Do students change as a result of completing their general education requirement? This question was examined by using a pretest/posttest design with five different cohorts of students required to complete a general education program in American history and politics. Differences among various groups in Cohen's d (the standardized difference between…

Like many of us, Stanley Katz will always remember exactly where he was and what he was doing on the morning of 9-11 as we all watched American life as we had known it implode before our eyes. Here, Katz reflects upon his experiences of the day and how difficult it was to know what students were thinking or feeling about the events. He writes that…

Peter Beidler reflects in this essay upon his experiences with his first year students following the events of 9-11. When the class met, still numb with the horror of events, Beidler and his apprentice teacher devised a different kind of exercise for the class. Having taken fifteen minutes to talk about the attacks with students, the author passed…

The authors share a successful Fulbright Group Projects Abroad grant award. The purpose of the grant was to enhance American educators' experience and knowledge of South Africa, in particular, and sub-Saharan Africa more generally. Toward that end, participants experienced a multifaceted view of South Africa's geographical diversity, both physical…

The Federal School was a correspondence art school in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the early 20th century. At that time, scientific methods changed the organization and practice of commercial art training and industrial education, which included correspondence courses from the Federal School. Standards of intelligence were determined with…

A significant number of community service-learning projects in higher education involve the teaching or tutoring of immigrants in English. As in related service-learning scholarship, these projects are commonly informed by perspectives on cultural difference, social justice, and power relations in U.S. society. Yet while faculty pair their…

Looking back over three centuries of American higher education, one can see both strengths and weaknesses in the changing attitudes toward teaching goals. In this article, the author discusses the Truman Commission's (President Harry Truman appointed the higher education commission in July 1946, and charged the commission members to examine…

In this article, the author asks: Why, after years of discussion about access and diversity, are there still so few women and faculty of color in American colleges and universities?" African American women are only one demographic that has been excluded or marginalized in academia, but they offer an intriguing entry point into the discussion…

Though Pace University's Civic Center campus is just two blocks from where the Twin Towers stood, they have never thought of themselves as the epicenter of anything. They are usually a footnote to New York University or Columbia. To read the media after September 11, 2001, one might have thought that New York University was the closest school to…

Columbia University offered the nation's first degree in historic preservation in the early 1970s. Almost overnight, similar programs began springing up from coast to coast. This was one factor that led the National Trust for Historic Preservation to sponsor a higher education study group to examine preservation academics and make suggestions to…

This article, discusses Brown University's slavery report, a 106-page narrative examination of the early connections between Brown University and slavery, that has been greeted--so far--with silence. The report, done at the behest of Ruth J. Simmons, Brown's president and herself a descendant of slaves, is an unsparing look at a shameful side of…

When environmental studies programs broaden their curricular offerings into the humanities, their first stop is often environmental literature, particularly classics such as Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac," and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." Environmental literature courses consider many of the works of…

This article examines the education of African American girls and women. It begins with a look at scholarship on African American girls and women published in "The Journal of Negro Education" from its inception in 1932 to the present. Subsequently, a historical overview of the long, hard-fought struggles of educating this population for…

This essay reflects on the ways in which the events of 9-11 offered those in the humanities an opportunity to demonstrate the many and varied gifts the disciplines have to offer a postmodern world that, for all its technological wonder, is still, ultimately, utterly dependent on food for the soul--the sort of nourishment that the liberal arts…

Timothy Draper's approach to teaching history is that the discipline essentially embodies the best of other humanities and social science disciplines. The processes of remembering, retelling, and reconstructing involve the higher domains of learning. Freed from the bonds of mere memorization of dates, the college history student analyzes,…