Changing Paths of Academic Lives: Revising How We Understand Higher Education, 1960s to 2020s and Beyond
Edited by Harvey J. Graff
Copy edited by Lindsey Harding. Designed by Mike Palmquist.
“Academic paths,” or the variety of careers that constitute in full or in part higher education, are for understandable reasons commonly misunderstood. Most often, this misunderstanding is rooted in conceptions of careers into and out of different kinds of teaching positions. Those conceptions are shaped, in part, by the disappearance of tenure-track and full-time professorships and the related increase in contingent and sessional appointments, by time-limited perspectives based on experiences in a single discipline or sub-discipline, and by challenges faced by women and two-career households. Changing Paths of Academic Lives offers, through a series of personal accounts of those who developed alternative or non-traditional academic careers over the past six decades, a compelling and historically-based perspective on what it means to pursue an academic career.
Harvey J. Graff is Professor Emeritus of English and History, inaugural Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies, and Academy Professor at The Ohio State University. A comparative social historian, humanities, and social science scholar, he is an international authority on comparative social and cultural history, literacy, children and youth, urban studies, interdisciplinarity, and education at all levels. He writes about a variety of contemporary and historical topics for Times Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Publishers Weekly, Against the Current, Columbus Free Press, newspapers, and academic journals. He has published many books, most recently Searching for Literacy (2022, Palgrave Macmillan), My Life With Literacy: The Continuing Education of a Historian (2024, The WAC Clearinghouse and University Press of Colorado), and Reconstructing the “Uni-versity”: From the Ashes of the ôMega- and Multi-versityö to the Futures of Higher Education (2025, Bloomsbury Academic).
Publication Information:
Graff, Harvey J. (Ed.). (2025). Changing Paths of Academic Lives: Revising How We Understand Higher Education, 1960s to 2020s and Beyond. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/1010.37514/PRA-B.B.2025.2692
Series Editors: Aimee McClure, Clarke University; Aleashia Walton, University of Cincinnati; Jagadish Paudel, Clemson University; and Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University
This book is available in whole and in part in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF). It will also be available in a low-cost print edition from our publishing partner, the University Press of Colorado .
