Blogs

In my state, as in many, there’s a move afoot at the state level to impose greater “accountability” throughout public higher education, but especially on community colleges. (In the words of Spider-Man’s uncle, “with small appropriations come great responsibility.” No, wait...) A few legislators heard a few anecdotes, and bad ideas are starting to snowball.

In early May, my wife, our two small children and I will pack up our serendipitously named 2003 Honda Odyssey and travel 262 miles from our home near Indianapolis to the campus of Michigan State University. There I will proudly don my newest prized possession: my master’s hood. However, unlike many others who will also walk through such a ceremony this spring, this trip is different in that it will be just my third time on campus as 100% of my degree has been completed online.

It’s no secret that "innovation" has become a buzzword in education. Organizations are looking for new ideas to pursue, or inventive tweaks to existing products and services. Where do these innovative strokes of genius come from?

The great thing about my job is that I get to combine theory (on how technology is changing higher ed) with practice (choosing and running ed tech platforms). The tough thing about my job is the clarity in which I see the limits of my ed tech management and decision making powers.

On April 30th, Naomi Schaefer Riley, a blogger for the Brainstorm blog on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s website, argued (and poorly) that Black Studies as a discipline should disappear; her argument was based solely on brief descriptions of three dissertations by three PhD candidates from Northwestern University’s first cohort of Black Studies doctoral program, as seen in an earlier article in The Chronicle.

On the same day a few weeks ago, I happened to be looking at a Hofstra Alumni newsletter and an article that I had clipped from The New York Times. To digress for a moment, “clipped” is the right expression since I was reading the actual newspaper, not the online version. I only read the paper version on weekends. During the week, I read my paper online and am very efficient in reading only those articles that I identify as of great interest. On the weekends, and at a more leisurely pace, I look through the entire paper and just by skimming find additional interesting articles to read. There is clearly a role for both, though it will be interesting to see if the economics of printing a paper, in an online world, is viable.

Several weeks ago, I sat through a play that was three hours long, with no intermission. The friend I went with joked that the omission must have been a strategic decision on the director's part, because if they had let us out, surely nobody would have come back in. I didn't blame the playwright. She was obviously impassioned about the subject matter, and assumed that everyone else would be, too. Maybe she had exercised great restraint in cutting it back from five or six hours. But at some point, someone should have intervened.

I’ve been calling references for job candidates of late, and starting to wonder if there are better questions to ask.