Blogs

This is an interesting time for international consortia of universities. The consortia structure brings with it strengths and weaknesses. For example, it is large enough to enable the drawing in of complementary resources, people, skill sets, networks, etc. The scale of these consortia and the emphasis on peer-based membership structures also facilitates collaborative action on a number of levels. However, international consortia are also too large, in some ways, to facilitate rapid responses to opportunities.

Monroe Community College, in Henrietta, New York, (near Rochester) has started setting institution-wide goals with 100 day timelines. The first goal it has set is reducing the number of passwords a student needs to sign on to various parts of the registration system.

Tom Friedman had an interesting quote in a recent NYT opinion piece: “Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary.” And so begins the third post in the series on “Foundations of Strategy.”

This is one of those books that I wouldn't buy at $10.87, the paperback price, but was happy to pickup at as an e-book for $3.95. This is not an argument about the quality of the book (we will get to that in a minute), but more about its publication date.

In an environment where the celebrity academic is gaining more prominence, how do we evaluate what we're worth and make sure we're not giving it away?

Last week, in a formidable and sometimes brilliant treatise, literary critic Terry Castle bemoaned the current state of dependent students at her elite university, suggesting that contemporary college students are missing an important stage of development by not separating (or ‘hating’) their parents. This weekend, in addition to three book reviews on the subject of motherhood, the New York Times Magazine featured an article about a mother whose nine-year old son may be a psychopath. Happy Mother’s Day.

Very few professionals in higher education really know how to use our information systems to their fullest capacity. A bold statement? Perhaps, but have you ever really met a large number of Student Affairs practitioners who are fluent with tools like Banner, Blackboard, or PeopleSoft?

One of the difficulties of promoting economic sustainability at Greenback (or, I suspect, on most US university campuses) is describing what it might look like without seeming to be some sort of pie-eyed socialist. Given the overwhelmingly prevalent civil religion of consumer capitalism and the de facto dominance of Chicago School neoliberalism, it's challenging to try to explain to that our economic system is nothing Adam Smith would recognize nor particularly approve, and that during the most recent generation when the USA was really on the economic upswing (think 1945 - 1975) the rules were entirely different than what we now take for granted.