I am confident that we are of a size and nimbleness that allow us to capitalize on the positive underpinnings beneath an iceberg that most folks can only see the tip of. This is a time for vision, imagination, energy and action tempered by a prudence that capitalizes on latent opportunities without jeopardizing the enterprise or compromising our mission of educating leaders to fashion a more humane and just world.
Rev. Stephen A. Privett, S.J., USF Town Hall Meeting April 2009
With the goal of providing additional context to the ongoing crisis in higher education, Gleeson Library has collected a set of articles and other resources that discuss the current state of budgeting, enrollment management, endowments and other topics from institutions with budgeting challenges similar to the ones we face at USF. This list is just a start. If you have other articles you’d like to see on this page, please let us know in the comments below.
The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time) (Hardcover)
This is a really good book that I read in one sitting. A description from Amazon:
Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why do professors all tend to think alike? What makes it so hard for colleges to decide which subjects should be required? Why do teachers and scholars find it so difficult to transcend the limits of their disciplines? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for one hundred years, while faculties and student bodies have radically changed and technology has drastically transformed the way people produce and disseminate knowledge. At a time when competition to get into and succeed in college has never been more intense, universities are providing a less-useful education. Sparking a long-overdue debate about the future of American education, The Marketplace of Ideas examines what professors and students—and all the rest of us—might be better off without, while assessing what it is worth saving in our traditional university institutions.
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About the Author
Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard University, is the author of The Metaphysical Club, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Ph.D. Cambridge) is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University. He is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race (with Cornel West); Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans. He is general editor (with the late Nellie Y. McKay) of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; editor-in-chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center (online); editor of The African-American Century (with Cornel West); Encarta Africana (with Kwame Anthony Appiah); and The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Craft; African American National Biography (with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham) and The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (with Hollis Robbins). For PBS, Professor Gates has written and produced several documentaries, among them African American Lives, series 1 and 2, and America Behind the Color Line.