Stephen M. Gavazzi – författare

Land-grant colleges and universities have a storied past. This book looks at their future.Land-grant colleges and universities occupy a special place in the landscape of American higher education. Publicly funded agricultural and technical educational institutions were first founded in the mid-nineteenth century with the Morrill Act, which established land grants to support these schools. They include such prominent names as Cornell, Maryland, Michigan State, MIT, Ohio State, Penn State, Rutgers, Texas A&M, West Virginia University, Wisconsin, and the University of California—in other words, four dozen of the largest and best public universities in America. Add to this a number of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and tribal colleges—in all, almost 300 institutions. Their mission is a democratic and pragmatic one: to bring science, technology, agriculture, and the arts to the American people.In this book, Stephen M. Gavazzi and E. Gordon Gee discuss present challenges to and future opportunities for these institutions. Drawing on interviews with 27 college presidents and chancellors, Gavazzi and Gee explore the strengths and weaknesses of land-grant universities while examining the changing threats they face. Arguing that the land-grant university of the twenty-first century is responsible to a wide range of constituencies, the authors also pay specific attention to the ways these universities meet the needs of the communities they serve. Ultimately, the book suggests that leaders and supporters should become more fiercely land-grant in their orientation; that is, they should work to more vigorously uphold their community-focused missions through teaching, research, and service-oriented activities.Combining extensive research with Gee’s own decades of leadership experience, Land-Grant Universities for the Future argues that these schools are the engine of higher education in America—and perhaps democracy’s best hope. This book should be of great interest to faculty members and students, as well as those parents, legislators, policymakers, and other area stakeholders who have a vested interest in the well-being of America’s original public universities.

Exploring the current state of relationships between public universities, government leaders, and the citizens who elect them, this book offers insight into how to repair the growing rift between higher education and its public.Higher education gets a bad rap these days. The public perception is that there is a growing rift between public universities and the elected officials who support them. In What's Public about Public Higher Ed?, Stephen M. Gavazzi and E. Gordon Gee explore the reality of that supposed divide, offering qualitative and quantitative evidence of why it's happened and what can be done about it. Critical problems, Gavazzi and Gee argue, have arisen because higher education leaders often assumed that what was good for universities was good for the public at large. For example, many public institutions have placed more emphasis on research at the expense of teaching, learning, and outreach. This university-centric viewpoint has contributed significantly to the disconnect between our nation's public universities and the representatives of the people they are supposed to be serving. But this gulf can only be bridged, the authors insist, if people at the universities take the time to really listen to what the citizens of their states are asking of them. Gavazzi and Gee draw on never-before-gathered survey data on public sentiment regarding higher education. Collected from citizens residing in the four most populous states—California, Florida, New York, and Texas—plus Ohio and West Virginia, the authors' home states, this data reflects critical issues, including how universities spend taxpayer money, the pursuit of national rankings, student financial aid, and the interplay of international activities versus efforts to create "closer to home" impact. An unflinching, no-holds-barred exploration of what citizens really think about their public universities, What's Public about Public Higher Ed? also places special emphasis on the events of 2020—including the COVID-19 pandemic and the worst racial unrest seen in half a century—as major inflection points for understanding the implications of the survey's findings.

The second edition of this book offers an expanded and updated blueprint for more consistently improved practice, emphasizing family process and structure instead of only individual developmental stages. Its chapters deftly summarize the recent knowledge base about families with adolescents and explains how to apply these results across mental health and social services disciplines. The new edition clearly illustrates family concerns and theoretical perspectives through real-world vignettes and cogent use of family assessment measures. Chapters offer a broad understanding of how diversity in all its forms – including race/ethnicity, culture, religion, and sexual orientation – has created a much more nuanced understanding of how families with adolescents are able to function within their environment. Both major challenges to families and communities form the backdrop of the second edition’s focus on forecasting in which the theoretical, empirical, and intervention literatures necessarily move in service to the health and well-being of families with adolescents.Featured topics include:Central concepts of family development, family systems, ecological, attachment, and social learning theories in relation to families with adolescents.Influence of the family on adolescent problem behavior, mental health concerns, substance use issues, educational attainment, and social competence outcomes.Selected studies on parenting behaviors, conflict resolution, and other major aspects of families with adolescents.Application topics in family-based intervention and prevention programs.Integrating theory, research, and applications to create a “triple threat” model.Diversity issues surrounding race/ethnicity, culture, religion, and sexual orientation. Families with Adolescents, Second Edition, is an essential resource for researchers, professors, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well as professionals and other mental health clinicians, practitioners, and therapists in clinical child and developmental psychology, family studies, human development, sociology, social work, education, and all allied disciplines.