Academically Adrift - Limited Learning on College Campuses

What happens to the liberal arts and science education when universities attempt to sell it as a form of job training? In Lowering Higher Education, a follow-up to their provocative 2007 book Ivory Tower Blues, James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar explore the subverted 'idea of the university' and the forces that have set adrift the mission of these institutions. Côté and Allahar connect the corporatization of universities to a range of contentious issues within higher education, from lowered standards and inflated grades to the overall decline of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences instruction.

Lowering Higher Education points to a fundamental disconnect between policymakers, who may rarely set foot in contemporary classrooms, and the teachers who must implement their educational policies—which the authors argue are poorly informed—on a daily basis. Côté and Allahar expose stakeholder misconceptions surrounding the current culture of academic disengagement and supposed power of new technologies to motivate students. While outlining what makes the status quo dysfunctional, Lowering Higher Education also offers recommendations that have the potential to reinvigorate liberal education.

Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People's History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools–with its emphasis on great men in high places–to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of–and in the words of–America's women, factory workers, African Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers. As historian Howard Zinn shows, many of our country's greatest battles–for a fair wage, an eight-hour workday, child-labor laws, health and safety standards, universal suffrage, women's rights, racial equality–were carried out at the grassroots level, against bloody resistance. Covering Christopher Columbus's arrival through the 2000 Election and the "war on terrorism," A People's History of the United States, which was nominated for the American Book Award in 1981 and has sold more than one million copies, features insightful analysis of the most important events in our history.

This new edition contains two new chapters covering the Clinton presidency, the 2000 Election, and the "war on terrorism," continuing Zinn's important contribution to a complete and balanced understanding of American history.

In this brilliantly conceived tour de force, Stephen King—who has absorbed the social, political, and popular culture of his generation more imaginatively and thoroughly than any other writer—takes readers on an incredible journey into the past and the possibility of altering it.

It begins with Jake Epping, a thirty-five-year-old English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching GED classes. He asks his students to write about an event that changed their lives, and one essay blows him away—a gruesome, harrowing story about the night more than fifty years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed his mother, his sister, and his brother with a sledgehammer. Reading the essay is a watershed moment for Jake, his life—like Harry’s, like America’s in 1963—turning on a dime. Not much later his friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. And Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession—to prevent the Kennedy assassination.

Why, then, is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire timeless? The author wasnt a post-modernist man trapped in an Enlightenment body; Gibbon had no conception of social history or archeology, his 18th century idea that climate affects morality is long out of date, and his analyses of the Middle East are hampered by his reliance on second-hand sources. But in 200 years no one has seriously challenged the framework Gibbon used to explain the fall of the empire. In fact, contemporary histories of Rome still owe a great deal to him.

Why? One reason is his careful use of documents. Decline and Fall relies mostly on writers like Ammianus and Sidonius, who tried to be impartial. Another is Gibbons almost superhuman objectivity; while individual characters are berated for this and that, the author is usually sympathetic to human foibles, and always tells his tales with as much complexity as the sources will allow. Which is one reason the works alleged hostility to Christianity is overstated; Gibbon said the religion played a role (not the role) in the fall of Rome, and even praises the new faith for breaking the violence of the fall, and mollify(ing) the ferocious temper of the conquerors. Theres one stumble, and thats the section on the various heresies and religious controversies of the 300s. Duty required Gibbon to analyze the niggling and sometimes incomprehensible arguments over Christs nature (and he confessed he didnt understand the passions behind them), but the historian gets bogged down in theological jargon and never makes it clear what role those heresies played in the fall until the end of Volume III. By then youve forgotten the details.

Thats a small scratch in the masterpiece. In two centuries no one has challenged his famous conclusion: The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. Today we have more details, but the trajectory Gibbon plotted has never been recalculated.

Decline and Fall is also a great read, and one of the best narratives in the English language. War, idealism, corruption, droll asides and the clash of civilizations fly along a brisk stream of prose. Its a big book, but the work moves faster than books a tenth its size.