Blogs

Today is the end of the first week of teaching in the South African academic year. It’s been an experience that any academic at any university around the world would recognise: the chaos of finding timetables and new lecture venues, the inevitable problems with IT and parking spaces, the long queues at university bookshops, and in the midst of all this, a new group of anxious, happy, first year students.

Names are powerful. That’s why I understand Georgia Tech’s “X-Degree.”

Being a good girl has gotten me this far, but to go any further, I'll have to figure out how to be bad.

I think that I'm ready to part with my most cherished physical books. Only a couple of years ago this thought would have been unimaginable. Books are the center of our culture, the core of my belief system, and the basis of my personal philosophy. I am a person of the book (literally).

Why might a political scientist writing about higher education employ the concept and term power less than he did in the early years after getting his political science degree? It’s only a relative difference; I continue to engage the concept and term more than do higher education scholars outside my home discipline, but still . . .

I was reminded a few weeks ago, in response to a situation I will outline in the next paragraph, of how important customer service is throughout education and especially at the very competitive higher education level. And by customer service, I am not suggesting a weakening of standards; rather, I am just suggesting that we, especially in private higher education, do all that is necessary to minimize administrative hassles and in that way help our students succeed.

As noted here previously, my French is what is known as "serviceable" — I can read the newspaper, order theater tickets and carry on a superficial social conversation, but generally speaking, when I address French people who understand English, they will immediately switch, and if they don't, they start speaking slowly and carefully. Even at my peak, I have never been quite fluent, with two notable exceptions.

I am not considered a "real" professor. But what does that mean?