Cathy N. Davidson

About the Book

Faculties is a call to action, a sourcebook, and a “how to” guide for academic colleagues who want to contribute to the administrative and educational decisions being made about the future of our institutions. There is no going back to the version of US higher education that existed twenty, ten, or even one year ago. Cathy N. Davidson and Jody Greene encourage faculty and allies to incite and participate in change by offering models of successful, constructive collaboration at a destructive and demoralizing time for higher education. Faculties focuses on the urgency of coalition-building, offering data and analyses of the structural, financial, ideological, and organizational circumstances that can support or inhibit productive change in colleges, universities, and research institutions. Presented in the form of dialogues between Davidson and Greene, two of higher education’s most innovative leaders, Faculties retains a welcoming, conversational tone while incorporating extensive references and citations and addressing the drastic changes to higher education since January 2025. Faculties offers the evidence and inspiration needed to enact institutional transformation now.

About the Book

We’re living in a period of great upheaval—yet there hasn’t been a corresponding change in our system of higher education. In The New Education, Cathy N. Davidson argues we need a new theory and practice of learning that emphasizes achievement not as a score on a test but as the ability to navigate a job market—and a world—in constant flux. Davidson offers lessons for remaking higher education for our own time, for every institution from the Ivy League to the poorest community college. Now with a new introduction that addresses the benefits and challenges of remote learning and an appendix that offers practical advice on how institutions can change, The New Education is essential reading for educators, parents, and students. Davidson deftly shows how we can teach students not only to survive but to thrive in the twenty-first-century economy.

About the Book

When Cathy Davidson and Duke University advocated giving free iPods to the freshman class in 2003, critics said the university was wasting their money. Yet when students in practically every discipline invented academic uses for the music players, sudden ly the idea could be seen in a new light—as an innovative way to turn learning on its head. This radical experiment is at the heart of Davidson’s inspiring new book. Using cutting-edge research on the brain, she shows how “attention blindness” has produced one of our society’s greatest challenges: while we’ve all acknowledged the great changes of the digital age, most of us still toil in schools and workplaces designed for the last century. Davidson introduces us to visionaries whose groundbreaking ideas—from schools with curriculums built around video games to companies that train workers using virtual environments—will open the doors to new ways of working and learning. A lively hybrid of Thomas Friedman and Normal Doidge, Now You See It is a refreshingly optimistic argument for a bold embrace of our connected, collaborative future.

About the Book

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a vast range of Internet sites, from Pokemon Web pages to Wikipedia? This report investigates how traditional learning institutions can become as innovative, flexible, robust, and collaborative as the best social networking sites. The authors propose an alternative definition of “institution” as a “mobilizing network”—emphasizing its flexibility, the permeability of its boundaries, its interactive productivity, and its potential as a catalyst for change—and explore the implications for higher education. The Future of Thinking reports on innovative, virtual institutions. It also uses the idea of a virtual institution both as part of its subject matter and as part of its process: the first draft was hosted on a Web site for collaborative feedback and writing. The authors use this experiment in participatory writing as a test case for virtual institutions, learning institutions, and a new form of collaborative authorship.

About the Book

The story of the White Furniture Company–a century-old, family-owned business that was bought out by a huge corporate conglomerate and later closed–puts a human face on the economic realities of the 1990s. Bill Bamberger took his revealing and powerful photographs during the last four months of operation on the factory floor, working side by side with the White employees. Cathy Davidson’s text focuses on six people who represent every economic level in the American workforce: CEO, executive assistant, middle manager, supervisor, skilled artisan, and manual laborer. 31 full-color and 61 black-and-white photographs

About the Book

An engaging combination of information and analysis, Davidson’s book on the production and readers of the early novel will be a valuable resource for anyone interested in the history of the novel, of reading, or of American literature. Considering the “codes or rules of fictive discourse” and the circumstances creating and created by “both texts and ways of reading them,” Davidson examines both early novels and perceptions of them as a subversive form. The mechanics of printing and book distribution; attitudes toward books as property; changing literacy patterns of men and, especially, women; and textual analysis figure importantly in this discussion.–Library Journal.