Blogs

Last spring when the Northern District of Georgia issued a decision in the Cambridge University Press, et al. v. Becker, et al. observers viewed it rightfully as a victory for higher education. The recent decision in Kirtsaeng, DBA Bluechristines99 v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. suggests that optimism about copyright reform may not be restricted to colleges and universities. It would appear that where the executive keeps a blind eye, and where the legislature is too paralyzed to act, the judiciary is stepping into the future.

I can tell I’m getting older by what gets me excited. There was a time when a story had to feature Winona Ryder and/or Paul Westerberg to get my attention. Now I read about the Department of Education issuing a guidance letter on competency-based education and financial aid eligibility and get all worked up.

Once again, being an instructor isn't all that it is cut out to be.

I've done a number of bootcamps and workshops on managing your digital identity and learning different social media technologies. While I find that grad students are fairly quick to learn the tools and have the intuition required to figure out a lot of the problems, there is one problem I see repeatedly: grad students don't understand why they should be doing it. If I had a dollar for each time I heard someone say "Well, I've got an account but I've never really used it...", I would probably be able to pay off a very small portion of my student loans.

Below is a screenshot of what I saw when I opened my Audible.com Library this morning. 0 results. No audiobooks. Nothing. Nada.

There were plenty of people who were quick to jump all over me when I said that I didn’t want my daughter to grow up and want to become a teacher or a professor. And there are more who criticize my tendency to discourage students from going into graduate school. My wish, as it stands, would be that my daughter goes to graduate school and becomes a professor. My wish is that plenty more people, especially women and other historically underrepresented groups, go to graduate school and get jobs as professors, shaping the lives and dreams of the next generations.

I have been fortunate to serve at several well-respected institutions of higher education that have aspired to “educate the whole person,” one who will go on to lead a successful career and live a meaningful life. Yet, throughout my career, I have been surprised by the barriers often created by our institutional structures that seemingly work against this noble endeavor.

Rising star of the Twitterverse Tressie McMillan Cottom has a must-read post about her observations as a sociologist and former admissions staffer at a for-profit college. It’s about the interaction between the prestige hierarchy of higher education, economic class, and self-image.