To understand the modern university and the contemporary crisis of higher education we must consider its central issues. The Order of Learning thoughtfully considers the problems facing higher education by focusing on some of the main underlying factors: the relationship of higher education to government, academic freedom, the responsibilities of the academic profession, among others. Edward Shils believes that higher education has a central role in modern society, and that the distractions of the recent past, including undue pressures from government, the fads of some students and faculty, and increasing involvement of the post-secondary education with day-to-day questions, have damaged higher education by deflecting it from its essential commitment to teaching, learning, and research. The Order of Learning will be of great interest to educators and students alike, as well as those interested in the future of higher education in the United States.

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Samuel Johnson, one of the most renowned authors of the eighteenth century, became virtually a symbol of English national identity in the century following his death in 1784. In Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England Nicholas Hudson argues that Johnson not only came to personify English cultural identity but did much to shape it. Hudson examines his contribution to the creation of the modern English identity, approaching Johnson's writing and conversation from scarcely explored directions of cultural criticism - class politics, feminism, party politics, the public sphere, nationalism, and imperialism. Hudson charts the career of an author who rose from obscurity to fame during precisely the period that England became the dominant ideological force in the Western world. In exploring the relations between Johnson's career and the development of England's modern national identity, Hudson develops new and provocative arguments concerning both Johnson's literary achievement and the nature of English Nationhood.

This book conceives the role of the modern town as a crucial place for material and cultural circulations of luxury. It concentrates on a critical period of historical change, the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that was marked by the passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional aristocratic luxury to a new bourgeois and even democratic form of luxury. This volume recognizes the notion that luxury operated as a mechanism of social separation, but also that all classes aspired to engage in consumption at some level, thus extending the idea of what constituted luxury and blurring the boundaries of class and status, often in unsettling ways. It moves beyond the moral aspects of luxury and the luxury debates to analyze how the production, distribution, purchase or display of luxury goods could participate in the creation of autonomous selves and thus challenge gender roles.