By Cathy Davidson. This workshop introduces the Graduate Center’s new Futures Initiative and the peer-led structure of “teaching as learning, learning as teaching,” an interactive, collaborative method that helps us rethink the Industrial Age apparatus of higher education. More...

By Cathy Davidson. Yesterday when I was at LaGuardia Community College I was asked about methods for boosting retention.  Students from stressed environments, who work full time, sometimes at one or two jobs, who have family and other obligations, have many things competing for their time and attention and money. Retention rates in such circumstances are low, graduation rates are too.  Boosting both is a challenge. More...

By Cathy Davidson. On July 1, I left my friends, family, students, and neighbors at Duke University, where I had enjoyed as rich and fulfilling a career  for over two decades as any academic could aspire to, to take up a new position among the distinguished faculty at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  To people who haven’t been paying attention, this choice may seem eccentric.  Why leave two (!) distinguished chairs at a  top, private university to join the nation’s largest public urban university at this historical moment, when so much public education is under duress?  To people who keep track of these things, however, the Graduate Center is “trending.”   Not only does it have as distinguished a faculty as the city's fine, elite, private research universities, but, in the last few years, several of us have moved here to the GC from elite institutions—Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Princeton, to name only the ones I happen to know about. More...