College and University Books

Mr. Tingle addresses, nay, jumps head-over-heels over a million foot cliff into the tumultuous Class V waters of late adolescents' struggle with identity as reflected (or not) in their college writing classes. I am a Psychologist working in a college counseling center, and I am a former instructor of writing. Tingle's deep, rich, textured, comical (in the odd way he can be comical while discussing Kant)and conversational (in the odd way he can be utterly conversational and unpretentious while discussing the Fourth Order of Consciousness as if you were both at Dunkin' Donuts)style is absolutely charming, engaging and, perhaps, most surprisingly,leaves me thinking "Damn--I am FOLLOWING this !" Writing becomes a counterpart to, a metaphor for, a process parallel to developmental psychology, to growing up (or not), to the awkward and painful destabilization and fragmentation with which we are clobbered as young'uns, and the subsequent long journey back toward reclaiming and redefining ourselves which takes up the rest of life. This is a fine, fine read. I loved it.
James Michael Nolan, Ph.D.

Just as colleges and universities give attention to helping first year students transition INTO the college experience, many schools are realizing the need to give more purposeful attention to helping students transition OUT of college and into the rest of their lives.

This book gives insight into students' cognitive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal development and how where students ARE in their development is not always congruent to what employers and graduate schools EXPECT students to be... and how we can help students build those bridges!

Topics included in this book can be helpful whether you are evaluating an existing Senior Year Experience program or seeking to design one. Information in various chapters can be used specifically for student affairs professionals in:

CAREER SERVICES Ch. 5: "Are College Seniors Prepared to Work?"

STUDENT ACTIVITIES/LEADERSHIP Ch. 8: "Leadership Education in the Senior Experience"

SERVICE LEARNING/RESIDENCE LIFE "Ch. 9: "Developing 'Civic Virtue' Among College Students"

ALUMNI DEVELOPMENT Ch. 14: Preparing Seniors for Roles as Active Alumni"

ACADEMIC ADVISING Ch. 11: "Creating Pathways to Graduate School"

and all faculty and student affairs educators who work with MULTI-ETHNIC STUDENTS Ch. 13: "College-to-career Transition Programs for Multiethnic Students"

The book includes a helpful list of references and a sample syllabus of a senior capstone class developed and used by the authors.

For student affairs professionals who are seeking to bridge the gap between curricular and co-curricular education on campus, this is a comprehensive, easily readable resource that makes reference to a number of colleges and universities that have successfully implemented Senior Year programs. I have searched the websites of those schools for additional ideas and information.

For readers for whom the Word is a sine qua non of religious
reflection, this is a must read. From the time of Paul Tillich to
Barbara Brown Taylor, we are invited into the homilies of insightful
minds at work. For those at Duke during the marvelous Scotsman's tenure as Dean of the Chapel and Professor of Preaching, we would have liked once more to delight in his play on words entitled "Loving the Sons of Birches". That, alas, was probably too time bound for this publication. Read these testaments, as I did, happy to have been touched by such a cloud of witnesses.

Great read! We enjoyed reading the book. It was easy and informative. I would recommend it to anyone planning on going to Seton Hall.

Seven: The National Championship Teams of the Tennessee Lady Vols

This was a great book on the history of the Tennessee Lady Vol's National Championships 1-7.
A detailed look at some of the greatest players to ever play at Tennessee.
A detailed account of what it's like to play for the Greatest coach in college basketball history. Who made Women's basketball what it is today,
Pat Summitt

Looking for a good read? Hooked on college football? Interested in knowing how college football matured into today's national spectacle?
If so, you have to read Raymond Schmidt's history of football in the 1920s (college football because the NFL was still in its infancy). Whether it's the Haskell Indians, traditionally African-American schools, or the rising Catholic powers, Schmidt ranges far and wide. He portrays a gridiron landscape no longer dominated by the traditional eastern schools (think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, and Army). The Midwest flanked by the South and West Coast now became the regions that produced big-time coaches,teams,and star players.
Schmidt's research is truly remarkable. No doubt most of us know something of the Golden Age of Sport--the age of prosperity and consumerism that produced sports legends like Knute Rockne and Red Grange. Yet how many are familiar with the bitter controversies that raged after Grange quit college to join the Chicago Bears? Or the national football machine created by Knute Rockne consisting of former players turned coaches who fed him insider information. Or the forward passes (just legalized in 1906) like burgeoning aircraft that filled the gridiron stratosphere.
Not that there weren't controversies and scandals. Schmidt airs the endless disputes and the conniving by teams for whom winning had become obsessive. The University of Iowa, a flagrant example, accumulated a slush fund that brought the wrath of today's Big Ten down on its head--not a conference team, many of them also tainted, would play the Hawkeyes. In 1929, the Carnegie Commission catalogued the numerous sins against the "amateur ideal." Unfortunately for the Commission, the report was released the same week as the stock market crash.
By 1930, the world of football, as Schmidt views it, was far closer to today's game, practices, and strategy than the pre- or immediately post-World War I version. As if to bookmark the end of an era, Knute Rockne died in an airplane crash after the 1930 season. Schmidt shows how Rockne personified the myth and reality of big-time football--and how the outpouring of tributes to Rockne illustrates the enormous power of its transformation.
"Indeed, that period from 1919 to 1930," Schmidt writes," had served to radically reshape the sport and lay the groundwork for most of what has transpired within intercollegiate football since that time, and it was truly the game's age of Transormation."

