Prose and Purpose

My older daughter has wanted to see Jekyll and Hyde, the musical, on Broadway from the time that the announcement was made that the show as coming back to Broadway.

A chained CPI (Consumer Price Index) sounds like a very painful condition. Or it sounds like a price index that couldn’t be controlled and is therefore forcefully restrained. Thankfully, it is neither of these situations and is instead a more realistic way of assessing cost of living increases.

My annual trip to the New York automobile show took place recently. I have been going to this show since the 1960s, even before I learned to drive, and have only missed one or two shows in all these years.

At the last meeting of my local school board, the chief topic of conversation was the proposal to become an International Baccalaureate diploma school which is a high school level program. The presentation was led by our high school principal and he was an articulate passionate advocate for moving in this direction. The community was very invested in this discussion focusing, as they should on both the benefits as well as the marginal cost of adding IB to the curriculum.

One of our leading faculty members announced last week that he would be retiring and relocating at the end of this academic year. The deciding factor seems most likely to be the impact of Hurricane Sandy on his house and on his life. I hoped he would change his mind. His retiring is certainly not in the best interests of his department and his school; it likely is in his best interest, given the circumstances.

For a university to fully fulfill its mission, it needs to be inextricably interwoven with the community, both the internal community and the surrounding community. Some universities pay limited attention to their surroundings but I have always been proud of Hofstra’s history of embracing the community in ways that clearly meet important needs.

Prior to this president’s week, I had never been in Las Vegas but now based on the experience, I should have gone sooner and more often. And I think my family feels the same way.

Up to age 18, I had never been on a plane and the furthest I traveled was to a camp in Pennsylvania. My kids, who are not yet 18, have already flown hundreds of thousands of miles by plane and have flown across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. But the differences are even more profound. Staying in touch with friends when I traveled, either with my parents or to camp, consisted of a once a week phone call and more frequent postcards. I always looked carefully to find the right postcards, those that would give a friend or family member at least some sense of what I was seeing or experiencing. Now my younger daughter stays in touch with her friends by facetimeing them and if she borrows my wife’s iPAD, she is even facetimeing multiple friends at the same time.