ACADEMIA THE RIGHT TO PURSUE KNOWLEDGE PDF Download

Author: Andreas Sofroniou
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0244411816
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Every individual has the right to pursue knowledge, to engage in research, or to teach independently of any political control. Academic freedom is desirable because knowledge is best discovered by the open investigation of facts and opinions. Nations exercise control over academic and educational systems. Some exploit this control for the purpose of indoctrination. Political theorists as diverse as Plato and Marx have argued that education gives people power to change their lives and enables whole societies to develop. The value of education can be illustrated by its impact in poorer countries. For the individual, education means access to better-paid, more varied jobs and higher status. Governments usually wish to hold down the potentially limitless costs of education while ensuring the production of a skilled and law-abiding citizenry, whereas others may have concerns about curriculum, assessment and discipline. In consequence, battles may be fought, but are rarely conclusively won.

Author: Karen Kelsky
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0553419420
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
The definitive career guide for grad students, adjuncts, post-docs and anyone else eager to get tenure or turn their Ph.D. into their ideal job Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration. Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success. They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options. Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers. Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including: -When, where, and what to publish -Writing a foolproof grant application -Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV -Acing the job talk and campus interview -Avoiding the adjunct trap -Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.

Author: Matthew W. Finkin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300155549
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book offers a concise explanation of the history and meaning of American academic freedom, and it attempts to intervene in contemporary debates by clarifying the fundamental functions and purposes of academic freedom in America.--From publisher description.

Author: Deborah Rhode
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804768177
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Although academics have never lacked for critics, publications on the profession tend to be either popularized polemics, which are engaging but misleading, or scholarly analyses, which are intellectually responsible but of little interest to anyone but specialists. In Pursuit of Knowledge offers an alternative: a unique portrait of academic life that should appeal to both experts and a general audience. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, including higher education, history, law, sociology, economics, and literature, the book focuses on the ways in which the pursuit of status has undermined the pursuit of knowledge. Deborah Rhode argues that both individual scholars and institutions in higher education are caught in an arms race of reputation. The result has been to skew priorities in scholarship, erode commitments to teaching, compromise efforts of public intellectuals, and impede effectiveness in administration. The book offers several solutions to counter these pervasive problems in our research institutions. Rhode makes a case for increasing accountability and realigning reward systems. She argues that what is needed is a greater sense of responsibility among universities and their faculties to narrow the gap between academic ideals and practices. In Pursuit of Knowledge is meticulously researched and elegantly written. It is also exceptionally entertaining in its use of quotations culled from over a hundred academic novels, including works by Kingsley Amis, Saul Bellow, David Lodge, and C.P. Snow.(For example, from P.G. Wodehouse's The Girl in Blue, "The Agee womantold us for three quarters of an hourhow she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.") The result is a highly readable but also deeply reflective analysis of the academic profession.

Author: Morgan G. Ames
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537443
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
A fascinating examination of technological utopianism and its complicated consequences. In The Charisma Machine, Morgan Ames chronicles the life and legacy of the One Laptop per Child project and explains why—despite its failures—the same utopian visions that inspired OLPC still motivate other projects trying to use technology to “disrupt” education and development. Announced in 2005 by MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte, One Laptop per Child promised to transform the lives of children across the Global South with a small, sturdy, and cheap laptop computer, powered by a hand crank. In reality, the project fell short in many ways—starting with the hand crank, which never materialized. Yet the project remained charismatic to many who were captivated by its claims of access to educational opportunities previously out of reach. Behind its promises, OLPC, like many technology projects that make similarly grand claims, had a fundamentally flawed vision of who the computer was made for and what role technology should play in learning. Drawing on fifty years of history and a seven-month study of a model OLPC project in Paraguay, Ames reveals that the laptops were not only frustrating to use, easy to break, and hard to repair, they were designed for “technically precocious boys”—idealized younger versions of the developers themselves—rather than the children who were actually using them. The Charisma Machine offers a cautionary tale about the allure of technology hype and the problems that result when utopian dreams drive technology development.

Author: Joanna Williams
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137514795
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Academic freedom is increasingly being threatened by a stifling culture of conformity in higher education that is restricting individual academics, the freedom of academic thought and the progress of knowledge – the very foundations upon which academia and universities are built. Once, scholars demanded academic freedom to critique existing knowledge and to pursue new truths. Today, while fondness for the rhetoric of academic freedom remains, it is increasingly criticised as an outdated and elitist concept by students and lecturers alike and called into question by a number of political and intellectual trends such as feminism, critical theory and identity politics. This provocative and compelling book traces the demise of academic freedom within the context of changing ideas about the purpose of the university and the nature of knowledge. The book argues that a challenge to this culture of conformity and censorship and a defence of academic free speech are needed for critique to be possible and for the intellectual project of evaluating existing knowledge and proposing new knowledge to be meaningful. This book is that challenge and a passionate call to arms for the power of academic thought today.

