Winner of the 2002 Alice L. Beeman Research Award for Outstanding Writing about Communications from the Council for Advancement and Support of EducationAmong higher education institutions in the United States, for-profit colleges and universities have steadily captured a larger share of the student market. A recent trend at for-profit institutions is the coupling of job training with accredited academic programs that offer traditional baccalaureate, professional, and graduate degre...

While he celebrated higher education as the engine of progress in every aspect of American life, George Keller also challenged academia’s sacred cows and entrenched practices with provocative ideas designed to induce “creative discomfort.” Completed shortly before his death in 2007, Higher Education and the New Society caps the career of one of higher education’s exceptional minds.Refining and expanding ideas Keller developed over his fifty-year career, this book is a clar...

George Keller’s case study of Elon University’s transformation from a struggling college with a limited endowment into a top regional university is now available in paperback.Ten years after the publication of Transforming a College, Elon University continues to thrive as a school that reinvented itself and its community around the idea of inspiring and guiding students. George Keller’s now-classic account has been used as an inspiration and playbook for m...

In the middle of a church service, a man is struck by a sense of dread. As impassioned organ music fills the building, the man senses that the source of his anxiety is coming from a hostile organist. What is the root of the musician’s animosity? Is it real, or is the narrator just imagining it? This quick, suspenseful story from The King in Yellow gives readers a taste of Chambers’ mastery of the horror genre.

With this 1990 speech, American politician William Jennings Bryan presents a compelling argument against imperialism. He outlines how maintaining military force over other nations goes against core American values. The speech highlights specific issues that were current at the time, particularly US relations with Cuba and the Philippines. Though the speech is over 100 years old, its core points about American democracy ring true in contemporary foreign affairs.

With “The Prophets’ Paradise,” acclaimed horror writer Robert Chambers plays with form to create a series of dream-like prose poems. In one section, a woman empties a jar of blood on a patch of white flowers, crying out, “I have killed him I loved!” In another, a clown tells Death, “You are very beautiful.” These eerie, yet ethereal poems defy interpretation and will linger in the minds of readers.

“Jabberwocky” is one of the most well-known nonsense poems in the English language. Though full of playful made-up words like “brillig,” “mimsy,” and frumious,” the poem still tells a story. A young warrior faces up against the fearsome Jabberwock, armed with a “vorpal blade,” and comes out triumphant: “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” This poem first appeared in the middle of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Carroll’s follow-up to the well-beloved children’...

In a departure from traditional horror writing, “The Street of the First Shell” focuses on the inescapable horrors of war. The story follows a group of struggling artists in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. The characters struggle to remain safe and together during the 1870 Siege of Paris, when Germans shelled the Latin Quarter. This nightmarish story is part of Robert Chambers’ collection The King in Yellow.

On November 20, 1820, a sperm whale struck and sunk the whaling ship Essex, stranding the 21 crew members who escaped on three whale-boats in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 2000 miles from land. Up against rough storms, vicious sharks, and desperation leading to cannibalism, only eight men survived. One was First Mate Owen Chase, who published this account of the disaster. His story served as real-life inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.

President Woodrow Wilson entered World War I reluctantly, and he aimed to be strategic and fair when arranging peace terms to leave it.He delivered his 14-point treaty to Congress in January 1918. In it, he emphasized the importance of establishing free trade, restoring sovereign territories, and reducing arms. This speech outlined the terms on which he sought to establish enduring peace in Europe, which he recognized as vital to maintaining peace in the Americas as well as the rest...

In “The Street of the Lady of the Fields,” horror writer Robert Chambers takes a more romantic approach to his work. The story follows an American student in Paris who falls in with a group of peers and the women who associate with them. As he begins to fall for one of the girls, she worries he will discover an unsavory secret about her life. This story also breaks away from the Yellow Mythos theme present throughout The King in Yellow, serving as a stand-alone story from the coll...

In this story, the narrator is recovering from an illness in the company of Lucy Latimer, a local lady who loves to help the ailing. When he notes a look of sadness in her eyes, she tells him of the “one great sorrow” of her life. Her brush with tragedy reveals the fruits such experiences can have in our lives. Though relatively unknown today, Timothy Shay Arthur was a highly influential voice in nineteenth-century life.