Support Us
Support Us
Home / Books / Practices & Possibilities / Changing Paths of Academic Lives: Revising How We Understand Higher Education, 1960s to 2020s and Beyond
cover

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.

Table of Contents

Open the entire book: In PDF Format PDF Format     In ePub Format ePub Format

Front Matter

Introduction, Harvey J. Graff
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2021.1145.1.3

Section 1. 1960s Cohort

Chapter 1. Weaving Career Trajectories: Academic, Professional, Intellectual, Personal, Michael Frisch
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.01

Chapter 2. Doing American History in the Recent Past, 1962-2023, Paul H. Mattingly
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.02

Chapter 3. Two Historians, One Wedding, and Two Entangled Academic Careers Since the 1960s, Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.03

Section 2. 1970s Cohort

Chapter 4. Permanence and Flux: Forms of Feminism in an Academic Career, Catherine Civello
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.04

Chapter 5. From Racine’s PhÞdre to Common Core: One Woman’s Journey through the Halls of Academe, Carolyn D. Herrington
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.05

Section 3. 1980s Cohort

Chapter 6. No Discipline!, Johanna Drucker
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.06

Chapter 7. My Journey: Still Putting Parts on the Floor, Jean Reith Schroedel
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.07

Chapter 8. Wayfinding Across the Academic Landscape: Braided Careers, H. Lewis Ulman
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.08

Section 4. 1990s Cohort

Chapter 9. Grounded in Community: Four Decades of an Academic Journey, Yolanda Chávez Leyva
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.09

Chapter 10. Repertoires of My Life, Michael L. Wilson
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.10

Section 5. 1990s Cohort

Chapter 11. Pictures from an Institution, Jefferson Pooley
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.011

Chapter 12. Prisons and Pathways to Rhetoric and Composition, Patrick W. Berry
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.12

Chapter 13. Community College Work, Shawn Casey
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.13

Chapter 14. Notebooks of an Adjunct Professor, Zoë Brigley Thompson
DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692.2.14

Contributors

About the Editor

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

Digital Publication Date:

August 23, 2025

Print Publication Date:

TBD

ISBN:

978-1-64215-269-2 (PDF) | 978-1-64215-270-8 (ePub) | 978-1-64642-822-9 (pbk.)

DOI:

10.37514/PRA-B.2025.2692

Contact Information:
Harvey J. Graff: graff.40@osu.edu

Practices & Possibilities

Series Editors: Aimee McClure, Clarke University; Aleashia Walton, University of Cincinnati; Jagadish Paudel, Clemson University; and Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University

Acrobat Reader DownloadThis 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.

Copyright © 2025 Harvey J. Graff and the authors of individual parts of this book. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License. 214 pages, with notes, illustrations, and bibliography. This book will be available in print from University Press of Colorado as well as from any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore. Available in digital formats for no charge on this page at the WAC Clearinghouse. You may view this book. You may print personal copies of this book. You may link to this page. You may not reproduce this book on another website. For permission requests and other questions, such as creating a translation, please contact the copyright holders.