Higher education is undergoing profound change at an unprecedented pace in today’s academic marketplace. This accelerating and precipitating change has motivated these distinguished authors -- passionate observers of academe -- to read well-chosen publications about meeting demands and responding to needs among our nation’s historically Black universities and colleges (HBCUs). We have captured the essence of expediting the critical analysis to confront the challenges of academic administration, finance, student life, technology, and other areas in the academic enterprise.

No dramatist has treated identity in as many ways and in such depth as William Shakespeare. In Shakespeare’s Identities, James P. Driscoll shows how the Bard used history, comedy, tragedy, and romance to develop comprehensive treatments of personal identity.

In this book eminent philosopher Burton Porter examines the concept of “forbidden knowledge” in religion, science, government, and psychology. From the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden (forbidden fruit), to world altering scientific research (nuclear power, stem-cells, cloning) to damning government secrets (Abu Ghraib, domestic spying), to traumatic experiences that individuals want to repress (sexual abuse), humanity has encountered knowledge that has been hidden and suppressed.

Command responsibility, or executive accountability, assumes that leaders are responsible for the actions of their subordinates. If subordinates misbehave, violate basic moral laws, transgress international law, or thwart international standards of behavior, their leader may be called before to justice. Standards that set the boundaries of human action have been evolving for many millennia, with some degree of precision arriving after the post-World War II international war crimes prosecutions.

This book by dynamic scholars James Whisker and John Coe examines the short life of the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, one of the most overlooked individuals in the pantheon of leaders in the Third Reich. Born to German mercantile parents in the Baltic region of the Russian Empire, he was a student in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. Deeply influenced by the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a propaganda pamphlet distributed by the tsar’s secret police, he carried it to Germany, where he introduced it to Adolf Hitler.

In this daring new study, the renowned Turkish sociologist and public intellectual Suheyb Öğüt seeks a new explanation of political sovereignty demystified from traditional descriptions of the political process.

In this innovative study, Colombian technology writer Mauricio Loza pursues an intriguing thesis on the origin of psychology and modern media, namely that they arise from the magical arts of the Renaissance, and it is there that we must seek what Ioan Culianu called “the prototype of the impersonal systems of the media, of indirect censorship, of global manipulation and of the trusts that exercise their occult control over the Western masses.”

The Instructional Designers: A Guide for Dual Credit Teachers—Theory and Practice presents a thorough examination of American higher education, and particularly the emergence of dual credit education, as a viable program of teaching and learning, within the higher education paradigm. Professor Roscoe Johnson introduces the first half of the book with an examination of the history and development of education in the West, and higher education in particular. He then moves on to an exhaustive retracing of the history and theory of education curriculum in the United States.

This collaborative book by five distinguished scholars in overlapping fields suggests that fruitful living is extremely hard work and that social harmony requires the unlocking and the emancipation of the human brain– the core cerebral source for advancing human coherence, connectivity, cohesion and civility. The stakes are simply too high for stakeholders across our country not to respond to the ongoing and escalating crisis of human division and the desperate need for engagement, enlightenment, and acceptance of human diversity.

For an author who tended to avoid explicitly Christian subjects in his plays and poems, Shakespeare showed an abiding interest in the spiritual qualities of his characters. Spiritual Shakespeare, the latest study by noted Shakespeare scholar E. L. Risden, considers the playwright not only as a Christian writer, but also one of considerable spiritual significance: the plays regularly highlight evidence of characters’ struggles with their own spiritual health. They often show the sorrows that result from spiritual blindness or neglect.