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Columbia University began the second half of the twentieth century in decline, bottoming out with the student riots of 1968. Yet by the close of the century, the institution had regained its stature as one of the greatest universities in the world. According to the New York Times, “If any one person is responsible for Columbia’s recovery, it is surely Michael Sovern.” In this memoir, Sovern, who served as the university’s president from 1980 to 1993, recounts his sixty-year involvement with the institution, as well as his experiences growing up poor in the South Bronx and attending Columbia. Sovern addresses key debates in academia, such as how to make college available to all, whether affirmative action is fair, whether great researchers are paid too much and valuable teachers too little, what are the strengths and weaknesses of lifetime tenure, and what is the government’s responsibility for funding universities. A labor-law specialist, Sovern also discusses his personal and professional accomplishments off campus, particularly his work to compensate victims of racial exploitation and his recommendations as chairman of the Commission on Integrity in Government.
Throughout his twenty-one-year tenure as president of Columbia University, Lee C. Bollinger was an outspoken national leader on many of the major issues confronting higher education and society more broadly. One of the country’s preeminent First Amendment scholars, he published frequently on free speech and press while leading a wide range of transformational university initiatives. During a period marked by profound change, he spoke within and beyond the academy about the challenges facing journalism, global free speech, and academic freedom, as well as the critical value of increasing racial and cultural diversity in higher education through affirmative action. In Search of an Open Mind ...
Regardless of the pressures and problems confronting colleges and universities today, they can ill afford to assume that the only essential qualities of those chosen to be presidents are their abilities to be sound managers, institutional developers, and public relations experts. Nelson argues that college presidents must possess the capacity to use the presidential pulpit as moral leaders. Presidents are profiled as leaders who shape student character, lead campus communities, and are in the forefront of issues critical to education. From this vantage point, we can better examine the moral beliefs at the core of colleges and universities, understand and appreciate moral leadership in higher education, and consider the foundations and future of the presidency.
Presents the history from 1960 of how policies allegedly designed to promote the welfare of the urban poor have been half-hearted. This book shows how little the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the War on Poverty provided for the urban poor, and demonstrates the weakness of job-training programs devised at the federal level.
By most accounts Pete Likins has had a successful life. But his personal accomplishments are only the backdrop for the real story—the story of his family, whose trials and triumphs hold lessons for many American families in the twenty-first century. This poignant but ultimately empowering memoir tells the story of Peter Likins, his wife Patricia, and the six children they adopted in the 1960s, building a family beset by challenges that ultimately strengthened all bonds. With issues such as inter-racial adoption, mental illness, drug addiction, unwed pregnancy, and homosexuality entwined in their lives, the Likins’ tale isn’t just a family memoir—it’s a story of the American experie...
This is a deeply personal memoir by the doyen of applied economics in the United States. His name is indelibly linked to the creation, expansion, and refinement of employment policy and human resource needs from 1935 to the present. Eli Ginzberg has been a longtime consultant to the federal government, including nine presidents. In this volume, the focus is on American Jewry in the present century from the perspective of an active participant observer and a critical social science based analyst.My Brother's Keeper deals with the changing position of American Jewry in the twentieth century. Ginzberg makes extensive use of his own experiences to review the changes that have taken place in urba...
In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service recruited 623 African American men from Macon County, Alabama, for a study of “the effects of untreated syphilis in the Negro male.” For the next 40 years—even after the development of penicillin, the cure for syphilis—these men were denied medical care for this potentially fatal disease. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was exposed in 1972, and in 1975 the government settled a lawsuit but stopped short of admitting wrongdoing. In 1997, President Bill Clinton welcomed five of the Study survivors to the White House and, on behalf of the nation, officially apologized for an experiment he described as wrongful and racist. In this book, the attorney for the men describes the background of the Study, the investigation and the lawsuit, the events leading up to the Presidential apology, and the ongoing efforts to see that out of this painful and tragic episode of American history comes lasting good.