Blogs

December is a cruel month for academics. More accurately, the stretch from Cyber Monday until Christmas is uniquely difficult.

Aaron Bady's excellent critique of Clay Shirky's thought provoking post "Napster, Udacity, and the Academy" provides a powerful window into our most important debates about how higher ed will evolve over the next few years. The comments to Bady's article, and Shirky's response to his critique, provide strong evidence of the power of an open exchange of ideas and views within an informed community.

I’ve written before about how helpful it is, as a teacher, to be a student, but this semester I had a very different experience with that than I’ve had before. Previously I’ve learned a lot about teaching when I took tae kwon do, a martial art with which I had absolutely no previous experience, or when I participated in faculty development seminars that focused on areas that I did have experience in but wanted to develop further. They were two very different cases—either I was a rank beginner, eager to soak up whatever knowledge I could get, or I was an advanced student, ready and able to polish my skills. In the first case, almost anything the instructor said was helpful because I knew nothing at all; in the second case, I had a good grounding of knowledge and understanding, and so, again, I could make use of almost anything an instructor said—or at least put it in some kind of context and, perhaps, decide not to use it.

In November, the Council of Presidents of Public Universities and the Federation of University Faculty Associations approved a collective bargaining agreement that defines a new structure for the teaching career at Argentine public universities.

Johnny Manziel won the Heisman Trophy. Texas A&M intends to capitalize.

It’s entirely normal for a tenure-track faculty search to take the better part of a year. The same holds for upper-level administrative searches. Within higher ed, it’s easy to take that for granted. It’s the way things have been for a long time, and some of us have never seen it any other way. But in most industries, a timeline like that would -- rightly -- be considered insane. So why do our searches take so long?

The young woman is a brilliant researcher. We’ve bonded before over dinner and art. She introduced me to Japanese toilets. That changed my life. She wanted advice and perhaps too a little comfort. Like many of us, she had heeded the call from universities for scholars to demonstrate their value to society through engaged “public scholarship.”

It may actually be harder, in the age of social media, to shift gears in your research. But it does't have to be.