Founded in the forested mountains of ChinaOs remote Jiangxi Province in 1958, the Communist Labor University, along with some 100 branch campuses, introduced uneducated farmers and peasants to basic agricultural science and farming techniques through an innovative work-study program until 1980. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, John Cleverley here explores the inner workings of this unique Chinese institution and the direct personal involvement in its affairs by the nationOs key communist leaders, including Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Deng Xiaoping. The community would survive the dictates of political agriculture, famine and pestilence, and the Cultural Revolution, thus mirroring higher education's own cycle of expansion, contraction, and division. Yet the university could not avoid the bitter factional politics and deadly power plays of the 1970s. Open to the charge that it was a utopian experiment, another of Mao's great follies, its undoing was part of the larger canvas of ChinaOs shift from a Maoist vision to DengOs philosophy of pragmatic socialism. This fascinating story illuminates the internal and external politics of an innovative educational enterprise from both an institutional and personal perspective. In the process, the book underscores the larger issues of educational reform and political and social change in China.

Taking Our Place tells the story of Aboriginal education and the Koori Centre at the University of Sydney. Within its short history, the university has embodied both the virtues and vices of Australia's public attitudes to Indigenous people. The university's early teaching and research focused on Aboriginal people as ethnographical specimens, a race frozen in time. More than a century would pass before two students identified as Aborigines, Charles Perkins and Peter Williams, entered the university gates. It was 1963. From that time on, an increasing numbers of Indigenous Australians have studied and worked at the university, contributing their knowledge and understanding to a learning society from which they were once absent. Much more remains to be done. This is the first account of struggles and outcomes arising from the engagement of Indigenous people with a tertiary institution in Australia, a place established by a white elite for its own purposes on land taken from the Eora people. Today, the University of Sydney promotes and celebrates the diversity of Indigenous education on campus.