Reading Room: The college identity crisis

Preserve, change or adapt, we are working for a voice in the university now and to come. So then, what is our idea of the idea of the university, contemporary, ideal, historical? What shaped the university and higher education as we have experienced it and know it now? What challenges does it face?

Peter Kemp (Aarhus): The Idea of University in a Cosmopolitan Perspective. Davide Cantoni and Noam Yuchtman on how universities helped transform the medieval world. From H-Net, a review of Twentieth-Century Higher Education: Elite to Mass to Universal. A review of The Constitution Goes to College: Five Constitutional Ideas That Have Shaped the American Universityby Rodney A. Smolla. 

Donald Alexander Downs and Ilia Murtazashvili on their book Arms and the University: Military Presence and the Civic Education of Non-Military Students. Anthony Grafton reviews College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco (and more and more and more and more). Sam Ross-Brown on the college identity crisis. From Prospect, will online learning spell the end of universities? Nick Strohl on the past and future of public higher education. The Ronin Institute is hoping to revolutionize academia by connecting unaffiliated scholars to research funding.

The college identity crisis, re-posted from Omnivore