This dissertation is a cultural and intellectual history of black education, nationalism, and empire. I argue that educational philanthropy played an indispensable role in the construction of Anglo-Christian nationalism in the nineteenth century, and Anglo-American empire in the twentieth. The Tuskegee idea, as embodied in the educational philosophy of Booker T. Washington and underwritten by corporate philanthropy, enabled advances in African American literacy, economic development, and land ownership. However, it packaged these advances in such a way that they accommodated disfranchisement and segregation as the dominant organizing principles of the southern and the national political order. Moreover, the principles of the Tuskegee idea proved adaptable to educating colonial subjects in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and other imperial settings across the globe. Tuskegee Institute became a laboratory for the working out of race relations in the South. The Tuskegee idea---a complex of theories regarding racial differentialization, progress, and the gradual accrual of citizenship rights for African Americans---played a prominent role in the regional unification of the North and South into a modern nation-state, the exclusion of African Americans from the national family, and an entry point for the U.S. into the family of nations. As such, it played a key role in Gilded-Age contests over the meaning of citizenship for African Americans, for women, and for poor whites. Those who participated in these contests helped define the meaning of American nationalism in the modern era.

Recent textbook studies find the human religious heritage curiously absent from public school history textbooks, an absence perhaps explainable through the development of an ideology of progress, lying at the heart of the modern public educational establishment. This ideology achieves dominance after the Civil War. Antebellum texts, containing a fusion of classical and Judeo-Christian historical outlooks, show no consensus upon overarching historical notions of progress. These texts contain strong Biblical content, including miraculous and supernatural elements, and serve to impress upon the reader moral values of the classical/Judeo-Christian heritage, while justifying the Protestant Reformation. Progressive notions, when present, are usually derived from Christian, post-millennial outlooks. Post-bellum textbooks adopt increasingly secular notions of progress. Biblical and moral content diminish; the miraculous and supernatural virtually disappear. The theme of progress becomes the prime determinant for selecting historical content, a theme increasingly separated from religious development and increasingly linked to political and especially technological advancement.

Since the first Architecture schools were established in the U.S. over a century ago there have been instances when the country has questioned its own methods, values and identity. The perceptions of a university and, in some cases, of the school of architecture, as microcosms of the world gives economic, social and political issues an immediacy invaluable to a clear study of methods and values.(UNFORMATTED TABLE OR EQUATION FOLLOWS)$$\vbox{\halign{#\hfil&&\enspace#\hfil\cr e.g.,\quad&The Cooper Union&---Admission policies\cr&Harvard&---Architect and democratic ideals\cr&Taliesen&---Transcendence of agendas\cr}}$$(TABLE/EQUATION ENDS) Section (3) of this work lists and isolates what I think are the most pressing contemporary issues about which relevant questions and skepticisms should be raised. I propose that facets of these pressing global, national, and local problems and the skepticisms they bring to life, are present at Rice University and explain the development of its master planning, the activities encouraged, or sometimes discouraged, by its central quadrangle, and the prevailing methodology of its School of Architecture.

This thesis is a study of Rice University's struggle to integrate and charge tuition to its students. In 1891 William Marsh Rice established the charter that founded Rice University. As the school developed, however, the Board of Trustees found it difficult to follow the charter's restrictions against admitting non-white students or charging tuition. The board was struggling to uphold the wishes of the founder while also adapting Rice to changing social and economic conditions. In 1962 Rice began legal action to reinterpret the charter. The board believed that permission to integrate and charge tuition was vital in Rice's efforts to remain a leading educational institution. As a result, the trustees argued that these restrictions prevented realization of the founder's main intention of creating and maintaining a first class university. This action was successful, and with the court's permission, Rice began to integrate and charge tuition in 1965.

This dissertation traces the debate about desegregation on the campuses of five elite private universities in the South from the end of World War II to the early 1960s. The presidents of Duke, Emory, Rice, Tulane, and Vanderbilt, charged with leading these schools to national prominence, quickly grasped that postwar realities---including pressure from federal grantmakers and national philanthropic foundations---would require some measure of racial change if the schools were to advance. In the interest of progress the presidents were willing to accept limited participation by "exceptional" blacks in the life of the university. The critical issue in their eyes was who would control the process of racial change. While acknowledging, some more grudgingly than others, that "outside" pressure for desegregation should be heeded, the presidents insisted that the pace and manner of loosening racial restrictions must remain the decisions of educated southern whites. Many powerful trustees and alumni staunchly opposed even this. These traditionalists strongly defended southern racial customs and fought any attempts to alter them for any reason, even the advancement of the schools they served. With varying degrees of energy and success, the presidents mediated between the proponents of progress and tradition, trying to avoid open conflict while gradually improving each school's academic quality. Only Vanderbilt took steps towards opening admissions, allowing black graduate students to enroll in its School of Religion beginning in 1953. The debate over the place of talented blacks on these campuses remained subdued until 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education and the growing grass-roots civil rights movement brought increased turmoil to the South. Although many trustees vowed not to bend to this pressure, the costs of maintaining segregation on campus became too high to bear. By the early 1960s, snowballing loss of faculty, student discontent, and above all, the threat of a funding cut-off by the federal government and the foundations led all these schools to abandon segregated admissions policies.

