2 products
John Warner
Sustainable. Resilient. Free.
9781948742955
Regular price $16.95 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%After the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the unsustainability of our public higher education system, an author and educator maps out a path for change.
In 1983, U.S. News and World Report started to rank colleges and universities, throwing them into competition with each other for students and precious resources. Over the course of the next thirty or so years, a Reagan-era ethos of privatization and competition transformed students into consumers and colleges into businesses.
Now, tuition is unaffordable. Student loan debt is more than $1.6 trillion, and most college faculty work in adjunct positions for low pay and with no job security. Colleges seem to exist only to enroll students, collect tuition, and hold classes. When learning happens, it is in spite of the system, not because of it.
In Sustainable. Resilient. Free., John Warner envisions a future in which our public colleges and universities are reoriented around enhancing the intellectual, social, and economic potentials of students while providing broad-based benefits to the community at large. As Warner explains, it’s not even all that complicated. It’s no more costly than the current system. We just have to choose to live the values we claim to hold dear.
A critical read for anyone invested in the future of public higher education.
Steve Volk
The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College
9781948742849
Regular price $16.95 Save Liquid error (snippets/product-template line 248): Computation results in '-Infinity'%A succinct and impassioned call to reimagine and revive the small liberal arts college, by two veteran educators.
Private liberal arts colleges have struggled for decades; now, as the COVID-19 pandemic widens cracks latent in many American institutions, they are facing a possibly mortal crisis.
In The Post-Pandemic Liberal Arts College: A Manifesto for Reinvention, Steven Volk and Beth Benedix call for small colleges to seize this moment and reinvent themselves. With the rise of rankings that set peer institutions against each other, tuition that outpaces income, creeping pre-professionalism, and a race to build student “customers” the splashiest new amenities, many private liberal arts colleges have strayed from their founders’ missions. If they could shed the mantle of exclusivity, reduce costs, facilitate true social mobility, and collaborate with each other, the authors argue, they might both survive and again become just, equitable, accessible institutions able to offer the transformative and visionary education that is their hallmark.
Educators, students, parents, and anyone invested in the future of higher education should read this book.