College and University Books

This is a very well-researched history of an academic institution that has transformed itself from a place where people could learn science to enrich the economies of the empire to an independent university that brings together engineering, science medicine and management. It discusses the impact of war on academic life.

It has copious notes and references. There are also plenty of pictures. Anecdotes relate the political struggles of professors, motivation behind new courses and campus building initiatives. If you want to understand academics this might be a good place to start as it is a very readable book.

It will be of interest to Imperial College alumni, staff, students, prospective students. Also I would recommend it to anyone in the management of educational institutions, particularly those with a high concentration of science and engineering like MIT and the Indian Institutes.

The book was written for the centenary of Imperial College, although some of the founding colleges and departments go back much further.

I hope libraries buy this book as the price is extraordinarily high.

This history of Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia, is the work of professional educator and English professor Roberta D Cornelius. It is a carefully researched, well-documented review of RMWC from its inception through 1950. Obviously, RMWC has changed in the past 50 years, but it is fascinating to read how everything started, from the kernal of a dream, to the battles over developing its identity, to the history of the faculty, staff, and students.

There are some quaint touches we would not see in a current history, such as the use of a husband's name for a married allumna (e.g., Mrs. Ralph Whitesides), but for the most part this is an engaging history of a rigorous, evolving, and challenging program to be a major force in the education of the women of the South. It was interesting to read about the development of the international program, the debate club, and discussion of whether religious activities should be manditory or optional, and more.

Seems like it is time for the next 50 year historical review, especially given the current discussion about RMWC going coed.

How did the university survive so long? Why?

The answer is probably to be found in this series. Some of it is merely intersting trivia, other parts are truly fascinating. The role the university has played in society cannot be underestimated. The series provides an in-depth examination of what makes a university what it is historically.

Each of the chapters examines a different aspect of the university. Written by a group of wonderful scholars, the series is an excellent reference as well as a delightful read.

This is a must read for Razorback fans and a super read for football fans. Schroeder did an excellent job of covering the ups and downs of Razorback football. This book was so good that I have bought several for gifts! WOOOO PIG SOOIE!!!

I attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from September 1964 through June 1972; I worked at the MIT Lincoln Laboratories in the summers of 1968 and 1970. I was given this book by the MIT Alumni Association, and found it to be remarkable in its truthful rendition of events that I lived through, and things that came afterwards (going to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the 1990s), and seeing that Howard Johnson guided MIT through the late 1960s and beyond and the Museum of Fine Arts into a rebirth, and made it all look so easy. I look forward to the video that should accompany this!

Adams worked as an insider at the highest levels of academic administration for much longer than anyone should ever have to. This book clearly takes up much of the hatred of the culture wars. You can see this topic played out in The Education of Max Bickford, or in novels like Straight Man, but the topic is so much more painfully dissected in this novel, as the people involved in the internecine war are much more human than they are ideological machines, and it's the humanity that suffers in the present conversation between traditional academic scholars and cultural studies mavens.

It's hard to put your finger on why this book is great. I've always been interested in anarchist communes of the Pacific Northwest. There's research and a resurrection of one of these. Another strong interest is how sexual harassment is being used as a weapon to gain academic power by a very small minority, and how this weapon is destroying any sense of collegiality in humanities departments. what Adams reaches for is the humanity behind people in those humanities departments. It is this that nobody really dares to show, but which is nevertheless always there.

This novel won't be for everyone. Anyone, however, who has suffered through the culture wars while attending graduate school in English at the University of Washington, however, will find this book right on the money. I'm not sure if other graduate programs are as terribly afflicted as that one, but that school was a disaster in which all sense of conversation had broken down, and only single-issue name-calling, and lies, and the bearing of false witness remained, except for a few small circles when they were in very protected environments.

This novel astutely and rather wisely recounts that one battleground in the cultural wars. I feel almost grateful to have gone through that war just in order to have this book's psychogeography down pat. Novels like this take something horrible and make it comprehensible, and manage to create a sense of community out of the incommunicable.

I'm grateful. I suspect that those who aren't very in on the lingo and debates of the last few years in literary studies will have a tough go with this one and be unable to quite get their bearings. For me, I couldn't put it down. It was a powerful and tremendous book that moved me as deeply as literature ever has, and is likely to remain one of my favorite books. there were some characters I couldn't get a feel for, and some of the plot concerning the fin de siecle anarchists seemed slow, as I couldn't wait to get back to the sexual harassment case in present time, but finally the author managed to pull it all together into a very impressive ending. This book is a song of experience: a lifetime spent in academia distilled, and one feels the author's simultaneous gratitude, amusement, and sorrow all mixed together and in no particular order.

This was a great book. It was unlike most books in a series like that because of the fact that it was realistic. Most authors make things up so the book has a good plot but they are very fictional. This book has the realistic everyday temptations of an average college student along with realistic answers from an average college student. This is a book I defininetly recommend.

Norman White is the world expert on Gerard Manley Hopkins, and his new book on Hopkins in Ireland gives a clear and stunningly sad picture of the last years of Hopkins' life. As usual, White's prose is clear and nuanced. We are all lucky to have White as a lover/critic of the sublime Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The book is just wonderful and the language very easily understandable. The book is a must for everyone who is interested or involved in the business of Highee Education. I would recommend to biuy Dr. Birnbaum's new book and also "How Colleges Work". Your library will get richer if you get this book from Amazon.com as you may also familiarize with the Table of Contents. Dr. Birnbaum is a great scholar and a professional. I am from Tbilisi, Georgia and studied at Kent State University and Dr. Birnbaum's book was very difficult to get as everyone loved it and wanted to have his own copy. So, why wait? Rush to get this book and the other one!

In this case study of 2 departments at Stanford University, Larry Cuban shows that, despite repeated "reforms" and the installation of new leaders, the university's basic reward structure has remained more or less the same for a century. Indeed, similar "reform" proposals have re-cycled through the university over the years, dressed up in new rhetoric but with the same result: power and influence flow to those faculty who meet the highest standards in their disciplines, rather than those most interested in pedagogy. Scholars want to teach graduate students and work on their research. When required to teach undergraduates, they want to offer small seminars in their specialty area, rather than foundational courses in their discipline. Cuban uses data from other highly selective American universities to show that the same pattern obtains elsewhere. We could read Cuban's book as a tragedy, from a student's point of view, but then, who listens to them?