Blogs

Higher education, once a whole division of UNESCO-Paris’ education sector, has gradually shrunk to a small section that, at this writing, comprises but a few people. This is arguably a major setback for an organization such as UNESCO, which provided the venue for international HE milestones such as the 1998 and 2009 World Conferences, and a seminal, richly funded international higher education research partnership with the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. That said, stripping la maison back to the studs, and taking a moderately bullish view of the future, could also reposition UNESCO-Paris for some significant strategic opportunities.

1.) Page 403. O, I so want to be a mother. We're in Nighttown, the late night hallucinogenic bad dreams part of Ulysses. Leopold Bloom, a cuckold, has struggled all day with his sense of his shaky masculinity, and now in this insanely desublimating setting he has been transfigured into a puling, mincing pregnant woman.

I happened to be listening to the second hour of the Dianne Rehm show on NPR this morning. Dianne's guest was Callum Roberts, a marine conservation biologist, oceanographer, author and research scholar at the University of York, England. Roberts was on to promote his book "The Ocean of Life", a discussion of how important oceans are to human survival and what sorts of major stresses oceans are currently undergoing.

We answer this question every single year, construing “should” in the narrow sense of “next year.” But after several years of awful hand-wringing over annual increases caused primarily by the collapse of state support, we’re starting to try to get a longer-term handle on it.

One of the online communities where I lurk and occasionally shove in my oar is a listserv for writing program administrators (which, lucky for me, is inviting even to those who are no such thing). It’s a virtual water cooler where people who teach writing talk about all manner of things. One comment by Doug Downs, who teaches rhetoric and composition at Montana State University, really struck me as containing a key to many of the frustrations that bubble up in libraries.

I've been thinking about the library, and the librarian, as a campus hub. The role of the library in connecting academic disciplines and functional staff areas (computing, admissions, student affairs etc.) together seems to grow in proportion to the degree that these areas become more and more specialized. The library, and the librarians connected to the library space, seem to have some key advantages as connectors.

I finally could offer my course “Science, Technology and International Relations” this past semester. The course had been on the elective courses list for the last three Spring semesters, but enough students did not register before this year. My guess was that the course topic was the deterrent: it obviously required being interested in science and technology, not a general characteristic of the average social sciences student. However, somehow the tides have turned this year and I found myself with nine students in the classroom.

About two years ago my then nine-year-old son discovered that the public radio station I regularly played in the car...