Every once in a while, a book is published that siginificantly advances knowledge. Thus, it is with great pleasure that I state that Dr. Nemata Amelia Blyden's book is bound to be regarded as one of the greatest books on West Africa produced in this decade. This brilliant, synchronic, historical tour de force teaches us about the trans-oceanic migration of West Indians from the Caribbean to Sierra Leone in the decades after slavery was abolished in the British colonies in 1807. Employing both primary and secondary sources, Dr. Blyden in the eight chapters of this book chronicles how the West Indians who immigrated to Sierra Leone during this period came to occupy numerous positions in the colony and the colonial administration; how they became an important minority, albeit not always well-liked; and the impetus for their power and influence. More tantalizing is how Dr. Blyden skillfully weaves together the economic, political, psychological and social contexts of the time (1808-1880) to tell this fascinating history in an interpretive style. In essence, any student of history and the social sciences should get a copy of this book. It represents effulgent scholarship

Earl McGrath, a U.S. Commissioner of Education, produced in 1970 a study that is just as relevant 30 years later. It is a clear and fair examination of the pros and cons of involving students in college and university governance.

The book extends its analysis through historical example and contemporary practice. McGrath concludes that students can and should play a large role in governance, but that the burden is so great that administrators need to promote and encourage such participation as an integral part of students' educational experience. Including students in governance must be a community endeavor, not an adversarial one.

McGrath shows convincingly, among many points I would like to quote, that "students whom faculty members consider sufficiently mature intellectually and morally to study understandingly such works as Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics, Aquinas' Summa Theologica, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth, Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, Freud's Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Wundt's Volkerpsychologie, to say nothing of the demanding treatises in modern physics," can without much trouble "comprehend and deal with the theoretical issues and the practical problems of [merely] the academic establishment" (71).

An extensive survey of actual practice produces much cross-institutional data about real student involvement at every level of decision-making. One hopes that a survey in this generation might be done for the purpose of gauging how far we have come toward meeting McGrath's challenge.

The 2nd revised edition of Show! Don't Tell! How to personalize College Applications includes a dynamite interactive CD-ROM to help students complete the application essays. A one-of-a kind reading experience that produces results. Very user friendly!

The master's degree is often viewed by higher education professionals as a "second-class degree" or the "consolation prize" for those who never pursue and complete a Ph.D. Conrad, Haworth, and Millar give the master's degree its proper recognition in academe in their ground-breaking book, "A Silent Success." This text, essential reading for anyone in higher education administration, is the culmination of sound research (800 interviews of stakeholders in 47 master's programs across the country -- administrators, faculty, students, employers, and alumni) and skilled writing that engages the reader. The authors apply the constant comparative method to the plethora of qualitative data to arrive at four program types (ancillary, career advancement, apprencticeship, and community-centered) and 14 attributes of high-quality master's programs. This approach allows the researchers to see the tendencies "emerge" from the data rather than forcing the data to conform to some predetermined categories that may or may not be present (for more information on this intriguing approach, see Bogdan & Biklen's "Qualitative Research in Education").

The purpose of this book is not to help a prospective student choose a master's program; instead, it is an analysis of 47 programs to determine what constitutes a quality experience in a master's program. On a related note, it becomes clear that not all master's programs are created equal -- each has (or at least should have) particular strengths. Administrators may well consider the culture and objectives of their own programs to determine whether they are in line with their students' needs.

Haworth and Conrad pursue this thesis in a follow-up book, "Emblems of Quality in Higher Education: Developing and Sustaining High-Quality Programs." Both books are well worth a look if your field is higher education administration!