This concluding contribution to the special issue on the Ethnography of the University Initiative based at the University of Illinois locates the project at the intersections of several of the main currents in modern higher education: the push for undergraduate research, calls for critical inquiry into higher education, an interest in pedagogical…

The real danger with a successful president and a complacent board is that the board will no longer have the benefit of a "marketplace of ideas" when making critical decisions. Boards that rely on an experienced president as the major source of their information are just as likely as a student's single-source paper to arrive at…

In the 1890s, the Board of Trustees of the not-yet-built University of Chicago had just elected Rainey Harper to be its first president, and later, he would formally accept the position. Harper left a secure position at Yale University to accept the presidency of a university that was nothing more than an idea, a board of trustees, and the…

There are many talented and creative dance professionals working in academia today, and it can be stifling to an artist to feel that one must give students traditional class assignments to evaluate their progress. Dance is a creative endeavor, and all aspects of the curricula, even non-movement-based classwork, can and should reflect this fact. In…

When scholars write about their research in writing programs' archives, they often face the ethical question of whether to name the administrators who were involved in documents. The author identifies and provides examples of three basic orientations to this issue, which he calls overt-historical, covert-qualitative, and hybrid-institutional.…

A materialist rhetoric in service learning is needed to teach students how to "discover" the arguments that already exist in the communities they wish to serve; "analyze" the effectiveness of those arguments; collaboratively "produce" viable alternatives with community partners; and "assess" the impact of…