Academic literature on the topic 'People-founded university'

The Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence, founded in 1775 by the Grand Duke Peter Leopold, is the oldest scientific museum in Europe. Firenze University Press opens the series dealing with the six sections of the Museum with this book on La Specola, situated in Palazzo Torrigiani, which represented the original nucleus. The articles in the first section reconstruct the historic background, the foundation of La Specola and the genesis and development of the collections. The second part considers the anatomical waxes, the entomological collections, and those of the vertebrates

With no moral compass, the current higher education civic engagement movement has wreaked havoc on inner city communities, especially for low-income people and people of color. This chapter explains why this happened, who it benefits, and why it largely continues unquestioned. A bold new vision is charted for higher education's civic engagement movement that is built upon principles of systems change and a fundamentally reimagined version of cities founded on social justice. Theoretical and practical solutions are also discussed.

The years 1904–14 witnessed the Second Aliyah, the emigration to Palestine of roughly forty thousand Jews, mainly from the Russian Empire. The first kibbutz, an egalitarian agricultural community, was founded south of the Sea of Galilee in 1909, and in the next decade eleven more collective settlements were created. They were revered as the purest expression of Zionism and socialism. “The Weizmann era and the Balfour Declaration” describes the importance of Chaim Weizmann, a chemist who came to Manchester University in 1904. In 1917 he secured the support of the British government for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine in the form of the Balfour Declaration.

The fifth chapter explores how theological education was opened to women, African Americans, and working class whites. Congregationalist Mary Lyon founded Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary (1837) to provide a rigorous education built on the liberal arts, theology, personal discipline, and domestic work—all designed to produce independent women for missions. Other women, like Methodist Lucy Rider, founded religious training schools for women in their denominations. For African Americans, pioneers like AME Bishop Daniel Payne, who revived Wilberforce University (1856), developed a blend of liberal arts and theological education. W. E. B. Dubois fought for this model as the way to educate “the talented tenth” needed for racial uplift. The other model, pioneered by Samuel Armstrong at the Hampton Institute (VA) and Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee (Alabama), combined a religious training school with industrial work so that black pastors and teachers could be self-supporting. Finally, Bible colleges, like that of Dwight Moody, opened theological studies to working people with only a basic education. Emma Dryer brought practical, normal school approaches to the beginnings of the Moody Bible Institute (MBI) in Chicago. Under Dr. R. A. Torrey, MBI combined a literal reading of Scripture with experiential holiness, spiritual healing, end-times prophecy, and practical business methods—all of which marked the future fundamentalist movement.

Soil scientists used to speak of soil quality, a concept expressing a soil’s “fitness for purpose.” The prime purpose was for agriculture and the production of food and fiber. However, to the general public soil quality is a rather abstract con­cept and in recent years the term has been replaced by soil health. A significant reason for this change is that health is a concept that resonates with people in a personal sense. This change is epitomized in the motto “healthy soil = healthy food = healthy people” on the website of the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania (http://rodaleinstitute.org/). One consequence of this change is an increasing focus on the state of the soil’s biology, or life in the soil, an emphasis that is expressed through the promotion of organic and biodynamic systems of farming. Viticulture and winemaking are at the forefront of this trend. For example, Jane Wilson (2008), a vigneron in the Mudgee region of New South Wales, is quoted as saying, “the only way to build soil and release a lot of the available minerals is by looking after the biology,” and Steve Wratten (2009), professor of ecology at Lincoln University in New Zealand has said, “Organic viticulture rocks! It’s the future, it really is.” This exuberance has been taken up by Organic Winegrowers New Zealand, founded only in 2007, who have set a goal of “20 by 2020,” that is, 20% of the country’s vineyards under certified organic management by the year 2020. The Cornell Soil Health Assessment provides a more balanced assessment of soil health (Gugino et al., 2009). The underlying concept is that soil health is an integral expression of a soil’s chemical, physical, and biological attributes, which determine how well a soil provides various ecosystem functions, including nutrient cycling, supporting biodiversity, storing and filtering water, and maintaining resilience in the face of disturbance, both natural and anthropogenic. Although originally developed for crop land in the northeast United States, the Cornell soil health approach is readily adapted to viticulture, as explained by Schindelbeck and van Es (2011), and which is currently being attempted in Australia (Oliver et al., 2013; Riches et al., 2013).

Alan Kidd explores the cultural sphere of amateur local historians and the associational culture of the local historical societies, from their origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries to their evolution in the twentieth. The county historical societies founded in the nineteenth-century were expressions of urban bourgeois culture and their early success owed much to that symbol of modernity, the world’s first national railway network, however, the societies exemplified the persisting social deference of ‘provincial cultural life’ expressed in the very survival of the ancient county identities. The work of nineteenth-century county historical societies contributed to an imagined notion of Englishness whose rural associations was a steadying counterpoint to a rapidly developing urban reality. The shadow of ‘amateurism’ haunted the historical societies as History developed as a university discipline, although a shift in attitudes towards the subject of local history came in the second half of the twentieth-century, chiefly in the form of ‘history from below’, exemplified by the History Workshop movement and the subsequent concepts of community history and public history.

Technical Innovation covers the process of creating a new successful competitive product from invention to production and market introduction within a practical company related context. Typically education for this kind of complicated, open ended work requires mastering a wide range of knowledge-areas and a lot of hands-on training practice in projects and workshops. The combination of depth and width is symbolized by the “T-shape”. Well-known learning theories give a good rationale of the teaching approaches that were developed over the years and a confirmation of this approach, including the