In An Education in Place professor and national commentator Zachary Michael Jack asserts that higher education’s greatest existential threat may not be decreasing numbers of high school graduates, but a crisis of confidence originating in an industry’s failure to honor the values of deeply rooted college students and their parents. Jack challenges an Academy that has bartered away its heart and soul in the name of educational buzzwords and band-aid fixes while offering as potential antidote a panoply of place-based proposals for students, faculty, administrators, and policymakers who seek to make higher education feel more like home again. Intergenerational education, respect for student rights and student research, opportunities for local learning, a balance of in-person and distance education, rooted rather than rootless professors, and more politically inclusive dialogue–all promise to reinvent campus and community. An Education in Place makes an impassioned plea for common-cause coalitions among well-grounded educators, students, and parents as well as non-conformist academics, industry dissenters, and conscientious objectors allied in opposition to displaced corporatist models of higher education.

Zachary Michael Jack offers a welcome addition to place studies and conversations about the meaning and value of postsecondary education. In this artful collection…Jack persuasively argues that colleges and universities should learn to embrace students who hail from rural regions, small towns, and inner cities, populations too often marginalized in conversations about postsecondary education.” –Dr. Bill Conlogue, Professor of English, Marywood University

“An Education in Place will be a breath of fresh air for anyone troubled by the corporatization of American higher education. Each of its twenty-nine component essays could stand alone as a cautionary tale, yet their unifying theme is clear: to regain the public’s trust, we must respond with more than lip service to its needs.” –Dr. John L. S. Daley, Professor of History, Pittsburg State University

“Zachary Michael Jack uses his personal experience as a scholar and teacher to argue for place-based learning, and an approach to post-secondary instruction that is broadly conceived.” –Dr. Christopher Norment, Professor of Environmental Science and Ecology, College at Brockport, State University of New York