Blogs

With all the talk about how our attention spans are suffering from our collective technology addiction, perhaps there is at least one positive consequence of thumb-typing and 140-character limits.

I always enjoy a good laugh bit it rarely happens when I am reading economics. I’ve never thought of economics as the “dismal science” but likewise, it never seems to be a barrel of laughs. Two weeks ago, while reading one of the Sunday newspapers, I came across an interview by Mary Ann Gwinn of The Seattle Times with Yoram Bauman, Ph.D. who describes himself as “the world’s first and only stand-up economist.”

Every summer, my undergraduate school offered a ten-week summer theater intensive. Students studied acting, directing, playwriting, stagecraft, movement, and voice all day, five days a week, and in the evenings and on weekends they prepared a play for performance.

A month of teaching was just what I needed at the end of my first two years as president. And a transition for this blog ...

it would be misguided to think that the establishment of campuses overseas (however funded) could be a substitute for international students coming to study in the UK. The experience of the University of Nottingham with its campuses in Malaysia and China has been hugely positive and the benefits of campus development have been considerable. But net income isn’t one of them. In the longer term interests of the UK economy and its world leading Universities, international campuses and internationally mobile students must be seen as complementary initiatives in internationalisation, not alternatives.

I was in Pennsylvania to present at a workshop when Louis Freeh took to the podium and damned those living and dead who abandoned boys to Jerry Sandusky’s brutality. Everyone at the workshop exists within the academy, and all of us expected Mr. Freeh’s conclusions. Tragically, no one in a room of higher education professionals seemed remotely surprised by the range of power-brokers willing to feed boys to a predator before they would consider decreasing the athletic department’s profit at Penn State.

A new correspondent writes: "I just want to know how to get a job as a CC professor and keep it."

I have a confession to make. I don’t love writing my dissertation. In fact, there are days when I open documents on my computer and start to cry. I am, at times, filled with an overwhelming anxiety, and there are moments when even thinking about my dissertation makes me want to throw my computer out the window and join the circus.