Blogs

Last week’s article on Thinking Like an Administrator reminded me of my favorite metaphor to describe the difference between faculty life and administrative life: faculty are sprinters, and administrators are distance runners.

The other day I was reading to my children the book Ish by Peter Reynolds. It is the story of a boy who becomes frustrated with his artistic ability until he learns that his work does not need to be perfect, just good enough. My children love this book as well as another one like it called The OK Book by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, which is about a stick figure OK who informs its readers that it is fine to not be great at everything they do.

A savvy professor caught me in the hallway to discuss a presentation we had both seen on social media and its potential for local businesses. She had a great question that really threw me: what if colleges actually used social media well?

Last year, more than 1,000 stories, photos, videos or tweets were collected and curated during #UWRightNow. Framed as a "multimedia project designed to capture the breadth, depth and spirit of the University of Wisconsin-Madison during a 24-hour period," the 2012 version of #UWRightNow was a crowdsourced social media masterpiece. Combining "staff-produced and user-generated content," the day-long project provided a snapshot of what it meant to be a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison community.

It's that time of the year again, where we wring our hands about another cohort of incoming PhD students.

A book review, of sorts, of Kio Stark's Don't Go Back to School, along with the larger "don't go to college" narratives.

On 29 March - coincidentally my birthday and the day General George Patton took Frankfurt - Susan Patton published a Letter to the Editor in The Daily Princetonian titled “Advice for the Young Women of Princeton: the Daughters I Never Had” that made a stir at my doctoral alma mater. Like me, Patton has two sons. Like me, Patton has adopted highly accomplished female undergraduates at her alma mater as surrogate daughters. Like me, Patton finds endless banter about “leaning in” to careers vapid unless it engages women’s private as well as public personas. Unlike me, she advises Princeton women to graduate with a diploma and a marriage license. Ms. Patton’s prescription depends upon three flawed premises, all rooted in assumptions.

When the Swedish Language Council released a list of words that are not in the Swedish dictionary but are used in common parlance, on it was “ogooglebar” which roughly translates as “ungoogleable” in English, and gave its meaning as “something that cannot be found with a search engine”. Google objected to that definition arguing the word Google is trademarked and therefore if it is ungoogleable it means that it cannot be found on the web by using Google. The interesting part of what is essentially a specific aspect of the internationalisation of language and knowledge transfer is that Google is claiming it has trademarked an activity as well as a company.