Education as Civic Engagement Toward a More Democratic Society

Education in the Post-9/11 Decade is a collection of ten essays examining educationmostly higher educationas civic engagement. These essays are the finest works of scholarship on education published over the last decade in JAC, an award-winning journal of rhetoric, politics, and culture. The essays in Part 1 attempt to historicize higher education and to unpack many of its underlying dynamics. Part 2 examines emerging trends in the politics of educationtrends that to the authors in this collection are alarming. Balancing the anxiety and seeming pessimism of Part 2 are the distinctly optimistic essays in Part 3, which collectively interject a note of hope for the future of education. Collectively, the essays in this volume analyze in a substantive and rigorous manner a number of key issues in the politics of education. This volume should be of great interest to university faculty and graduate students regardless of their disciplinary areas, and generally to anyone interested in the future of higher education in an increasingly corporatized academic setting.

Gary A. Olson is a noted scholar of rhetoric and culture and a keen observer of higher education in America. He has served as a both a university provost and a dean. Olson writes a popular monthly column on academic administration for the Chronicle of Higher Education and currently is a professor of English at Idaho State University.

Lynn Worsham is a professor of English at Idaho State University and editor of JAC, an interdisciplinary scholarly journal of rhetoric, politics, and culture. She has published seven books, including The Politics of Possibility: Encountering the Radical Imagination and Race, Rhetoric, and the Postcolonial (both with Gary Olson). She is currently working on a book on psychopathology in America.