A lively history of the University of Connecticut from its founding to the present day

The School of Business Administration at the University of Connecticut was created in 1940 at about the same time that the university changed its name to the University of Connecticut. This book chronicles the School’s journey to excellence over its first 75 years of existence. The School operates degree programs at four major locations. The School has grown from a faculty of 5 in 1940 to 112 in 2015. Starting with just an undergraduate program in 1940 the offerings of the school now include multiple MBA and MS programs as well as a Ph.D. program. Recognition of the quality of the School’s programs is represented by its AACSB accreditation and its rankings. In the most recent year its MBA program has been ranked in the Top 50 among all programs and the Top 25 among all public programs. Its MS in Accounting Program recently was ranked as number 3 in the country.

Clearly written and compellingly argued, Nathan Sorber's Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt should be read by every land-grant institution graduate and faculty and staff member, and by all high government officials who deal with public higher education.― Times Higher Education Sorber's history of the movement and society of the time provides an original framework for understanding the origins of the land-grant colleges and the nationwide development of these schools into the twentieth century. The land-grant ideal at the foundation of many institutions of higher learning promotes the sharing of higher education, science, and technical knowledge with local communities. This democratic and utilitarian mission, Nathan M. Sorber shows, has always been subject to heated debate regarding the motivations and goals of land-grant institutions. In Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt, Sorber uncovers the intersection of class interest and economic context, and its influence on the origins, development, and standardization of land-grant colleges. The first land-grant colleges supported by the Morrill Act of 1862 assumed a role in facilitating the rise of a capitalist, industrial economy and a modern, bureaucratized nation-state. The new land-grant colleges contributed ideas, technologies, and technical specialists that supported emerging industries. During the populist revolts chronicled by Sorber, the land-grant colleges became a battleground for resisting many aspects of this transition to modernity. An awakened agricultural population challenged the movement of people and power from the rural periphery to urban centers and worked to reform land-grant colleges to serve the political and economic needs of rural communities. These populists embraced their vocational, open-access land-grant model as a bulwark against the outmigration of rural youth from the countryside, and as a vehicle for preserving the farm, the farmer, and the local community at the center of American democracy.

Science as Service is a collection of essays that traces the development of the land-grant colleges established by the Morrill Act of 1862, and documents how their faith and efforts in science and technology gave credibility and power to these institutions and their scientists.

One of the most remarkable education leaders of the late nineteenth century and the creator of the modern American research university finally gets his due. Daniel Coit Gilman, a Yale-trained geographer who first worked as librarian at his alma mater, led a truly remarkable life. He was selected as the third president of the University of California; was elected as the first president of Johns Hopkins University, where he served for twenty-five years; served as one of the original founders of the Association of American Universities; and—at an age when most retired—was hand-picked by Andrew Carnegie to head up his eponymous institution in Washington, DC. In Daniel Coit Gilman and the Birth of the American Research University, Michael T. Benson argues that Gilman's enduring legacy will always be as the father of the modern research university—a uniquely American invention that remains the envy of the entire world. In the past half-century, nothing has been written about Gilman that takes into account his detailed journals, reviews his prodigious correspondence, or considers his broad external board service. This book fills an enormous void in the history of the birth of the "new" American system of higher education, especially as it relates to graduate education. The late 1800s, Benson points out, is one of the most pivotal periods in the development of the American university model; this book reveals that there is no more important figure in shaping that model than Daniel Coit Gilman. Benson focuses on Gilman's time deliberating on, discussing, developing, refining, and eventually implementing the plan that brought the modern research university to life in 1876. He also explains how many university elements that we take for granted—the graduate fellowships, the emphasis on primary investigations and discovery, the funding of the best laboratory and research spaces, the scholarly journals, the university presses, the sprawling health sciences complexes with teaching hospitals—were put in place by Gilman at Johns Hopkins University. Ultimately, the book shows, Gilman and his colleagues forced all institutions to reexamine their own model and to make the requisite changes to adapt, survive, thrive, compete, and contribute.

What can we learn when we listen closely to and engage in dialogue with social movement activists? Social Movements and Activism in the USA addresses this question for a group of progressive activists in Hartford, Connecticut, who do community, labor, feminist, gay and lesbian, peace, and anti-racist organizing. Situated within the twenty-first-century landscape of post-industrialism and neo-liberalism and drawing on oral histories, the book argues for a dialogic and integrative approach to social movement activism. The dialogue between scholar and activist captures the interpretive nature of activists' identity, the variable ways activists decide on strategies and goals, the external constraints on activism, and the creative ways activists manoeuvre around these constraints. This dialogic approach makes the book accessible and useful to students, scholars, and activists alike. The integrative nature of the text refers to its theoretical approach. Rather than advancing a new theory of social movements, it uses existing approaches as a tool kit to examine the what, how, who, and why of social movement activism.

Volume XXII/2 of History of Universities contains the customary mix of learned articles, book reviews, and bibliographical information. In this special issue, the contributors examine the institutional and intellectual history of the Collège de Montaigu, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century.