Blogs

I passed another milestone of middle age last week: new eyeglasses with progressive lenses. And, as everyone told me, it’s taking me some time to adjust. So I’m feeling a little off-kilter as I begin the week.

Several alert readers have sent me updates on the conflict going on at Queensborough Community College, part of the CUNY system in New York City. It’s perplexing on several levels.

Academic conferences can be overwhelming, but they are often a necessary part of academia. They provide a means for you to engage other scholars, and to work on your scholarly identity. They are awesome networking opportunities, and a great place to test out new research and challenging ideas. Below are a list of (more) hacks for successfully navigating the academic conference gauntlet!

Paul Ryan is a little bit rich. That’s like being a little bit pregnant, and we all know Ryan’s stand on pregnancy. Just as Ryan thinks life begins at conception, I think wealth begins at trust fund.

Is it possible that I've become too enamored with Jim O'Neill's BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) concept? This summer I gave O'Neil's book, The Growth Map: Economic Opportunity in the BRICs and Beyond, a glowing review. Sharma's Breakout Nations has caused me to re-think, or at least question, some of my BRIC enthusiasm.

The results are starting to come in and are proving to be quite interesting.

I’m watching our students, especially our 1st year students, walk around campus from class to class- with backpacks filled with books. And I know from looking at course outlines that textbooks in paper format continue to dominate higher education classes as they did when I went to college. There is even a feeling, still prevalent, that regardless of all the technological advances, textbooks, as we have always known them, will continue their dominance for at least another decade. I don’t think that will happen.

The reactions to this article, which has been circulating the Internet, seem to fall into three general clusters.