The Still Divided Academy: How Competing Visions of Power, Politics, and Diversity Complicate the Mission of Higher Education

The Still Divided Academy is a wonderful examination of the academic community that shows their inner workings by addressing a broad range of issues including: academic politics, tenure, perceived and real political imbalance, academic freedom, and diversity. Administrators, professors, and students have very different priorities, values, and expectations and therefore, often have conflicting opinions on these issues. Drawing on data collected in a specially commissioned public opinion survey as well as other recent research on higher education, Rothman, Kelly-Woessner, and Woessner, create an incredibly readable presentation of both the similarities and differences between those running our universities and those attending them. The authors manage to remain impressively neutral; instead they give us a fuller perspective of the people on our college campuses.

Stanley Rothman is Mary Huggins Gamble Professor of Government Emeritus at Smith College and the director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change. April Kelly-Woessner is associate professor of political science at Elizabethtown College. Matthew Woessner is an associate professor of political science and public policy at Penn State University at Harrisburg.