This dissertation examines efforts by the largest American philanthropic foundations, particularly those established by Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, to improve mankind by funding research in the fields of human behavior and biology. In this study I argue that during the period between the world wars foundation policies and practices revolved around three main themes: the formation of an "interlocking directorate" of foundation officers, scientific entrepreneurs, and university administrators; the promotion of the ideal of transcending disciplinary boundaries through "cooperation in research;" and the launching of a human engineering effort that was based on the premise that human problems could be investigated and attacked through scientific research. Throughout the interwar period, university research programs that were coordinated by well-connected scientific entrepreneurs, that pledged to cultivate interdisciplinary cooperation, and that fulfilled the goals of the human engineering effort received millions of foundation dollars. The case studies that form the centerpiece of this dissertation both exemplify the most successful grant applications of the interwar period and illustrate how the human engineering effort unfolded over time. The early phases of the human engineering effort were based on the idea that humans could be improved through the investigation and control of behavior and sexual reproduction. Exemplary case studies for the earlier phases of human engineering include a multi-million dollar grant package for Yale University behavioral sciences, initiatives related to the eugenics movement, and support for the National Research Council Committee for Research in Problems of Sex. Gradually, foundation-sponsored human engineering was transformed into an effort to investigate and control living beings on a structural, chemical, and molecular level. Case studies that epitomize this later phase include grants for biological science research at Stanford University and University of Chicago, and especially the cooperative bio-organic chemistry and molecular biology projects that foundations helped to launch at the California Institute of Technology. My analysis of these case studies, viewed through the lens of the interlocking directorate, the cooperation in research ideal and the human engineering effort, elucidates intersecting social, intellectual, political and economic factors that shaped knowledge production in the United States.

<p> This descriptive study looks at how social justice is being integrated into 11th grade language arts classes in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado. I observed four educators, noting how they addressed issues of social justice through classroom discussions and literature selection. This study will reflect upon on observations in classrooms and interviews with educators that inform ineffective and effective means of incorporating, or not incorporating, social justice into their classrooms.</p>

<p>An online learning phenomenon emanated 2&frac12; years ago from three courses taught at Stanford University, promising an opportunity for high-quality instruction from elite institutions and professors for no cost to the student. This phenomenon, which came to be known as the MOOC, catalyzed sweeping changes in both higher education&rsquo;s relationship with distance education, as well as the discussion of higher education in society, in a remarkably short period of time. </p><p> While people have questioned the effectiveness of MOOC learning and the potential negative consequences of adopting MOOC systems either in support of or to replace existing educational infrastructure, the MOOC movement has continued to grow at a rapid pace. This research study sought to define the characteristics of the MOOC on the terms of learning theory, pedagogy, history, society and policy through the use of an expert-based Delphi study, where participants engaged in a phenomenological dialogue about what constitutes a MOOC in practice, the present state of higher education in the wake of the MOOC movement, the effect the phenomenon has had on education both structurally as well as socially, and visions of the future of the institution of higher education as affected by the MOOC. </p><p> In summary, panelists focused their agreement on cognitive and pragmatic aspects of the MOOC debate, such as a hope for learning analytics to offer solutions to educational problems as well as the opportunity for the MOOC system to offer tier-based education services to consumers. The Delphi discussion showcased the importance of cognitive theory in MOOC design as well as the relationship between MOOCs and economics, and highlighted the difficulty education experts have in agreeing on how to define educational terminology. </p>

<p> The <i>Brown v. Board of Education</i> decision marks a crucial moment, not only in United States civil rights history, but also in educational reform, as it presumed that national reform would follow the success of changes in the educational system. Surprisingly, within the vast body of <i>Brown</i> scholarship, little attention has been paid to the narratives that are taught to contemporary schoolchildren about desegregation, which presumably would help them to develop a framework for understanding their own racially fraught classroom experiences. Conversely, within children's literature scholarship, narratives of desegregation have not received attention as stories that are also about school. This dissertation examines the archive of children's novels about desegregation and makes the case that they can provide insights both for scholars of desegregation and for scholars of the school story genre. I argue that the often-discussed failures to realize the <i>Brown</i> decision's utopian vision can be traced to the underlying assumptions about individual success, failure, and ability that are built into the institution of the school, assumptions which come into focus when these novels are read as generic school stories. Nevertheless, I also suggest that children's novels highlight the potential agency of children, and suggest utopian methods of education, racial integration, and citizenship, in ways that policy discourse cannot do.</p>

<p> Recent education reform efforts utilize standardized tests and current assessments measure binary results: pass or fail. However, innovation, discovery, critical thinking and design all have experimentation, testing, and failure as essential components of their process. The purpose of this investigation was to explore how visual art teachers define, address, and use failure in their classrooms. Structured interviews with six K-12 art teachers were analyzed for common themes that addressed (1) the ways in which students and teachers assess failure in the art classroom; (2) how extrinsic and intrinsic motivation affect success and failure; and (3) how effort and ability affect student success and failure. Art teachers reported a number of factors - both intrinsic and extrinsic - that affected student motivation, effort, confidence and their opinion on the outcome of a project. Future research should consider alternative assessment methods that enable art teachers to document student failure and success as processes as opposed to endpoints.</p>