to those objections followed by discussion questions.

I'm a recent college grad (BU class of '03), and I just read this book on my own. However this book although an excellent read by oneself, would probably bear much more fruit when read in the context of a discussion group or a class on the Catechism.

The teachings are clear and well illustrated with examples. The only chapter I thought was a little weak was the one on MAry, because the objections presented were a little fluffy and nothing like what you would encounter from Evangelical Christians or others.

This book is DEFINITELY worth buying!! Great for discussion, catechism classes, evangelizing, or personal study.

Banta was a leader in this field from the beginning. As educators continue to struggle to improve student learning, this book continues to offer ideas.

While most books about assessment focus on the concepts and principles related to assessment to the exclusion of practical advice, this book provides over 60 case studies from a variety of institutions with multiple examples of assessment in the major, general education, student development, in the classroom, and institutional effectiveness. While this is not the only book you should read or have on assessment, it is a valuable companion piece with an extraordinary set of examples.

This is a carefully researched and elegantly written book on the relationship between sexuality and spirituality on US college campuses. It is pretty well known among scholars that high school kids are quite religious in the US. When they go to college they start turning away from the religions of their parents, often toward more generic spirituality. Why does this happen? Freitas thinks sexual experience might hold the key. In other words, as college students start experimenting sexually they push away from religion, since religion is in their view "anti-sex." That's the argument, or part of it. But at the heart of the book lie stories about these students. Kids at evangelical, Catholic, and secular schools struggling with faith and sexuality. It's brilliantly done. It's sad in many ways to see the binds that "hookup culture" put young people in. It's balanced in that there are things in here that will infuriate (and delight) conservatives and liberals alike. And it's timely. Makes me wonder what the next generation is in for heading off to college.

This is an excellent ( at times appalling - at times hopeful) book. I don't usually find sociology books that I can't put down, but I read through this one in short order. What the author does quite brilliantly is weave her study of college students and how they integrate faith/religion and sex, around the personal stories of the students that she interviews. If you are a parent (like me) it is disheartening to see the influences that kids come under when they go away to college, and the soul-destroying nature of casual "hook-ups" with people one may or may not know well.

The book is hopeful (to my way of thinking) in that it is almost exclusively the evangelicals (I am one) who believe that there is a connection between spirituality and sex, and that it is important. While it is no surprise that virtually everyone struggles with how far to go physically before marriage, it is nice to see that evangelicals are generally trying to follow what they believe God desires in regards to dating and marriage.

This book is a balanced, scientifically supported account of a very real problem of sexual harassment on college campuses. It has set the national standard for policies based on its accuracy and fairness. It has helped my campus understand how a professor who seemed to have a second wife could actually be abusing dozens of students and demanding sex from them. This is one instance where knowledge is power and wisdom.

This book is very well written with real life situations. It can assist students, universities and hopefully educators that abuse the ivory power.

It enlightened me to understand that what happened to me was not my fault because when someone masterfully manipulates individuals with the abuse of power at the mercy of vulnerable people and the organization they work for it is not nice. The world does have evil people in it, but it is not the act that is sinful. It is the lie and not owning up to the behaviors verbal and nonverbal that are the true unjustice to themselves as human beings.

Overall, the book is excellent as well as other books on similar topics. I hope that future editions will be published to assist in the awareness to the fact that this does exist in Higher Education.

Although it is out-of-print, "Alma Mater: Unusual Stories and Little-Known Facts from America's College Campuses" by Don M. Betterton is an interesting, fact-filled book about interesting, and little known facts about America's many colleges and universities. Being the country with the greatest number of higher-learning institutions in the world, the United States possesses a variety of schools that have been able to stand apart from one another due to their locations and/or school traditions.

This book, which was published by Peterson's Guides, the same company that publishes the thick college guides many high school students use during their search for the right school, is interesting because it discusses the little-known facts that you definitely won't find in an admissions brochure. From most preppiest schools, to the origin of many schools' names, this book will fascinate alums all over the country and world. I discovered that my alma mater was voted one of the five most preppiest in the United States (I wasn't shocked). I also read where many famous celebrities attended school, what they studied and who were Rhodes scholars (actor/singer Kris Kristofferson was a Rhodes scholar while studying at Pomona College during the 1950's).

If you are a person who loves interesting facts, then this book if the right choice for you. You will be surprised what you'll find about many schools in this book.

College students are bound to have opinions about politics, religion, human rights, and all sorts of other topics. And it is no surprise that there may be a wide variety of views about the Middle East. Still, when it comes to what colleges teach about Israel, there is so much anti-scholarly material that I feel obliged to take a stand. All I ask is some respect for truth as a value. And I'm not seeing much of it.

Now, what does Robert Johnson have to say about all this?

To his credit, he tells us a little about the problem at Columbia University, where Joseph Massad has "dismissed Arab antisemitism as 'a Zionist-inspired propagandistic claim' while terming Israel 'a racist state that does not have a right to exist.'" Of course, Massad is not the only one at Columbia to present not just an unbalanced but, in my opinion, anti-scholarly point of view about Israel.

The author also discusses Alan Dershowitz, who speculates that Israel may be serving as a proxy for the criticism of American foreign policy.

