Dialogic education : conversation about ideas and between persons /

Arnett (Manchester College) offers the academic world a substantial glimpse of his own lifelong journey into ideas and personhood in this highly communicative, if rather unworldly, portrayal of contemporary American higher education. Speaking largely to his fellow faculty and administrators, he emphasizes both content and relational dimensions of college teaching and institutional arrangements. Arnett also admonishes against recent proclivities toward crass marketing and the selling of half truths. Above all, he urges academicians to create visionary "homes" and Athenian forms of leadership that nurture community and a profound sense of significance. A former academic administrator and sensitive scholar in communication studies, his intellectual memory bank houses a wide range of ideological sources from existentialism to neoconservatism. In the end, Arnett seeks to transcend ideology; yet he rarely restrains the pervasive idealism that anchors, and sometimes ossifies, his own foundational premises. Graduate students; faculty; researchers. J. L. DeVitis; SUNY at Binghamton