Blogs

Raise your hand if you are not on the tenure track, but long for the space and time to think, write, reflect, and create? I know that faculty do many many things beyond research and writing, (teaching, advising, service, etc.), but it is almost exclusively faculty who get to conduct research and publish results.

About 50 seconds in.

The Hartford Courant, ever vigilant to trends seen likely to affect the insurance industry, noted that 2011 is already the year with the most billion-dollar-plus weather-related disasters in US history. This year already has twelve such incidents; the previous record-holder (2008) had only nine.

While the “Occupy” movements seem to be quieting down this week, higher education received some attention from the White House. President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan met with a select group of college presidents and provosts on Monday to discuss how to make higher education more affordable. With his usual rhetorical grace, Obama referenced this issue again in Kansas on Tuesday.

I have been invited to present a seminar paper at the Institute of Historical Studies in London in December, but my excitement is tempered by the inevitable visa application. As a South African citizen, I need a visa to gain entry to most of Europe and Asia, all of North America, and parts of Latin America. Most people need to apply for visas for long stays for study or work in foreign countries, but those of us from the developing world need visas for short visits as well. I am not going to add to the debate about the fairness or otherwise of the visa system, but, instead, want to describe its impact on my work as an academic in a developing nation.

A longtime reader wrote me a mini-rant occasioned by frustration at an overwhelming pile of applications for a faculty position...

Committee work may be time intensive. And committee work might not be as relevant as we'd like for promotion. But committee work is not hard work.

Carol Twigg raises doubts about the ultimate viability of the Khan Academy. Khan raises the question of completion rates verses quality of education. These questions are red herrings. The Khan Academy is trying something in an era when education is challenged by stagnation, technology, global competition and gross domestic inequalities. I thought of two people when I read the article in IHE about it today. The first is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The second is my Aunt Toni.