Land-grant colleges and universities have a storied past. This book looks at their future.
Land-grant colleges and universities occupy a special place in the landscape of American higher education. Publicly funded agricultural and technical educational institutions were first founded in the mid-nineteenth century with the Morrill Act, which established land grants to support these schools. They include such prominent names as Cornell, Maryland, Michigan State, MIT, Ohio State, Penn State, Rutgers, Texas A&amp;M, West Virginia University, Wisconsin, and the University of California―in other words, four dozen of the largest and best public universities in America. Add to this a number of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and tribal colleges―in all, almost 300 institutions. Their mission is a democratic and pragmatic one: to bring science, technology, agriculture, and the arts to the American people.
In this book, Stephen M. Gavazzi and E. Gordon Gee discuss present challenges to and future opportunities for these institutions. Drawing on interviews with 27 college presidents and chancellors, Gavazzi and Gee explore the strengths and weaknesses of land-grant universities while examining the changing threats they face. Arguing that the land-grant university of the twenty-first century is responsible to a wide range of constituencies, the authors also pay specific attention to the ways these universities meet the needs of the communities they serve. Ultimately, the book suggests that leaders and supporters should become more fiercely land-grant in their orientation; that is, they should work to more vigorously uphold their community-focused missions through teaching, research, and service-oriented activities.
Combining extensive research with Gee’s own decades of leadership experience, Land-Grant Universities for the Future argues that these schools are the engine of higher education in America―and perhaps democracy’s best hope. This book should be of great interest to faculty members and students, as well as those parents, legislators, policymakers, and other area stakeholders who have a vested interest in the well-being of America’s original public universities.

Land-Grant Universities for the Future: Higher Education for the Public Good

Education & Teaching

Gavazzi, Stephen M.

Gee, E. Gordon

Higher & Continuing Education

Johns Hopkins University Press

Exploring the current state of relationships between public universities, government leaders, and the citizens who elect them, this book offers insight into how to repair the growing rift between higher education and its public. Higher education gets a bad rap these days. The public perception is that there is a growing rift between public universities and the elected officials who support them. In What's Public about Public Higher Ed?, Stephen M. Gavazzi and E. Gordon Gee explore the reality of that supposed divide, offering qualitative and quantitative evidence of why it's happened and what can be done about it. Critical problems, Gavazzi and Gee argue, have arisen because higher education leaders often assumed that what was good for universities was good for the public at large. For example, many public institutions have placed more emphasis on research at the expense of teaching, learning, and outreach. This university-centric viewpoint has contributed significantly to the disconnect between our nation's public universities and the representatives of the people they are supposed to be serving. But this gulf can only be bridged, the authors insist, if people at the universities take the time to really listen to what the citizens of their states are asking of them. Gavazzi and Gee draw on never-before-gathered survey data on public sentiment regarding higher education. Collected from citizens residing in the four most populous states--California, Florida, New York, and Texas--plus Ohio and West Virginia, the authors' home states, this data reflects critical issues, including how universities spend taxpayer money, the pursuit of national rankings, student financial aid, and the interplay of international activities versus efforts to create "closer to home" impact. An unflinching, no-holds-barred exploration of what citizens really think about their public universities, What's Public about Public Higher Ed? also places special emphasis on the events of 2020--including the COVID-19 pandemic and the worst racial unrest seen in half a century--as major inflection points for understanding the implications of the survey's findings.

What's Public about Public Higher Ed?: Halting Higher Education's Decline in the Court of Public Opinion

The Optimal Town-Gown Marriage book is dedicated to helping campus and community leaders better understand how the twin components of the “town” and the “gown” come together to determine the relative health and well-being of relationships between institutions of higher education and the communities in which they are located. Following a review of the emerging body of scholarly literature on town-gown relationships, the metaphor of marriage is introduced as a way of providing additional invaluable insights into the ways that campuses and communities interact with one another. A typology that borrows from the marital literature – using the terms harmonious, traditional, conflicted, and devitalized to describe the experiences of relationship partners – is presented as a new set of lenses for observing and making sense of town-gown associations. As well, case examples are used to flesh out the characteristics that help to shape these different relationship types, with special attention paid to the critical role that leaders play in directing campuses and communities toward more optimal ways of interacting with one another. The Optimal Town-Gown Marriage book additionally provides assistance to readers in taking the guesswork out of assessing the quality of town-gown relationships. The development and testing of the Optimal College Town Assessment (OCTA) is described, including a discussion of the quantitative and qualitative data generated by the pilot studies that have been conducted with university campuses and the communities that surround them. The items of the OCTA are included in the book to encourage readers to become more data-driven in their approach. All of the best data gathering efforts are for naught, however, if the information’s reliability and validity is questioned. Therefore, a Town-Gown Mobilization Cycle is presented as part of a thorough explanation of the steps that campus and community leaders must take both before and after the data gathering phase of one’s work in order to ensure that the integrity of the resulting database is beyond reproach. The confidential thoughts and reflections of four former university presidents and four city administrators are reported in The Optimal Town-Gown Marriage book as well. These campus and community leaders reported on the various ways that successful town-gown partnerships were forged as the result of their efforts to create and sustain a focus on mutually beneficial goals and objectives. Corroborating information is brought to bear on this discussion through the results of an interview conducted with E. Gordon Gee, arguably the most well-known university president in the nation. Having served as president at five different major institutions of higher learning – including two stints at The Ohio State University and West Virginia University – Dr. Gee has built up a wealth of insights in facilitating campus-community interactions that are unparalleled by any of his contemporaries. Finally, all of this information is pulled together in the book’s presentation of The Ten Commandments of Town-Gown Relationships, a series of statements about what campus and community leaders must do together in order to build more optimal relationships with one another.

The Optimal Town-Gown Marriage: Taking Campus-Community Outreach and Engagement to the Next Level

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

The second edition of this book offers&nbsp;an expanded and updated blueprint for more consistently improved practice, emphasizing family process and structure instead of only individual developmental stages. Its chapters deftly summarize the recent knowledge base about families with adolescents and explains how to apply these results across mental health and social services disciplines. The new edition clearly illustrates family concerns and theoretical perspectives through real-world vignettes and cogent use of family assessment measures. Chapters offer a broad understanding of how diversity in all its forms - including race/ethnicity, culture, religion, and sexual orientation - has created a much more nuanced understanding of how families with adolescents are able to function within their environment. Both major challenges to families and communities form the backdrop of the second edition's focus on forecasting in which the theoretical, empirical, and intervention literatures necessarily move in service to the health and well-being of families with adolescents. Featured topics include: <ul> <li>Central concepts of family development, family systems, ecological, attachment, and social learning theories in relation to families with adolescents.</li> <li>Influence of the family on adolescent problem behavior, mental health concerns, substance use issues, educational attainment, and social competence outcomes.</li> <li>Selected studies on parenting behaviors, conflict resolution, and other major aspects of families with adolescents.</li> <li>Application topics in family-based intervention and prevention programs.</li> <li>Integrating theory, research, and applications to create a "triple threat" model.</li> <li style="list-style: none">Diversity issues surrounding race/ethnicity, culture, religion, and sexual orientation.</li> </ul> Families with Adolescents, Second Edition,&nbsp;is an essential resource for researchers, professors, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well as professionals and other mental health clinicians, practitioners, and therapists in clinical child and developmental psychology, family studies, human development, sociology, social work, education, and all allied disciplines.

Families with Adolescents: Bridging the Gaps Between Theory, Research, and Practice (Advancing Responsible Adolescent Development)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Lim, Ji-Young

Psychology & Counseling

Springer

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gavazzi, Stephen M.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gavazzi, Stephen M.