Kudzu on the Ivory Tower

Kudzu on the Ivory Tower
Author: Evan Peacock
Publisher:
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2021-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9781734573077

Educated meets Dispatches from Pluto, but with more explosions. The story of an unlikely journey from a poverty-stricken upbringing in the Mississippi backwoods to a career in academic archaeology. Along the way one encounters homemade cannons, untethered nuclear bombs, zombie cheeseburgers, country music sycophants, demonic rodents, screaming wood, mechanical butts, grease sandwiches, ancient artifacts, and the deleterious consequences of racist thinking. Ultimately a story of love, family, and the redemptive power of education, Kudzu on the Ivory Tower is "a mélange of Franklin's Autobiography, Rousseau's Confessions, Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Tomb, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn".

Cathedrals of Kudzu

Cathedrals of Kudzu
Author: Hal Crowther
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2002-04
Genre: American literature
ISBN: 9780807127889

In these essays, one of the most influential Southern journalists of his generation sorts out a whole warehouse of Southern idiosyncrasy and iconography, including the Southern belle, Faulkner, James Dickey, Stonewall Jackson, Cormac McCarthy, guns, dogs, fathers, trees, George Wallace, Elvis, Doc Watson, the decline of poetry, and the return of chain gangs.

Unprofitable Schooling

Unprofitable Schooling
Author: Todd J. Zywicki
Publisher: Cato Institute
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2019-02-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1948647052

Most economies advance by simultaneously decreasing costs and increasing quality. Unfortunately, when it comes to higher education, this has been turned on its head. Costs keep rising while quality declines. How has this happened? What can be done? This exceptional volume looks at the issues facing higher education from the perspective of both economics and history. Each chapter explores how the lessons learned from market competition in other sectors of the economy can be applied to higher education in order to bring about innovation, improved quality, and lower costs. The opening section offers a history of for-profit education before the Morrill Act—the federal legislation that funded land-grant universities; reviews the Act’s impact; and concludes with an exploration of federal student aid and how it prevents new funding options from entering the market. Section two examines higher education as it stands today—what is driving up college prices; tenure; administrative bloat; and university governance. And, the concluding third section shows how robust competition in higher education can be energized, and takes a deep look at for-profit vs. non-profit institutions. Unprofitable Schooling provides a sober and informative assessment of the state of higher education, critically covering historical assumptions, increasing government involvement, reflexive aversion to profit, and other, maybe unexpected, conclusions.

Micro Mischief

Micro Mischief
Author: Michael Walden
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2006
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0595388795

Wouldn't it be nice to end our dependence on foreign oil, and fuel automobiles with a cheap and abundant energy source? Corith College scientist George Hollaway thinks he's found the answer to this dilemma when he finally succeeds in squeezing fuel from the tenacious kudzu plant. But when George seeks financial advice for his discovery from newly hired economics professor Dia Fenner, he receives some bad news. He's overlooked some key costs in producing kudzu fuel that make the alternative unprofitable in today's marketplace. Yet powerful forces see kudzu fuel as the ticket to their dreams, including the interim college president and two influential businessmen. When Dia persists in presenting her economic arguments questioning the fuel, she first finds her job-then her life-in jeopardy. Her house is vandalized, she's attacked, and shadowy figures stalk her. Someone is trying to silence Dia. Will they succeed?

Cracks in the Ivory Tower

Cracks in the Ivory Tower
Author: Jason Brennan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2019
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0190846283

Ideally, universities are centers of learning, in which great researchers dispassionately search for truth, no matter how unpopular those truths must be. The marketplace of ideas assures that truth wins out against bias and prejudice. Yet, many people worry that there's rot in the heart of thehigher education business.In Cracks in the Ivory Tower, libertarian scholars Jason Brennan and Philip Magness reveal the problems are even worse than anyone suspects. Marshalling an array of data, they systematically show how contemporary American universities fall short of these ideals and how bad incentives make faculty,administrators, and students act unethically. While universities may at times excel at identifying and calling out injustice outside their gates, Brennan and Magness contend that individuals are primarily guided by self-interest at every level. They find that the problems are deep and pervasive:most academic marketing and advertising is semi-fraudulent; colleges and individual departments regularly make promises they do not and cannot keep; and most students cheat a little, while many cheat a lot. Trenchant and wide-ranging, they elucidate the many ways in which faculty and students alikehave every incentive to make teaching and learning secondary.In this revealing expose, Brennan and Magness bring to light many of the ethical problems universities, faculties, and students currently face. In turn, they reshape our understanding of how such high-powered institutions run their business.

Ghost Stories for Darwin

Ghost Stories for Darwin
Author: Banu Subramaniam
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014-10-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0252096592

In a stimulating interchange between feminist studies and biology, Banu Subramaniam explores how her dissertation on flower color variation in morning glories launched her on an intellectual odyssey that engaged the feminist studies of sciences in the experimental practices of science by tracing the central and critical idea of variation in biology. Subramaniam reveals the histories of eugenics and genetics and their impact on the metaphorical understandings of difference and diversity that permeate common understandings of differences among people exist in contexts that seem distant from the so-called objective hard sciences. Journeying into interdisciplinary areas that range from the social history of plants to speculative fiction, Subramaniam uncovers key relationships between the life sciences, women's studies, evolutionary and invasive biology, and the history of ecology, and how ideas of diversity and difference emerged and persist in each field.

Intellectual Property Rights

Intellectual Property Rights
Author: Mario Cimoli
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 019966076X

"This book analyses the impact of diverse intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes upon the development process". -- PAGE [1].

Narrative in Health Care

Narrative in Health Care
Author: John D Engel
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1315347083

Narrative medicine has developed an identity already. Clinicians of many disciplines are being summoned to a practice that recognizes patients by receiving their accounts of self. Starting from different positions, the four authors have converged in a strong and shared commitment to narrative health care. They conceptualize narrative health care practices within frameworks derived from the social sciences and psychology, and, to a lesser degree, phenomenology and autobiographical theory. They relate the development of narrative medicine to relationship-centered care, patient-centered care, and complex responsive process of relating theory, positing that narrative medicine can help clinicians to develop the skills required to practice relationship-centered care. The book details - with exercises, resource texts, and abundant scholarly apparatus - how these skills can be developed and strengthened. This work will change health care. Because of its scholarly rigor, its multi-voiced sources, and its highly practical features (lists, activities, key ideas and key references, primary texts written by health care professionals and patients), this work will be a guide in the field for those who practice medicine or nursing or social work. The book establishes that there is a field to be practised, a need to practise it, and a means to develop the wherewithal to do so.

The Mother Tongue

The Mother Tongue
Author: Teri Holbrook
Publisher: Crimeline
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2001
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780553577198

Returning to her Georgia hometown, Gale Grayson sees the community altered by outsiders studying the area's most isolated residents who have their own dialect. When three men are murdered, shocking truths about people whose roots go back for generations are revealed. Gale must find out the secret before someone tries to silence her for good.