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Agile Faculty is a faculty development book that introduces strategies to help faculty improve their goal-setting, productivity, vitality, and career satisfaction. To do so, the book adapts the Scrum project management framework popular in software development. Scrum is a framework for dividing large projects into smaller pieces that can be accomplished in a short amount of time. The Scrum roles, meetings, strategies, and terminology can easily be adapted to faculty work in research, service, and teaching, and this work can be individual or collaborative. Faculty often juggle multiple projects and responsibilities including completing research, serving on committees, designing and teaching classes, and mentoring students and peers. Faculty can experience stress when these responsibilities compete for their time. Faculty can benefit from a set of flexible and adaptable strategies to achieve meaningful personal and professional goals. Scrum is considered an Agile framework. Agile is an umbrella term for a set of human-centered project management values and principles. The Agile values of focus, commitment, openness, courage, and respect align with faculty values. Agile Faculty introduces everything faculty readers need to know about the basics of Agile and Scrum and includes chapters with advice and specific strategies to improve how faculty approach different aspects of their research, service, and teaching priorities. The goal of Agile Faculty is to help faculty readers determine their most meaningful personal and professional goals and to use the Agile and Scrum strategies outlined in the book to make regular incremental progress toward their highest priorities for career satisfaction.

The book is a collection of essays about ethical issues arising in selective higher education. The chapters, all by distinguished scholars, including one eminent university president, address the following issues: what are the proper aims of the university and what role do the liberal arts play in fulfilling those aims?: what is the justification of the humanities; how should we conceive of critical reflection, and how should we teach it to our students?; how should professors approach their intellectual relationship with their students?; how should academics approach the problems raised by social epistemology (like the novice-expert problem) in their curriculum design and pedagogical practices?; what obligations do elite institutions have to correct for the contribution they have made, over time, to racial inequality?; and how can the university serve as a model of justice for its students? It concludes with a brief essay suggesting further avenues for research.

Aspiring college students and their families have many options. A student can attend an in-state or an out-of-state school, a public or private college, a two-year community college program or a four-year university program. Students can attend full time and have a bachelor of arts degree by the age of twenty-three or mix college and work, progressing toward a degree more slowly. To make matters more complicated, the array of financial aid available is more complex than ever. Students and their families must weigh federal grants, state merit scholarships, college tax credits, and college savings accounts, to name just a few. This book shows how students and their families really make college decisions—how they respond to financial aid options, how peer relationships figure in the decision-making process, and even whether they need mentoring to get through the admissions process. Students of all sorts are considered—from poor students, who may struggle with applications and with deciding whether to continue on to college, to high-aptitude students who are offered “free rides” at elite schools. The book utilizes the best methods and latest data to analyze the college decision-making process, while explaining how changes in aid and admissions practices inform those decisions as well.

What types of friendship networks do students form? Who forms which type? What academic and social outcomes are attached to them? And how they impact students after college? These are some of the issues this book considers as it follows Alberto, Mary, Martin, and their peers over a five-year period from their undergraduate years at MU into life after college. By investigating the connections among students’ friends, this book identifies three types of friendship networks—tight-knitters, compartmentalizers, and samplers. Friendship networks positively and negatively impact students’ academic performance, social experiences, and life after college. And they do so differently across racial, gender, and class backgrounds. In brief, the benefits of friendship are not the same for all friends or for all students. Although friendships can drag down students’ academic success, friendships can also keep students in school, giving them a sense of belonging and enjoyment. This book challenges views of friendships as either helping or harming students by showing how and for whom friends help and hinder. Connecting rich descriptions of students’ experiences with detailed maps of their friendships over time provides a uniquely deep and nuanced lens on the lasting academic and social benefits of friends. This book advances and reorients both conceptualization and empirical investigation by showing how college friendships matter academically and socially, and how they matter differently across social categories. The book also provides suggestions for students, parents, faculty and administrators who seek to help students thrive academically and socially.

Jacobs raises questions about the increasing popularity of concept of interdisciplinarity, which is becoming a powerful force in American higher education. Reformers assert that blurring the boundaries between traditional disciplines would promote more rapid advances in research, more useful solutions to complex public problems, and more effective teaching and learning. Jacobs maintains that the critiques of established disciplines, such as history, economics and biology, are often over-stated and misplaced. He shows that disciplines are remarkably porous and continually incorporate new methods and ideas from other fields. Drawing on diverse sources of data, Jacobs considers many case studies, including the diffusion of ideas between fields, with a special focus on education research; the creation of interdisciplinary scholarly journals; the rise of new fields from existing ones; American studies programs; cross-listed courses, team teaching and specialized undergraduate degrees. Jacobs broadens the inquiry, looking beyond individual research collaborations to the system of disciplines and the long-term trajectories of research frontiers. Over time, successful interdisciplinary breakthroughs recreate many of the key features of established disciplines. He questions whether efforts to integrate knowledge across domains are likely to succeed, since interdisciplinary research itself is often quite specialized. Finally, these efforts may produce unintended consequences, since an interdisciplinary university would likely promote greater centralization of academic decision making in the offices of deans and presidents. Over the course of the book, Jacobs turns many of the criticisms of disciplines on their heads while making a powerful defense of the enduring value of liberal arts disciplines.

America's public universities educate 80% of the nation's college students. But in the wake of rising demands on state treasuries, changing demographics, growing income inequality, and legislative indifference, many of these institutions have fallen into decline. Tuition costs have skyrocketed, class sizes have gone up, the number of courses offered has gone down, and the overall quality of education has decreased significantly. This book draws on the author's years of experience as a professor, administrator, and university president to argue that a new compact between state government and public universities is needed to make these schools more affordable and financially secure. The book challenges a change-resistant culture in academia that places too low a premium on efficiency and productivity. Seeing a crisis of campus leadership, the book takes state legislators to task for perpetuating the decay of their public university systems and calls for reforms in the way university presidents and governing boards are selected. It concludes that the era is long past when state appropriations can enable public universities to keep their fees low and affordable. The book thus calls for the partial deregulation of public universities and a phase-out of their state appropriations. The plan outlined in this book would tie university revenues to their performance and exploit the competitive pressures of the academic marketplace to control costs, rein in tuition, and make schools more responsive to student needs.

Based on years of observation at a large state university, this book tracks the dispiriting consequences of trading in traditional educational values for loyalty to the market. Aping their boardroom idols, the new corporate administrators at such universities wander from job to job and reductively view the students there as future workers in need of training. Obsessed with measurable successes, they stress auditing and accountability, which leads to policies of surveillance and control dubiously cloaked in the guise of scientific administration. This exposé of the modern university paints a candid portrait of the corporatization of higher education and its impact on students and faculty. Like the best campus novelists, the book entertains with observations of backstage power dynamics and faculty politics, but ultimately aims to be a hard-hitting account of how higher education's misguided pursuit of success fails us all.