This chapter reflects on how the Michigan Center for Student Success (MCSS) has leveraged its position within a membership organization for community college presidents and trustees to engage in statewide student success efforts in a state with a unique higher education governance structure. With no formal higher education governing body to set…

Promise programs are discussed as a policy movement that began with the 2005 launch of the Kalamazoo Promise. Since then, programs bearing the Promise label or sharing similar features have spread across the higher educational landscape, appearing in most states and across postsecondary sectors. Simultaneously, scholarly literature discussing…

The purpose of this study was to examine instrumental music lessons taught for schoolchildren over the radio by Joseph Maddy in the 1930s and early 1950s. Research questions addressed (a) conditions, circumstances, and details surrounding the lessons and (b) pedagogical principles, strategies, methods, and didactic materials utilized in these…

The activism efforts of Latinx students from the 1960s to 1990s at Michigan State University preceded the current resources available to Latinxs on campus today. Guided by transformational resistance, university library archival sources are used to showcase various activism efforts demonstrated by these collegians. Some include a grape purchasing…

Historians of higher education generally agree on a handful of ideas about the early years of the land-grant colleges that grew out of the Morrill Act of 1862. For their first three decades, the land-grant colleges struggled to survive: lacking students, funding, and public favor. Charged, by the Morrill Act, to promote "the liberal and…

This historical study chronicles the creation, development, and termination of the Midwestern Conference on School Vocal and Instrumental Music, hosted by the University of Michigan between 1946 and 2005. Beginning as a band music reading session led by William Revelli in 1936, the conference developed into a premier professional workshop by the…

In the discourse that swirled in the mid-1800s around the creation of new American public universities, three major and interrelated tensions became evident: the first related to the continued debate regarding the proper curricular balance between practical education and classical studies; the second focused on the appropriate autonomy of…

Informal physics programs bring physicists together with youth and adults from local communities to engage with physics content outside of classroom settings. These public engagement or "physics outreach" programs are a significant endeavor of the physics community; however, we lack a systemic documentation of these efforts, which makes…

This study examined the history of band tournaments governed by the Michigan State Band Association (MSBA), beginning with the first competition in 1877 and ending with the disbandment of the Association and tournaments in 1884. The research focused specifically on the (a) organization, rules, and procedures of the tournaments; (b) details…

Few institutions receive more attention and more funding than our education system. And it certainly warrants that attention; after all, education plays a big part in determining the future. Reformers abound, for both higher education and the K-12 system. But they have largely missed one of the most crucial components of education, our schools of…

In this article we search for real utopias for higher education by first introducing and describing a vital counter-hegemonic students movement of the early 1960s--Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and their Port Huron Statement (1962). The movement maintained that universities are not communities of equals but served the elite. In the…

Claiming that free speech is dying on American campuses, a conservative think tank has led an effort to push states to adopt a model bill that, in the name of defending campus free speech, risks undermining it. This report seeks to understand the context and content of the "campus free-speech" movement, to track its influence within…

"The Soul of the American University" is a classic and much discussed account of the changing roles of Christianity in shaping American higher education, presented here in a newly revised edition to offer insights for a modern era. As late as the World War II era, it was not unusual even for state schools to offer chapel services or for…

In this study, I investigated how student publications portrayed whiteness as the dominant feature of the campus environment between 1945 and 1965 among the member institutions of a consortium of elite U.S. Midwestern liberal arts colleges located in rural and industrial towns across Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania. These…

On the 50th anniversary of the start of the writing across the curriculum movement, the authors explore the historical foundations of the movement, consider key developments that have occurred since its emergence as one of the most enduring and successful education reform movements in North America, and reflect on potential directions for future…