The urban campus

In The Urban Campus: Educating the New Majority for the Next Century, Peggy Gordon Elliott (president and professor of education at The University of Akron) discusses how major changes in society have created significant implications for the delivery of higher education. Dr. Elliott reveals that we cannot, with any degree of success, educate students while operating under the same assumptions and with the same models that were successful in the past. It is time to discard our old notions of what a college or university is and what the majority of students are like. It is especially important that policy makers and elected representatives, many of whom are products of higher education in the 1950s, understand that America is truly an urban culture and that many modern universities have multiple campuses with enrollments of 30,000 to 40,000, sometimes more. Students are no longer exclusively single white males - "New Majority" is made up of women, minorities, displaced workers, career professionals upgrading their skills, and senior citizens "upgrading" their knowledge. Members of this New Majority often do not graduate in the traditional four- or five-year span. . The Urban Campus: Educating the New Majority for the New Century unveils the significance of nontraditional campuses in urban areas, which serve student populations that extend beyond 18- to 22-year-old full-time students, and which also interact with and respond to the needs of surrounding communities. The power and potential of the urban campus lie in its flexibility to offer educational services to nontraditional students. The author labels their teachers as "urban faculty," or the "asphalt intelligentsia." She also discusses inequities in accreditation, funding, and faculty performance evaluation and describes limitations and misplaced fears about territorial concerns. Understanding how the urban campus works gives the reader an important perspective on our traditional higher education system. The seven chapters of the book explore the development and growth of urban campuses; what an urban campus is and how it works within the community; who makes up the "New Majority" of students; the urban faculty, their challenges and successes; the frustrations and misconceptions related to urban campuses; the ways in which urban colleges and universities play a key role in moving society forward; and the dynamic role urban campuses can play in preparing students for a globally competitive and technologically complex twenty-first century.