Author: Christopher Emdin
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807089516
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
A revolutionary new educational model that encourages educators to provide spaces for students to display their academic brilliance without sacrificing their identities Building on the ideas introduced in his New York Times best-selling book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, Christopher Emdin introduces an alternative educational model that will help students (and teachers) celebrate ratchet identity in the classroom. Ratchetdemic advocates for a new kind of student identity—one that bridges the seemingly disparate worlds of the ivory tower and the urban classroom. Because modern schooling often centers whiteness, Emdin argues, it dismisses ratchet identity (the embodying of “negative” characteristics associated with lowbrow culture, often thought to be possessed by people of a particular ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic status) as anti-intellectual and punishes young people for straying from these alleged “academic norms,” leaving young people in classrooms frustrated and uninspired. These deviations, Emdin explains, include so-called “disruptive behavior” and a celebration of hip-hop music and culture. Emdin argues that being “ratchetdemic,” or both ratchet and academic (like having rap battles about science, for example), can empower students to embrace themselves, their backgrounds, and their education as parts of a whole, not disparate identities. This means celebrating protest, disrupting the status quo, and reclaiming the genius of youth in the classroom.

Author: Henry Etzkowitz
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791439470
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Examines current trends toward increasing links between industry and academia and the resulting commercialization of universities as they seek to capitalize their research.

Author: Stanley Fish
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606431X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Advocates of academic freedom often view it as a variation of the right to free speech and an essential feature of democracy. Stanley Fish argues here for a narrower conception of academic freedom, one that does not grant academics a legal status different from other professionals. Providing a blueprint for the study of academic freedom, Fish breaks down the schools of thought on the subject, which range from the idea that academic freedom is justified by the common good or by academic exceptionalism, to its potential for critique or indeed revolution. Fish himself belongs to what he calls the It s Just a Job school: while academics need the latitude call it freedom if you like necessary to perform their professional activities, they are not free in any special sense to do anything but their jobs. Academic freedom, Fish argues, should be justified only by the specific educational good that academics offer. Defending the university in all its glorious narrowness as a place of disinterested inquiry, Fish offers a bracing corrective to academic orthodoxy."

Author: Edmund L. Pincoffs
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292766386
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Most professors and administrators are aware that academic freedom is in danger of being brushed aside by a public that has little understanding of what is at stake. They may be only marginally aware that the defense of academic freedom is endangered by certain confusions concerning the nature of academic freedom, the criteria for its violation, and the structure of an adequate justification for claims to it. These confusions were enshrined in some of the central documents on the subject, including the 1940 Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, agreed upon by the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and endorsed by many professional organizations. Careful analysis of them will not do away with debate; it will bring the debate into focus, so that attacks on academic freedom can be appraised as near or far away from the center of the target and can then be appropriately answered. Nearly all the contemporary writing on academic freedom consists of attack or defense. The Concept of Academic Freedom is the first book to deal exclusively with fundamental conceptual issues underlying the battle. In the discussion of these issues, certain philosophical positions crystallize: radical versus liberal conceptions of the status and function of university teachers, specific versus general theories of academic freedom, consequential versus nonconsequential theories of justification. Partisans (and enemies) of academic freedom would do well to decide on which side of these divisions they stand, or how they would mediate between sides. Otherwise many questions will remain unclear: What is under discussion—a special right peculiar to academics or a general right that is especially important to academics? Is justification of that right possible? Can the right be derived from other rights, or from the theory of justice or of democratic society? Or is the argument for academic freedom one that more properly turns on the consequences for society as a whole if that freedom is not protected? The essays in this book explore these and other problems concerning the defense of academic freedom by radicals, the justification for disruption on campus, and the control of research. Contributors to the volume include Hugo Adam Bedau, Bertram H. Davis, Milton Fisk, Graham Hughes, Alan Pasch, Hardy E. Jones, Alexander Ritchie, Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Rolf Sartorius, T. M. Scanlon, Richard Schmitt, John R. Searle, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and William Van Alstyne. All are outstanding in their fields. Many have had practical experience in the legal profession or with the American Association of University Professors on the issue of academic freedom.