Böcker av Thomas A. Bryer

Self-determination in the European Union rests on the strength and skills of a country¿s representatives to manage and leverage relationships with other nations, and for individuals it rests on the ability to use autonomy and freedom wisely. To flourish, an individual must consciously determine their own path. Similarly, we can say a country can flourish. Self-determinism for a country is conditioned on the forces that facilitate or hinder its ability to succeed as a society. The same forces that can help a nation to flourish might also accelerate the decision to emigrate among a nation¿s people. This is the paradox, and it is the quest: national and individual self-determination, to allow choice for emigration but to have strength of culture, civics, and institutions to discourage it, or to encourage return migration for those who have left. In this book, we address this paradox and this quest using the case of Lithuania. More specifically, we examine how municipalities can and do respond to ongoing population shrinking due to emigration in Lithuania, the non-economic factors that facilitate decisions to emigrate, and the opportunities for local governments to shrink smartly or reverse shrinkage.

This book presents a philosophy of and strategies for a war on poverty and impoverished citizenship for the twenty-first century. It focuses on the United States, with comparison to some international experiences, and considers poverty in all its forms-subsistence, agency, and status.

Higher education in the United States and elsewhere is being forced to respond to several disparate social and economic pressures: social trust and connectedness is down, empathy across citizens is deteriorating, political awareness and participation are low, and job prospects and financial security are sobering for many citizens, even the college educated. The response to these pressures is not to double down on one mission of higher education, namely job creation. Instead, higher education marching into the next decades requires an integrative approach that promotes job creation, skill development, citizen cultivation, and knowledge disseminationall oriented towards strengthening communities and providing opportunity for all citizens to pursue the good life. Across eight chapters, this book provides historical and theoretical analyses of the role of higher education in society across these four missions, as well as applied mini and extended case examples demonstrating how the four missions can be successfully integrated. The extended cases consist of one pedagogy example, a teaching initiative labeled ';joined up service learning' that represents deep partnership between the university and community, and an institutional design case of an academic research center and its work conducted in partnership with community stakeholders. Recommendations are advanced for an integrated approach to performance funding of higher education institutions, tenure and promotion expectations for faculty, and graduation requirements for students, among others.