The Still Divided Academy: How Competing Visions of Power, Politics, and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education - Hardcover

The report on the major NAASS survey is important and timely. The survey instrument goes in novel directions and yields rich results. The report is clear, thorough, and accessible. The results bring important confirmations, new insights, and surprises that will challenge folks from various quarters. -- Daniel Klein, George Mason University There is simply no book that does what The Still Divided Academy does. The authors tackle important matters: conflict over the very purpose of universities, who should (and does) run universities, political imbalance at universities, tenure, academic freedom, and most importantly, the role of diversity. Their work is potentially controversial, but without bias. There is much here that will comfort and annoy both liberals and conservatives, and that is so rare in this area. One cannot have a good understanding of academic freedom and political correctness at universities without reading The Still Divided Academy. -- Robert Maranto, University of Arkansas; editor, Journal of School Choice As universities hire more administrators from outside the faculty ranks, the gulf between those officials and the faculty widens and professors feel less influence on university governance, says a new book on conflict in higher education. The book, The Still Divided Academy: How Competing Visions of Power, Politics, and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education, relied on surveys of about 4,060 administrators, faculty members, and students at four-year institutions. Like The Chronicle' s own reporting, the surveys found that confidence in the impact of faculty governance is low. * The Chronicle of Higher Education *

Drawing on data collected in a specially commissioned public opinion survey as well as other recent research on higher education, Rothman, Kelly-Woessner, and Woessner, create an incredibly readable presentation of both the similarities and differences between those running our universities and those attending them. The authors manage to remain impressively neutral; instead they give us a fuller perspective of the people on our college campuses.