Blogs

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.

Why do we love apocalyptic metaphors so much? Nobody reads. Libraries are doomed. Higher education must change radically or die; no, wait, it’s already dead. R. David Lankes (author of The Atlas of New Librarianship) says it’s time to close the crisis center when it comes to libraries, and I agree. Yet there is something about heightened anxiety that is so tempting.

There is a classic problem from Algebra that torments many a math student. If one driver leaves New York going 150 miles an hour, and another leaves Chicago going 200 miles an hour, where do they meet? (the answer- jail; they both were arrested for speeding!) Another classic problem haunts Calculus students, in which the volume created by revolving a function around a line is calculated. It is that latter problem that I was reminded of as I watched daughter, who would soon be too big to be riding such a small animal, ride a pony last weekend.

Any time I indicate that a market-based solution to any given problem might be less than optimal, I get beaten over the head with Adam Smith's "invisible hand". A lot of folks (including a lot of folks on Greenback's campus) seem to think that Smith's classic Wealth of Nations defined, once and for all, the innate superiority of "free markets" in all goods, all services, all circumstances.