Higher Education Commons^™

“‘Curating Kisumu’ And ‘Curating East Africa’: Academic Collaboration And Public Engagement In The Digital Age”, J. Mark Souther, Meshack Owino

History Faculty Publications

This essay examines the origin, permutations, potentials, challenges, and implications of two successive, collaborative public history research, teaching, and learning projects undertaken by the Department of History at Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio, and the Department of History and Archeology at Maseno University, Kisumu, Kenya between 2014 and 2018. The two projects explored how opportunities created by the mobile revolution in Africa could be leveraged to generate new ways of acquiring historical information and knowledge between students and faculty in universities separated by enormous distances and by disparate social, economic, and political experiences. Specifically, the projects examined how the cellphone …

American And German Research Universities Between The Beginning And End Of The German Reich, Mcclelland, Charles E. Mcclelland

History Faculty Publications

Departing from a sketch of the “German-American” interaction in higher education starting around the beginning of the nineteenth century, moves on to the main focus on the half-century between about 1890 and 1940, concentrating only marginally on student movements and experience but more on autochthonous institutional developments.

Strengths Hidden In Plain Sight, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

I knew from teaching that the lifeblood of education travels through capillaries, small vessels that reach into small classrooms, quiet conversations, silent reading. But when I became dean, I saw that those capillaries flow only because of the arteries and veins of admissions, finance, student affairs, and advancement. People far removed from the classroom make it possible for other people to be teachers and students.

What American Students Can Learn From Immersing Themselves In Africa, Julius A. Amin

History Faculty Publications

More than one million people travelled from around the world to study at American universities in the 2013-2014 academic year. By contrast, just under 300,000 Americans enrolled to study abroad.

In this era of globalisation, it’s no surprise that so many young people are keen to study abroad. But as the Institute of International Education’s research reveals, the majority of US students are sticking close to home - not geographically, but culturally.

Africa remains on the margins when it comes to American universities' curricula and initiatives like study-abroad programmes. American university students also display profoundly ill-informed views about Africa.

In The 'Lógos' Of Love: Promise And Predicament In Catholic Intellectual Life, Una M. Cadegan, James Heft

History Faculty Publications

In the 'Lógos' of Love: Promise and Predicament in Catholic Intellectual Life, the title of the September 2013 conference cosponsored by the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California and by the University of Dayton, was inspired by a somewhat unlikely pair: Walker Percy and Pope Benedict XVI. The lógos of love, according to Benedict in his 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, is where “[t]ruth opens and unites our minds ... the Christian proclamation and testimony of caritas”—that Latin word inadequately translated into English as “charity” but which refers to the fullness of love made possible …

Talking Less But Saying More: Teaching Us History Online, Carolyn J. Lawes

History Faculty Publications

After years of teaching in person at a large public university in Virginia, I decided to move my undergraduate U.S. history courses for that school online. I did so for one reason: the online format allows me to off er a better history class.

Cohen: Reconstructing The Campus: Higher Education And The American Civil War (Book Review), Julie Mujic

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Julie Mujic.

Cohen, Michael David. Reconstructing the Campus: Higher Education and the American Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. ISBN: 9780813933177

The Future Of Scholarship, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Digital scholarship could take many new shapes, many of which we are just now glimpsing. It seems likely to take advantage of new forms of visualization, certainly, and become more supple to the reader’s curiosity. Arguments will be tied more closely to the documents and data on which they are based, allowing readers to test ideas in real time, for themselves.

Building A Community Of Inquiry And Analytical Skills In An Online History Course, Sheri Stover, Sean Pollock

History Faculty Publications

The purpose of this case study was to assess a history instructor’s attempt to redesign an introductory history survey course. Traditionally, it has been taught in a face-to-face environment within the university’s core curriculum program. It was redesigned as a synchronous online course that provided students with opportunities to work collaboratively to build a community of inquiry and to develop the analytical skills needed to understand course materials and compete in the 21st -century workforce. Students were required to attend daily 100-minute web conferencing sessions consisting of mini-lectures, polling questions and discussions in large and small groups (i.e., “breakout rooms”). …

A More-Radical Online Revolution, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Whatever the discipline, the new online world must find ways to help create new knowledge. Online education cannot run indefinitely, as it does now, on borrowed intellectual capital, disseminating what we already know. Higher education takes its energy, its purpose, from a charged circuit between teaching and research, between sharing knowledge and making knowledge. New forms of teaching must be able to generate new ideas.

A Fellowship In Learning: Kalamazoo College, 1833-2008 (Book Review), Julie Mujic

History Faculty Publications

Book review by Julie Mujic.

Francis, Marlene Crandell. A Fellowship in Learning: Kalamazoo College, 1833-2008. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Kalamazoo College, 2008.

"American Examples For German Universities: Admitting Women Before World War I", Charles E. Mcclelland

History Faculty Publications

Women were not allowed to enroll a regular students in Prussian universities until 1909, although most other German states had already changed this policy. This chapter analyzes the terms of controversy swirling around the issue, and how American university policies ultimately helped bring about the change.

