Blogs

Being first at anything is hard, but being first at college is a bewildering and sometimes terrifying experience.

The African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” is often used in education circles to stress the importance of community in the learning process. It is a concept that we in private higher education can apply to an area where colleges and universities continue to face new problems every year: the issue of drug and alcohol use and abuse on our campuses.

Southwest has spoiled me. I’m so used to just checking a bag and not thinking about it that when I flew USAir last week and saw a “bag fee,” I actually got offended. What do you mean, “bag fee”? If I didn’t bring a bag, I’d get flagged by TSA, but you’re charging a bag fee? How about a seat fee? Sheesh.

Go look at your calendar. How much of your week last was scheduled in meetings or other events? Recently, I received a piece of critical feedback from someone whose insights I greatly respect. She told me that my calendar (in our case a cloud based Office 365 calendar) is looking "awfully full."

Institutions are announcing their admissions data, and it’s another year of record highs and lows. With these record highs and lows revealing themselves in the form of acceptance and rejection letters and emails, what does this say about the current state of higher education?

The last few weeks of the semester have a feeling of both desperation and joy about them. Joy comes for me at the approach of spring—the cherry tree outside my office window just bloomed, so I know it’s really here now. But there’s desperation at the amount of work that remains to be done. My students are tired. Some are sick—I have received emails from the hospital emergency room, the doctor’s office, the dorm room, requesting extra time for papers due to illness or explaining an absence from class. Some are just experiencing the normal stresses of the end of the semester—the realization that, yes, all those papers really are due all at once, and the reading really does need to be done before class.

By their words shall ye know them. The Princeton graduate getting global attention for warning current undergraduate Princeton women to gather ye assortative rosebuds while ye may isn't the April Fool's joke people are calling her. She's got a certain take on things... Things having to do with the importance of physical, rather than virtual, campuses, for instance...

Next week I’m doing my first accreditation visit. I’ve been on the receiving end of three ten-year visits in my career -- you’d think that wouldn’t be mathematically possible, but it is -- but this will be my first time on the visiting side. I spent a chunk of this weekend plowing through the self-study, pen in hand.