The academy, once celebrated as society's vital center of intellectual life, has become in many respects a business enterprise whose primary concern is to keep itself in business, leaving the culture of ideas to languish. We might recover - or create - it in interstitial spaces and in interludes we seize for ourselves.

Imagining the universities of the future. How can we re-envision the university? Too many examples of what passes for educational innovation today—MOOCs especially—focus on transactions, on questions of delivery. In Alternative Universities, David J. Staley argues that modern universities suffer from a poverty of imagination about how to reinvent themselves. Anyone seeking innovation in higher education today should concentrate instead, he says, on the kind of transformational experience universities enact. In this exercise in speculative design, Staley proposes ten models of innovation in higher education that expand our ideas of the structure and scope of the university, suggesting possibilities for what its future might look like. What if the university were designed around a curriculum of seven broad cognitive skills or as a series of global gap year experiences? What if, as a condition of matriculation, students had to major in three disparate subjects? What if the university placed the pursuit of play well above the acquisition and production of knowledge? By asking bold "What if?" questions, Staley assumes that the university is always in a state of becoming and that there is not one "idea of the university" to which all institutions must aspire. This book specifically addresses those engaged in university strategy—university presidents, faculty, policy experts, legislators, foundations, and entrepreneurs—those involved in what Simon Marginson calls "university making." Pairing a critique tempered to our current moment with an explanation of how change and disruption might contribute to a new "golden age" for higher education, Alternative Universities is an audacious and essential read.

In this autoethnographic work, authors Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren illustrate a synthesis of critical pedagogy and instructional communication, as both a field of study and a teaching philosophy. Critical Communication Pedagogy is a poetic work that charts paradigmatic tensions in instructional communication research, articulates commitments underpinning critical communication pedagogy, and invites readers into self-reflection on their experiences as researchers, students, and teachers.

Higher education as we have known it has now and forever dramatically changed and so must the previous models that we once held dear. Leaders must take a fresh look at how their institutions design, implement, and measure practices in strategic enrollment management and expand the model, as never before. Higher Education on the Brink: Reimagining Strategic Enrollment Management in Colleges and Universities combines strategies for enrollment enhancement with significant support for development of alternative revenue streams for overall sustainability and growth. It introduces a new model for launching highly engaged strategic planning processes for colleges and universities. With current, real-world examples, the book details how colleges can be guided by integrated strategic planning processes to recalibrate efforts that yield key results. The major difference in this work is an exacting focus on organizational culture and each facet that defines it. As colleges and universities place new focus on strategically re-imagining higher education and their role in it, Higher Education on the Brink will serve as a guide for determining what difficult questions need to be asked and how to answer those questions in a manner that will position the college for the future with support from the college community, generating increased opportunities for student and operational success.

The Artist and Academia explores the relationship between artistic and academic ways of knowing. Historically, these have often been presented as opposites; the former characterized as passionate and intuitive and the latter portrayed as systematic and rigorous. Recent scholarship presents a more complex picture. Artistic knowledge demands high levels of skill and rigor, while academic research requires creativity and innovative thinking. This edited collection brings together leading artists and scholars (as well as artist-scholars) to offer a variety of philosophical, educational, experiential, reflexive and imaginative perspectives on the artist and academia. The contributions include in-depth, scholarly discussions on the nature of knowledge and creativity, as well as personal artistic statements from musicians, dancers, actors and writers. Additionally, it explores both the mediational and subversive spaces created by the meeting of artistic and academic traditions. While the book addresses global themes by global writers, its core case study is an educational experiment called the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick in Ireland. Established in 1994, it set out to reconfigure the place of the artist in the context of contemporary higher education. The material is clustered into three parts. Part One and Part Two explore the artist as mediator, educator and subversive in academia. Grounded in close-to-practice research, Part Three concludes the volume with a set of case studies from the Irish World Academy. Artistic and academic knowledge come together in this unique set of pieces to explore the development of more inclusive and imaginative pedagogical values.

Congratulations! You have, right in front of you, a treasure. From within these pages you will be able to pick up a good collection of reformist ideas and concepts, endowed with the potential to bring about an epoch making impact on all kinds of assessments or evaluations in general, and in the academic performance evaluation of students, in particular. Once it so happened that Prasad was moved by a real life encounter with one of his long time friends who shared with him her sour experience as a student in a premiere educational institution. It seems that when she inquired with the professor who gave her a 'B' grade in a course in which she expected an 'A' grade, she was called to a side and explained that it was indeed a very high 'B', and that after all the difference between a low 'A' and a high 'B' is only marginal! However, that marginal difference had resulted in her missing an admission into an elite graduate program, which was her cherished dream unrealized. Prasad was ruminating on that episode during one of his casual walks on the sandy beach side off the Institute campus, on a beautiful Thursday evening of the Eighth of August Two Thousand Two; when he was 'visited' by the slippery idea of 'SQUIDS' fl owing over the tidal waves from the salty waters of the sea swashing on and off the sandy beach front. Yes, that is it! 'SQUIDS' (singular) has indeed come as a unique blessing in disguise. Here, 'SQUIDS' stands for 'Scale Quantum Unit Interval Domain Size' that is the most fundamental basis for the design of a measurement scale. 'SQUIDS' defines the scale precision. 'SQUIDS' is the key concept used in resolving the mystery behind the unacceptably chaotic behavior of the Letter Grading System, and also in developing an alternative system design as well. The proposed design for a novel "Students Academic Performance Evaluation System" has a tremendous potential to usher in a conceptual paradigm shift in all kinds of assessments or evaluations. The mathematical fallacy that is mysteriously implied in the design of the letter grading system has been well brought out and resolved here. Although the problem has been well analyzed and even a solution has been proposed herein, there remains a substantial amount of work remaining! The next stage is the task of convincing (and/or getting convinced by) the concerned stake-holders in academia, that can then facilitate a smooth implementation of this novel proposal. You are urged to take a pro-active leadership role in the entire exercise, to bring about the needed changes.