Blogs

I have suddenly realized that my children will have a fundamentally different childhood experience than the ones my husband and I had growing up. Before you say, duh, realize that I’m not talking about social media and texting and cell phones and Khan Academy (not to mention that we’re living in a different country). I am talking about my children growing up in a small, rural town, versus the big-city childhood my husband and I both had.

For the last 12 years, I have faithfully monitored the faculty job listings pages in the Chronicle of Higher Ed and IHE even though my husband and I are happily employed. Why? Because we live on the “wrong” coast. We are 3000 miles away from both sets of our aging parents and families, and for us this is a hardship.

From philosophy classes to street corners, one can hear Niccolo Machiavelli's famous dilemma between love and fear regaled. Machiavelli instructed "the prince" that it was better to be feared than loved by the people, because in his view compliance derived more from the latter than the former. What is often forgotten about Machiavelli's formulation was his additional comment: the prince should never be hated. Perhaps what he meant ultimately was that the prince should be "respected," but that concept may be more dependent on a democratic society and therefore not even thinkable in the wildly volatile political landscape of Machiavelli's day in fifteenth century Florence.

The news from Michigan that Northwestern Michigan College, a two-year school, has applied for permission to offer four-year degrees got me thinking about the entire concept.

Academics are some of the best complainers I know. In my field of English, I explain our penchant for complaining by saying that we are, after all, critics — and we can always find something to criticize. But it may be an occupational hazard for all academics — we spend an awful lot of our time, after all, grading, reviewing, and measuring, and things are bound to fall short more often than not. So we complain.

Much has been said about the (potential) impact of recent higher education policies of the English government, particularly regarding the effects of the increased fees on student access and participation and on the higher education institutions’ budgets. Now closer to the date—from September 2012—it is worthwhile to take stock.

These days, you can use a search engine like Google to find pretty much anything - from a local spa to information about Vienna. Noodle is attempting to allow users to find a wide range of learning opportunities.

Where will the next generation of deans come from? It’s an increasingly urgent question, since the current crop is largely aging out of the profession. And in many settings, there’s no heir apparent at the ready.