The prestige of an academic institution may be determined as a function of affiliations with other academic institutions. Using digital tools to data-scrape, data-mine, and perform network analysis on university websites, an approximation of numbers of academic affiliations may be measured. Especially observing the alma mater institutions of the faculty of employed institutions, these numbers show the relative employment of alumni and a proxy metric for the relative prestige of their degree-granting institutions. These affiliations can be charted and graphed to (...) determine the distributions of affiliations throughout an academic ecosystem from which we might draw conclusions about that system’s hierarchies and inequalities. Here we use anglophone PhD-granting philosophy departments as a case study for this methodology with tentative conclusions. (shrink)

Raquel Cascales and Luis Echarte focus on the development of practical wisdom and what they call ‘seeing with the heart’ for science students by means of reading science fiction literature. They argue that literature can bring the student into contact with the reality of moral life as moral dilemmas are made concrete by the characters and circumstances in a novel. They provide an analysis of how Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World can be read in the classroom and show how the (...) novel invites students to think about the role of science in society, the evolutionary paradigm, advances in genetic and psychological manipulation, as well as questions concerning human emotions,suffering, and friendship. (shrink)

The paper provides a philosophical insight into the contemporary critical trends in the university life, and an outline of possible solutions based on the historical overview of an idea of university. The particular section is devoted to the depiction of situation in Slovakia. The author suggests that the creative reconstruction of academic practices is the key to the future of university.

Joining the university context in the middle of the 19th century, Philology served as a comprehensive basis for what nowadays is meant by literary and linguistic studies. Depending on the specialization tendency that would settle down in the academic context, each of these areas followed separate or even divergent paths, losing, to a great extent, the contact with its initial basis. Despite this state of affairs, Philology has displayed a strong capacity of resistance, maintaining its traditional dimension active or going (...) through metamorphoses that resulted from the incorporation of new technologies, as well as from the epistemological adjustment that enabled it to overcome its first positivist stages. Trying to find a new place inside the general framework of Social Sciences and Humanities, literary studies need to recover its order and credibility, two factors that the new face of Philology can inspire. The present study aims at reconstructing the most recent trajectory undergone by this field of research and education, by identifying a space of reconnection that already seems to be adequate and beneficial. (shrink)

The still astonishing expansion of the American university since World War II has transformed the nation's intellectual and cultural life in myriad ways. Most intellectual historians familiar with this period would agree, I suppose, that among the conspicuous changes is the sheer increase in the size and diversity of intellectual and cultural activity taking place on campuses across the country. After all, we know that colleges and universities that employ us also provide full- and part-time academic appointments to novelists, poets, (...) playwrights, filmmakers, choreographers, composers, classical and jazz musicians, painters, photographers, and sculptors, even though most of them probably began their careers with little or no desire to join us in the halls of academe. This now widespread employment practice has decentralized the nation's literary and artistic talent. It also has made for a manifold increase in degree-granting programs in writing and the creative arts. One example will suffice here. When World War II ended, there were a small handful of university-based creative-writing programs. Over the course of the next thirty years, the number increased to fifty-two. By 1985, there were some 150 graduate degree programs offering an MA, MFA, or PhD. As of 2004, there were more than 350 creative-writing programs in the United States, all staffed by practicing writers and poets, many of whom now also hold advanced degrees in creative writing. (shrink)

The massive expansion of US higher education after World War II is a sociological puzzle: a spectacular feat of state capacity-building in a highly federated polity. Prior scholarship names academic leaders as key drivers of this expansion, yet the conditions for the possibility and fate of their activity remain under-specified. We fill this gap by theorizing what Randall Collins first callededucational entrepreneurshipas a special kind of strategic action in the US polity. We argue that the cultural authority and organizational centrality (...) of universities in the US national context combine with historical contingency to episodically produce conditions under which academic credentials can be made viable solutions to social problems. We put our theorization to the test by revisiting and extending a paradigmatic case: the expansion of engineering education at Stanford University between 1945 and 1969. Invoking several contemporaneous and subsequent cases, we demonstrate the promise of theorizing educational expansion as an outcome of strategic action by specifically located actors over time. (shrink)