Blogs

Call a lawyer today! That is more or less why I have come to D.C. for the NACUA conference on compliance for the last couple of days. I wanted to hone in on what, precisely, the legal language would be in a vendor contract to address the need that higher education has to protect its institutional information and take advantage of selective cloud providers of transmission and storage services.

The future, for colleges and universities, will require that we re-establish the local ties that many of us have been moving away from for generations. Operating a campus sustainably -- simply administering, lighting, heating, and plumbing its buildings; feeding their occupants; providing necessary supplies and handling physical output streams -- will require that the institution adjust, adapt, and rethink very much in integration with moves made by the surrounding community.

Today a colleague and I were feeling discouraged about the library sessions we’d been having with first year students.

I will threaten financial, if not physical, punishment for the next student who sits opposite me and glibly announces that s/he desires, “time off.” These seniors then expect me to find them a fellowship for the self-proclaimed period of inaction.

Can an academic decide, mid-career, to reinvent herself? I'll find out since that's exactly what I'm going to try and do. Digital Humanities, here I come!

At dinner last night, TW saw a ladybug crawling on the wall. I was drafted to catch it and set it loose outside, but it fell to the floor and scurried under the rug.

I remember one occasion, in my first year of graduate school, when a classmate asked a question in class. I have no memory of what the question was, but I recall the professor’s answer vividly. He told her "that question cannot be asked."

I think I love running meetings because I love teaching. The skills to run a good meeting and run a good classroom are related. The experience of keeping a class full of students all together is great preparation for doing the same with colleagues in a meeting. Good teaching, even lecturing, is about conversation. So are good meetings.