From the 1960s to the 1980s, a range of academic possibilities for women developed, as their career histories and intellectual biographies reveal. Some women sought to generate a new knowledge specialty in their disciplines, often explicitly defying admonishments that the subject matter was an oxymoron. Others pursued academic paths that disregarded these new opportunities and developments. Together their accounts portray how feminist scholarship emerged and was facilitated by historically specific conditions: a critical mass of like-minded women, a national political movement, an...

The current era in higher education is characterized by increased need for accountability and fiscal constraint coupled with demands for increased productivity. Higher education is expected to meet the demand of changing student demographics, as well as requests for research and service from government and industry. To preserve the academy's ability to meet these demands, the editors and contributors to this volume argue that, while change is inevitable and desirable, any radical alterations to the practices that have established and upheld the excellence of higher education in the United...

In this volume, Patricia Gumport and other leading scholars examine the sociology of higher education as it has evolved since the publication of Burton Clark's foundational article in 1973. They trace diverse conceptual and empirical developments along several major lines of specialization and analyze the ways in which wider societal and institutional changes in higher education have influenced this vital field of study.

In her own chapters, Gumport identifies the factors that constrain or facilitate the field's development, including different intellectual legacies and professional...