Published annually since 1985, the Handbook series provides a compendium of thorough and integrative literature reviews on a diverse array of topics of interest to the higher education scholarly and policy communities. Each chapter provides a comprehensive review of research findings on a selected topic, critiques the research literature in terms…

Read the news about America's colleges and universities--rising student debt, affirmative action debates, and conflicts between faculty and administrators--and it's clear that higher education in this country is a total mess. But as David F. Labaree reminds us in this book, it's always been that way. And that's exactly why it has become the most…

The stubborn memorandum of organizational forms and types of control stems naturally from the traditionalizing of their practices, the vesting of group interest in their continuation, and the justifying of ideologies. The momentum is increased when the forms and types acquire niches in the larger organizational ecology that protects them against…

Essays on the history of the University of Pennsylvania are presented in this book. They are grouped according to four main periods since the university's founding. After an introduction to the community of which the university has always been a part, focus is on the eighteenth century collegiate departments. In the nineteenth century, while the…

Citations are provided of major books, articles, and dissertations relating to the history of specific institutions of higher education in the United States. The book is intended to help persons learn about the history of institutions, and by its subject index, to give a subject guide to historical writing about higher education. All entries are…

University government in Great Britain, as in so much else in British society, is the complex product of an extended process of historical development. The British university ideal and the structures of academic government owe much to the venerable tradition of Oxford and Cambridge, sometimes reinforced by the heritage associated with the five…

American higher education developed under conditions vastly different from those of the Continent and Britain. Nine colleges were established in the colonial period before the Revolutionary War. Although some of them were related to state governments in their early history, they were even then importantly independent in comparison to continental…

Many apologies have been made for the part the German universities played in the Third Reich. The general stigma of having failed the people as intellectual leaders clung to the German academics for a long time. Their contention of helplessness before the forces of National Socialism gave rise to fears of similar weakness in the future. Although…

Definitions are given for over 300 terms commonly used in the field of higher education. Examples of terms are: A and M University, adjunct professor, degree mill, distribution requirement, early decision, elective, honors program, interlibrary loan, prestige, rolling admission, syllabus, and tutorial. Most definitions have two types of comments:…

Historians of education have never considered the problem of institutional economics to be very important. Almost nothing has been written in the field. The absence of inquiries into the financial basis of American higher education is a reflection of three major problems in the scholarship of education: (1) the lack of monographic literature in…

The Japanese university system has been evolving gradually from more traditional patterns to more modern ones in terms of increased efficiency and participation, as well as from an elite to a mass enrollment system. However, the basic patterns of control and decisionmaking have changed little. The universities have been able to resist intrusions…

We need conceptual assistance in thinking about access to higher education, systematic categories that will help us analyze and compare the national academic structures that condition problems of access and solutions thereto. An approach that centers on basic structure directs attention to the heavy historical momentum of massive systems of higher…

Supplementary text materials for graduate courses in the field of higher education are presented in 29 chapters on organization, governance, and internal and external constraints on governance. Chapter titles and authors include: "Alternative Models of Governance in Higher Education" (J. Victor Baldridge, David V. Curtis, George P.…

The history of universities in their social context is not a merely antiquarian study; it is the soundest basis for consideration of the contemporary university and its problems. The most frequent debate, that of the ivory tower, is really a question of the form and efficiency of the university's articulation with society at large. The…

The traditional European university is now extinct. The conditions in higher education that have succeeded it are highly unstable and therefore transitory, and its eventual replacement is now dimly perceptible on the horizon. The European university is of course an abstraction, meant to approximate the attributes of higher education in Germany,…