Blogs

Almost five years ago I wrote my first blog post for Inside Higher Ed. At the time I had a daughter about to graduate from high school, and a son just finishing elementary school. While my child care needs were vastly different from those of my colleagues with children in pre-school, still in many ways I planned my days and my semesters around my children’s schedules. In that first post, I noted the many things I no longer needed as an academic parent—“a lactation room, on-site daycare, or reduced work hours to be with an infant . . .. a referral to a good nanny, or a preschool that's open in the summer, or help installing a carseat.”

As I write this, I am stuck in a small town in Ohio after an accident on the freeway on my way home from a conference. (I hit a semi wheel that came off a truck and smashed my car’s suspension system. I’m fine but, sadly, my car is not.) Whether it’s a semi wheel, a sick child or spouse, our own illness, family issues, or something else, at some point in our academic career, life gets in the way of our work.

A single college struggling could be a sign of management failure. Entire sectors of colleges struggling suggests something deeper.

Jeremi Suri, a former colleague whom I have always respected, came out with an op-ed in the New York Times a few days ago. Suri’s piece, titled ‘Bomb North Korea, Before It’s Too Late,’ has generated a lot of discussion and debate, which was no doubt one of his objectives. But how should we ideally do this?

TV both gets it horribly wrong and terrifyingly right.

An academic career is challenging for anyone, yet the gender gap suggests that the current system continues to favour men. There are a number of particular factors that women face and, late last year, I realised that these challenges fall into two main categories.

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.

For obvious reasons, it is not possible to rehearse an improv show. However, my class had the equivalent of the dress rehearsal for our 4-show musical improv run last night, racing through three back-to-back 25-minute improvised musical comedies.