Now we get to an interesting point: Duke's history department has 32 Democrats and 0 Republicans. Does this mean that there will be uncountered gratuitous attacks on non-Democratic Party positions? It could. Is this lack of balance a threat? It certainly could be. Could this lack of balance extend to other areas, such as Israel? Yes. And could this lack of balance be reflected in the substitution of politics for scholarship in some areas? It sure could.

The author shows us how completely misleading and false claims by Ed Said are infecting Middle East studies in many universities. There is a discussion of Evergreen College (which the infamous Rachel Corrie attended) and its very biased and unscholarly course offerings that deal with Israel. And given that an Ivy League school such as Columbia has serious problems in this area, it ought not surprise us that on the other side of the country, the University of California at Berkeley does as well.

All this has led to the federal government becoming interested in the problem. Johnson tells of the Hoekstra bill, which stressed the need to educate Americans to serve their nation as well as for academic programs to reflect diverse perspectives and represent the full range of views on international affairs.

I'm not surprised that some people regard such ideas as "McCarthyism." After all, there is a threat of the government interfering in academic affairs. The author does not get into this. But I will. I think the federal government is out of line when it tells academics what points of view to teach. It is doing its job if it rules against outright sedition. But other than that, it ought to stay out of this. I even think that a request that the academic world supply a full range of views is strange. The academic world ought to be far more interested than the government in doing this!

I think the true problem is bad scholarship, and the substitution of highly biased political propaganda for scholarship. That is not something the government can rule against directly: we do have freedom of speech. But the government can set some standards for accrediting programs and universities, and programs that fail to meet such academic standards can be flagged. Given what Johnson has told us, that's what I think we need to do.

In this very well written article, Stein and Gal-Or point out that when the topic is Israel, "an anti-intellectual approach that seeks to limit debate, free speech, and academic freedom has been increasingly present on Canadian campuses. It has manifested itself in a number of major strategies: preventing speakers from arriving at their destination, preventing speakers from being heard, restricting opposing views, exploiting emotion and using propaganda, and preventing rebuttal."

The authors note that while arguments on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict have often been "skewed," it is the anti-Israeli camp "that has exceeded the bounds of civilized debate" by using the above strategies. They make the point that students and faculty are supposed to listen to all points of view to form their opinions. They shouldn't want or need others to tell them which speakers are acceptable. And one can presume that those who are against freedom of speech have something to hide, and that facts would discredit their cause.

The authors give some examples of intimidation and harassment on campus. And they insist that pro-Israel speech be given the same protection as its anti-Israel equivalent. That protection ought to extend to grades on papers: the article shows that many students were downgraded on papers that showed Israel in a good light.

This eight-page article makes quite a few good recommendations, but I think the best is the following:

"Although opinions can be held freely, patently false statements of 'fact' should bear some censure in the form of cumulative academic consequences similar to acts of plagiarism or 'cooking of results' in academic experiments."

I would like to applaud Inroads for publishing this article. I highly recommend it.

This book kept me on the edge of my seat. I couldn't put it down. One of my experiences was detailed in one of the chapters, but all of the stories are great. I highly recommend it if you are interested at all in the supernatural.

This is an invaluable book if you are training students and want to have them do some work on their own without creating it all yourself. It would work well across areas of student affairs and uses a good range of examples. The exercises help students reinforce their learning.

Gregory Prince served sixteen years as president of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Hampshire is famous for its remarkably talented graduates--Ken Burns, Jon Krakauer, Liev Schreiber, Leah Hager Cohen among them--and for its remarkably progressive educational practices and politics. "Teach Them to Challenge Auhority" is part love letter to Hampshire's students and faculty, and although Prince describes each group with critical acumen, his affection is obvious. Similarly, he describes students, faculty, and administrators at emerging colleges, universities and technical institutes around the world, specifically in parts of the former Soviet Union and in Asia. From these vignettes Prince hammers on a single but powerful theme: classrooms should be places where argument is encouraged, controversy analyzed, and informed opinion expressed. He writes eloquently of the courage it takes in other parts of the world (mainly those countries still suffering with the remnants of their oppressively leftist political regimes) to fight to establish the kind of academic freedom we in this country at best take for granted and at worst abuse. And therein lies my criticism of "Teach Them": Prince's relentless optimism clouds his recognition of the kind of intimidation many US college and university students are subjected to on their campuses. And it's the worst kind of intimidation because it is subtle (offhand snide remarks; dismissive references to political opponents), presumptive (the "all intelligent people agree,-don't-they?" approach to framing debates in the classroom), and pervasive (check the Chronicle of Higher Education and other sources for the percentages of faculty who define their politics as very liberal or radical). Anyone who has been on a US college campus in the last 30 years knows this to be true (and it is truer on some campuses than others), and knows how powerfully and easily faculty can silence even politically moderate students. So there are parts of Prince's book that do not fully acknowledge the crushing pressure on students to tow, or pretend to tow, a particular line of thought. But this is a small flaw in an otherwise original and inspired analysis of contemporary higher education. There is real value in "Teach Them" for educators as well as lay readers, for its defines and sets very high ideal standards for what should take place in the classroom. Perhaps in a second volume the author can refine his argument and talk about the ways in which faculty can be challenged by students who neither hold the faculty's political beliefs nor are persuaded by their arguments.