When Colleges Close: Leading in a Time of Crisis

(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)

By Mary Churchill & David J. Chard

How would you lead your college if you knew that you had to close it?

Founded in 1888 as Miss Wheelock's Kindergarten Training School, Wheelock College's mission was to prepare students to work in the helping professions, including teaching and social work. But in 2018, struggling with growing debt and declining admissions, the 130-year-old institution officially closed and merged with Boston University, creating the BU Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.

Written by the former president and vice president of academic affairs of Wheelock College, When Colleges Close presents the remarkable success story of Wheelock's merger with Boston University and its closure as a standalone institution. In an era when more and more institutions are at risk of closure, this book offers a detailed description of how the board and administration of one small college with an enrollment of under 1,100 students determined early that it needed to plan for a future in which it would no longer be viable. Mary L. Churchill and David J. Chard provide readers with a detailed understanding of the process they designed with their board and select members of the Wheelock community to generate multiple partnership options. They also describe how they managed the process through the final negotiations, despite being a small institution in an asymmetric merger with Boston University, which has an enrollment of over 33,000 students.

As the higher education sector faces increased volatility, colleges and universities will need authentic, transparent, and student-focused leadership to navigate new forms of crisis and transition. Written for leaders in both small colleges and larger universities who may find themselves in similar situations, as well as for scholars of higher education who are interested in strategic planning, When Colleges Close is the sobering yet hopeful story of a venerable regional institution that turned its long-term enrollment challenges into a strong merger.

Teaching with Tenderness: Toward an Embodied Practice

(University of Illinois, 2017)

By Becky Thompson

Transformations: Womanist studies

Imagine a classroom that explores the twinned ideas of embodied teaching and a pedagogy of tenderness. Becky Thompson envisions such a curriculum--and a way of being--that promises to bring about a sea change in education.

Teaching with Tenderness follows in the tradition of bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, inviting us to draw upon contemplative practices (yoga, meditation, free writing, mindfulness, ritual) to keep our hearts open as we reckon with multiple injustices. Teaching with tenderness makes room for emotion, offer a witness for experiences people have buried, welcomes silence, breath and movement, and sees justice as key to our survival. It allows us to rethink our relationship to grading, office hours, desks, and faculty meetings, sees paradox as a constant companion, moves us beyond binaries; and praises self and community care.

Tenderness examines contemporary challenges to teaching about race, gender, class, nationality, sexuality, religion, and other hierarchies. It examines the ethical, emotional, political, and spiritual challenges of teaching power-laden, charged issues and the consequences of shifting power relations in the classroom and in the community. Attention to current contributions in the areas of contemplative practices, trauma theory, multiracial feminist pedagogy, and activism enable us to envision steps toward a pedagogy of liberation. The book encourages active engagement and makes room for self-reflective learning, teaching, and scholarship.

The New Soft War on Women: How the Myth of Female Ascendance is Hurting Women, Men - and Our Economy

(Tarcher/Penguin, 2015)

By Rosalind Barnett

For the first time in history, women make up half the educated labor force and are earning the majority of advanced degrees. It should be the best time ever for women, and yet... it’s not. Storm clouds are gathering, and the worst thing is that most women don’t have a clue what could be coming. In large part this is because the message they’re being fed is that they now have it made. But do they? 

In The New Soft War on Women, respected experts on gender issues and the psychology of women Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett argue that an insidious war of subtle biases and barriers is being waged that continues to marginalize women. Although women have made huge strides in recent years, these gains have not translated into money and influence. Consider the following: 

- Women with MBAs earn, on average, $4,600 less than their male counterparts in their first job out of business school.

- Female physicians earn, on average, 39 percent less than male physicians.

- Female financial analysts take in 35 percent less, and female chief executives one quarter less than men in similar positions.

In this eye-opening book, Rivers and Barnett offer women the real facts as well as tools for combating the “soft war” tactics that prevent them from advancing in their careers. With women now central to the economy, determining to a large degree whether it thrives or stagnates, this is one war no one can afford for them to lose.

Festschrift in Honour of Professor Janet Todd: A Life in Feminist Scholarship

Festschrift in Honour of Professor Janet Todd: A Life in Feminist Scholarship

(Women’s Writing Journal, Vol. 23 no. 3, 2016)
Co-authored by Ruth Perry & Ros Ballaster

Women in Global Science: Advancing Academic Careers through International Collaboration

(Stanford University Press, 2017)

By Kathrin Zippel

Scientific and engineering research is increasingly global, and international collaboration can be essential to academic success. Yet even as administrators and policymakers extol the benefits of global science, few recognize the diversity of international research collaborations and their participants, or take gendered inequalities into account. Women in Global Science is the first book to consider systematically the challenges and opportunities that the globalization of scientific work brings to U.S. academics, especially for women faculty.

Kathrin Zippel looks to the STEM fields as a case study, where gendered cultures and structures in academia have contributed to an underrepresentation of women. While some have approached underrepresentation as a national concern with a national solution, Zippel highlights how gender relations are reconfigured in global academia. For U.S. women in particular, international collaboration offers opportunities to step outside of exclusionary networks at home. International collaboration is not the panacea to gendered inequalities in academia, but, as Zippel argues, international considerations can be key to ending the steady attrition of women in STEM fields and developing a more inclusive academic world.

Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools

(University of Minnesota Press, 2018)

By Freeden Blume Oeur

While single-sex public schools face much criticism, many Black communities see in them a great promise: that they can remedy a crisis for their young men. Black Boys Apart reveals triumphs, hope, and heartbreak at two all-male schools, a public high school and a charter high school, drawing on Freeden Blume Oeur’s ethnographic work. We meet young men who felt their schools empowered and emasculated them, parents who were frustrated with co-ed schools, teachers who helped pave the road to college, and administrators who saw in Black male academies the advantages of privatizing education.
 
While the two schools have distinctive histories and ultimately charted different paths, they were both shaped by the convergence of neoliberal ideologies and a politics of Black respectability. As Blume Oeur reveals, all-boys education is less a school reform initiative and instead joins a legacy of efforts to reform Black manhood during periods of stark racial inequality. Black male academies join long-standing attempts to achieve racial uplift in Black communities, but in ways that elevate exceptional young men and aggravate divisions within those communities.
 
Black Boys Apart shows all-boys schools to be an odd mix of democratic empowerment and market imperatives, racial segregation and intentional sex separation, strict discipline and loving care. Challenging narratives that endorse these schools for nurturing individual resilience in young Black men, this perceptive and penetrating ethnography argues for a holistic approach in which Black communities and their allies promote a collective resilience.

Inventing a Feminist Institution In Boston

Inventing a Feminist Institution In Boston

(NWSA Journal, Vol. 8 no. 2, 1996)
Co-authored by Ruth Perry, Joyce Antler, Renee Fall, Laura Levine Frader, Carol Hurd Green, Barbara Haber, Alice Jardine, and Christiane Zehl Romero

Laboring to Learn: Women's Literacy and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era

(University of Illinois Press, 2008)
By Lorna Rivera

The American adult education system has become an alternative for school dropouts, with some state welfare policies requiring teen mothers and women without high school diplomas to participate in adult education programs to receive aid. Very little has been published about women’s experiences in these mandatory programs and whether the programs reproduce the conditions that forced women to drop out in the first place. Lorna Rivera bridges the gap with this important study, the product of ten years’ active ethnographic research with formerly homeless women who participated in adult literacy education classes before and after welfare reform. Analyzing the web of ideological contradictions regarding “work first” welfare reform policies, Rivera argues that poverty is produced and reproduced when women with low literacy skills are pushed into welfare-to-work programs and denied education.