Blogs

As I write this, I am having a rare off-the-grid moment, looking over my laptop at a view that reminds me of the coast of Maine except that it doesn’t smell like the sea and there are no tidal pools full of sea urchins and starfish. But the North Shore of Lake Superior is, like Maine, a country of pointed firs, and interlaced among the conifers are the white trunks of birch trees. The hillside bristles with them rather starkly, because many of them have lost their crown of whispering leaves.

BREAKING: Community colleges are useful, and The New York Times is ON IT! It reduces them to vocational training centers, but it’s a start.

First the good news: The need for management education is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

I'm calling it. The age of software training is dead. We should never purchase another application or platform for our campus that requires any workshops, documentation, FAQs, or dedicated support people. If software is not intuitive and simple enough for people to teach themselves to use it then that software is flawed.

We like to joke in economics that we economists seem to always have two hands. We are known for saying “on the one hand” and then explaining some policy implication, only to follow quickly with “on the other hand”, followed by a conflicting policy implication. I found myself thinking of this recently while on vacation as I debated the merits and costs of possibly buying a laptop computer or a tablet.

When I first got professionally involved with campus sustainability, there was really only one first principle: greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming, and the higher education sector needed to show America how to correct that. Call it First Principles v1.0.

July being July, meetings take on a different tone than they have during the rest of the year.

Earlier this school year I wrote about mentoring as part of my mandate for the year, and now that my school year is ending I have time to reflect on how this worked for me and my students. I work with lots of students. In previous years the number was close to 1200 students per year. This last year, I had a teaching release and taught more than 900 students. I am also an Undergraduate Advisor, which means that students can potentially get lots of face time with me.