Our taste for blood sport stops short at the bruising clash of football players or the gloved blows of boxers, and the suicide of a politician is no more than a personal tragedy. What, then, are we to make of the ancient Romans, for whom the meaning of sport and politics often depended on death? In this provocative, thoughtful book, Paul Plass shows how the deadly violence of arena sport and political suicide served a social purpose in ancient Rome. His work offers a reminder of the complex uses to which institutionalized violence can be put. Violence, Plass observes, is a universal part of human life, and so must be integrated into social order. Grounding his study in evidence from Roman history and drawing on ideas from contemporary sociology and anthropology, he first discusses gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. Massive bloodshed in the arena, Plass argues, embodied the element of danger for a society frequently engaged in war, with outsiders--whether slaves, criminals, or prisoners of war--sacrificed for a sense of public security

"This edited volume offers a comprehensive introduction to the complex realities of American higher education, including its history, financing, governance, and relationship with the states and federal government. For this fifth edition, existing chapters were revised extensively to reflect contemporary realities, and new chapters were added"--

In The Instrumental University, Ethan Schrum provides an illuminating genealogy of the educational environment in which administrators, professors, and students live and work today. After World War II, research universities in the United States underwent a profound mission change. The Instrumental University combines intellectual, institutional, and political history to reinterpret postwar American life through the changes in higher education. Acknowledging but rejecting the prevailing conception of the Cold War university largely dedicated to supporting national security, Schrum provides a more complete and contextualized account of the American research university between 1945 and 1970. Uncovering a pervasive instrumental understanding of higher education during that era, The Instrumental University shows that universities framed their mission around solving social problems and promoting economic development as central institutions in what would soon be called the knowledge economy. In so doing, these institutions took on more capitalistic and managerial tendencies and, as a result, marginalized founding ideals, such as pursuit of knowledge in academic disciplines and freedom of individual investigators. The technocratic turn eroded some practices that made the American university special. Yet, as Schrum suggests, the instrumental university was not yet the neoliberal university of the 1970s and onwards in which market considerations trumped all others. University of California president Clark Kerr and other innovators in higher education were driven by a progressive impulse that drew on an earlier tradition grounded in a concern for the common good and social welfare.

International Education as we have known it has evolved from a fragmented approach on study abroad and international students into a strategic and comprehensive internationalization concept that affects all aspects of higher education. The SAGE Handbook of International Higher Education serves as a guide to internationalization of higher education and offers new strategies for its further development and expansion in the years to come. With a decidedly global approach, this groundbreaking volume brings together leading experts from around the world to illustrate the increasing importance of internationalization. It also encompasses the diversity and breadth of internationalization of higher education in all its thematic facets and regional impacts.The handbook comprises five sections, covering key areas: internationalization of higher education in a conceptual and historic context; different thematic approaches to internationalization; internationalization of the curriculum, teaching and learning process, and intercultural competencies; the abroad dimension of internationalization and the mobility of students, scholars, institutions, and projects; and a concluding section on regional trends in international education and direction for the future of internationalization in the 21st century.

Ideally, universities are centers of learning, in which great researchers dispassionately search for truth, no matter how unpopular those truths must be. The marketplace of ideas assures that truth wins out against bias and prejudice. Yet, many people worry that there's rot in the heart of thehigher education business.In Cracks in the Ivory Tower, libertarian scholars Jason Brennan and Philip Magness reveal the problems are even worse than anyone suspects. Marshalling an array of data, they systematically show how contemporary American universities fall short of these ideals and how bad incentives make faculty,administrators, and students act unethically. While universities may at times excel at identifying and calling out injustice outside their gates, Brennan and Magness contend that individuals are primarily guided by self-interest at every level. They find that the problems are deep and pervasive:most academic marketing and advertising is semi-fraudulent; colleges and individual departments regularly make promises they do not and cannot keep; and most students cheat a little, while many cheat a lot. Trenchant and wide-ranging, they elucidate the many ways in which faculty and students alikehave every incentive to make teaching and learning secondary.In this revealing expose, Brennan and Magness bring to light many of the ethical problems universities, faculties, and students currently face. In turn, they reshape our understanding of how such high-powered institutions run their business.

Change has dramatically confronted higher education in the last decade, challenging it to its very roots. Colleges and universities have been rocked by a volatile economy, changing demographic trends, weakening public opinion, lagging state and federal support, and other forces. Leaders from the most highly respected institutions in the country have examined the important issues facing higher education today and this book offers their insights on restructuring administrative operations, new revenue opportunities, debt management, capital renewal, endowment management, and more.