Evelyn Aschenbrenner. A History Of Wayne State University In Photographs (Book Review), Julie Mujic

History Faculty Publications

Wayne State University (WSU) alumna and freelance writer Evelyn Aschenbrenner compiled this book to fulfill her own curiosity about the evolution of Wayne State University's campus in Detroit, Michigan.

Book review by Julie A. Mujic: Aschenbrenner, Evelyn. A History of Wayne State University in Photographs. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009. ISBN 9780814332825

The Experience Of Liberal Education, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Every college and university has built new capacity to deliver new experiences for students through study abroad, community service, career development, health and fitness, cultural understanding, or spiritual growth. They come to college to broaden their experience, and colleges and universities are the only places where people of all backgrounds, religions, ethnicities, classes, and politics come together to explore who they are and who they might become. Going to college is a defining time in their lives, and there is much more we can do to make it a liberating and transformative experience.

On The Humanities, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Although humanists have tended to dwell on simple dichotomies as the source of our problems - the humanities versus virtually any other field of inquiry, scholarship versus teaching, specialization versus public reach, and innovation versus tradition - the real challenge to the humanities lies elsewhere.

A Response To John Sommerville’S 'The Decline Of The Secular University', William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

Introduction to William Vance Trollinger's plenary presentation:

I agree with Prof. Sommerville that in too many places the secular university has trivialized religion and religious commitment, and that it is high time for religion to be welcomed into our academic debates. I say this even while I take issue with some of the particulars in Prof. Sommerville’s book. I will give two examples related to our discipline of history.

First, Prof. Sommerville decries that “secularist humanities have declared war on metanarratives because of their hegemonic power.” But I confess that I am very pleased to see the demise of metanarratives …

New Men On Campus - Three Local Institutions Of Higher Education Have New Leaders. Today The Presidents Present Their Visions And Missions To The Community, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

There is no such thing as a perfect university. Despite the rankings and institutional bragging, there is no place that combines everything into a perfect package. Every institution is a work in progress. The University of Richmond is no exception. Like every institution, it inherits both strengths and weaknesses.

What I Overheard In The Sesquicentennial Conversation, Una M. Cadegan

History Faculty Publications

Catholic higher education is in many ways still responding to the challenge first articulated by John Tracy Ellis in his 1955 essay. In efforts to promote both a unique Catholic identity and a culture of excellence on par with secular institutions, Catholic universities can learn much from their historical context, founding religious communities, and contemporary experience.

This essay suggests some practical applications for campus life and governance that might be culled from a university’s religious history.

Doing Scholarship On The Web: 10 Years Of Triumphs And A Disappointment, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

In the fall of 1991, someone appointed me, a historian, to a committee that oversaw computing at my university. I had long been underfoot in the computer labs, consuming valuable time in front of UNIX workstations, making computerized maps, and running statistical tests for a history of the New South. Now it was time for payback.

Yet despite my years of working with computers, I had little idea at that time of the revolutionary promise that computing held for scholarship in disciplines like my own. More than a decade of living on the Web later, I recognize the potential of …

Aiming High For Virginia Colleges, Edward L. Ayers, Danny Axsom, Thomas M. Sherman, Esther N. Elstun, L. Terry Oggel

History Faculty Publications

Considerable discussion about higher education is likely to take place throughout 1999 from the current legislative session through December, when the report of the Governor's Blue Ribbon Commission on Higher Education is anticipated. Because faculty teach, conduct research and provide service to all Virginians, we have a unique perspective on what will be needed to ensure the continuing excellence of higher education in Virginia. Toward that end, we offer the observations below on funding practices, simplifying bureaucratic procedures, improving research and scholarship, and governance in higher education. We believe positive change can make real differences in the quality of the …

Independent Christian Colleges And Universities, William Vance Trollinger

History Faculty Publications

The category independent Christian colleges and universities is not a very large one. The reason for this is rather simple: as William Ringenberg has noted in the introduction to his helpful 1988 bibliography on such schools, "there are not many contemporary colleges and universities that are both continuing Christian in philosophical orientation and independent of denominational ties in governance." While this may change in the future, given the weakening of denominational loyalties among American Protestants, the fact remains that there are not too many independent Christian colleges.

For purposes of this essay I will I be looking at fourteen institutions. …

The Professionalization Of Artists: A New Approach To The Social History Of Art, Mcclelland

History Faculty Publications

Perhaps because of the somewhat inchoate and seemingly disorganized nature of the world of the arts, most students of modern social history and professions have steered clear of engagement with this fascinating crowd. Yet further acquaintance with the subject reveals that artists did in fact attempt to professionalize, and -- even if their efforts were not as successful as those of some others -- these efforts left a clear record of articulated demands and statements.

Professionalization In Comparative Perspective: Germany, Mcclelland

History Faculty Publications

critical social-history consciousness has abandoned to some degree the old notion that modern "professions" in the Anglo-Saxon sense could not "really" exist in Central Europe because of the heavy and early bureaucratization and/or the persistence of "feudal" or at least Stand (etat) traditions. Instead, most accept the notion of a process of dialogue between independent professions and bureaucratic authority.