A collection of articles forming a handbook of information on Metropolitan Universities, their unique mission and characteristics. It addresses the questions and concerns of faculty, students, administrators, state educational policy makers, and mayors or city managers, all of whom are involved in institutions located in or near the urban center of a metropolitan area. Johnson and Bell collected articles forming a handbook of information on metropolitan universities and their unique mission and characteristics. It addresses the questions and concerns of faculty, students, administrators, state educational policy makers, and mayors or city managers, all of whom are involved in institutions located in or near the urban center of a metropolitan area.

Building the Ivory Tower examines the role of American universities as urban developers and their changing effects on cities in the twentieth century. LaDale C. Winling explores philanthropy, real estate investments, architectural landscapes, and urban politics to reckon with the tensions of university growth in our cities.

A collection of 13 studies based on research into ongoing changes in higher education in the US. They cover leadership, wellness and health programs, student services, administration, curriculum, technology, athletics, diversity, volunteer service, and international issues. Discussion questions for each study are appended for use in a graduate education course. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

First Published in 2000. This is Volume 75, Number 3 of the Peabody Journal of Education and focuses on collaboration across campus, town and with K-12 schools. The issue provides descriptions of a range of ways in which universities and schools and colleges of education can provide leadership for collaborative ventures involving the wider community. The collaborative undertakings include working with community agencies, other schools or colleges within or external to the institution, P-12 schools, and business groups. The rationale for the theme is that in today's world the problems we are facing are so complex that solutions can no longer be generated and successfully implemented in a vacuum. Cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaboration is required to have the desired impact. This necessitates collaboration.

The Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee calls for urgent changes in the higher education sector in this report examining students' university experience. The report says the current system for safeguarding standards is out of date, inconsistent and should be replaced. The Quality Assurance Agency should be transformed into an independent Quality and Standards Agency with a specific standards remit. The Committee also says that the culture at the top of the sector should change. The Committee found defensive complacency in the leadership of the sector and no appetite to explore key issues such as the reasons for proportional increase in first and upper second class honours degrees in the past 15 years. Support for and treatment of part-time and mature students should be improved - the current system amounts to a form of discrimination. The Government's forthcoming review of fees needs to examine all aspects of support for these students. The report also says: further education colleges should play a larger role in the development of higher education; the Government should help create a credit transfer system which will allow credit earned in one institution to be transferred to another; schemes such as those run by Leeds University for students from disadvantaged backgrounds should be standard practice across the sector; there is a lack of consistency across the higher education sector and codes of practice applying to all institutions receiving public money should be introduced; elements of chance in the admissions process should be reduced so that students get a fairer deal on access to university.

The chapters in this book are revised versions of papers initially presented at a confer ence on Universities and their cities held in Amsterdam on March 27-29 1996. There were about one hundred participants and 45 written contributions from Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. People with different disciplinary backgrounds, geographers, historians, sociologists, economists and planners among them, attended, as did a few university administrators and local government officials. The intricate relationships between universities and their cities were intensively debated from the perspective of possible contributions by the university to city life as well as from the angle of the city as a milieu that affects the university's functioning. There were theoretical and historical papers, and a series of case studies, some of them comparative, as well as proposals and descriptions of efforts to improve city-university relations. It was a fruitful occasion for many on account of the diversity of experience brought together for the purpose of a debate on a matter of common interest. The vari ous university settings within Amsterdam were visited during a guided tour that pro vided food for thought on the matters under discussion by means of a living example.