Reclaiming
the Public University: Conversations on General & Liberal Education.
Judith
Summerfield and Crystal Benedicks, eds. Peter Lang Publishing Group. (Summer 2007)
Book Synopsis:
Our title, Reclaiming the Public University: Conversations on General & Liberal Education, represents the mission of our project-to reclaim-as well as the spirit of our intervention-to hold a conversation. This book brings us into the national conversations on "liberal" and "general" education, respecting the complexities of those terms and pushing at their historical and rhetorical legacies. In the late 1990s, CUNY was considered a university "adrift," having fallen, critics insisted, into disarray. Recurrent budget crises and heated public debates over what constituted acceptable student performance threatened to focus the agenda more on staying afloat than on moving the university forward. Under the leadership of Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, CUNY's star has risen; and it is time for all those involved in this most public
of universities to attend to our shared business of teaching CUNY's quarter
of a million undergraduates.
To reclaim the public university is to focus our energies on teaching all our students well, educating them for a new, increasingly complicated age. To deliver on this promise, we must interrogate the general education we
provide for our students, for that is the vast, unrecognized ground we stand on. It is what students and faculty do most in common. If we can get educating our students right, generally and liberally, then we will have laid a claim to what the public university needs to be - and provide that critical balance and integration of the general and the specialized. It is what makes American higher education unique across the globe.
This is what the conversations represented in these pages are all about: we make public our debates, disagreements, and visions, our ventures into a noisy marketplace of ideas, suggestions, recollections, our hopes that what our students will "get" out of their four or five or more years at CUNY is an education that serves them well. In opening the conversation, we lay claim to the importance of our task.
Short Biographical Sketches of Editors:
Judith Summerfield is the University Dean for Undergraduate Education in the Office of Academic Affairs at the City University of New York. She is also a full professor of English at Queens College and is on the doctoral faculty of the Ph.D. program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center.
She did her undergraduate work at the University of Pittsburgh, and her Ph.D. in Narrative Studies at New York University. She has published widely in composition, literary studies and narrative, most notably Texts and Contexts: A Contribution to the Theory and Practice of Teaching Composition, co-written with Geoffrey Summerfield, which received the 1987 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize from the Modern Language Association.
In 1998, she was named Professor of the Year for the State of New York by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She's also received several FISPE grants, a Mellon Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Diversity Grant. Most recently, she initiated CUNY's participation in the select Carnegie Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Leadership Program.
Crystal Benedicks completed her doctorate in English literature at the City University of New York Graduate School and University Center in 2004. Her dissertation, Spasmodic Bodies and Victorian Poetics: Biology, Masculinity, and Modernity in Spasmodic Poetry, received the Calder Prize for Distinguished Work in Nineteenth-Century Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center English faculty.
After serving for two years as Deputy Director for Undergraduate Education at the CUNY Central Office, she accepted a job as assistant professor of English at CUNY's Queensborough Community College. She currently teaches composition and literature at Wabash College in Indiana.
