Opinion

It may be much harder to write a short paper than a long paper, but it’s much more interesting to tell a story – any story – in six words.

The news business, the fight against CIPSA, and an important Supreme Court decision - all on my mind this week.

This week I led a discussion on academic/vendor relations with a product group at an edtech company. The meeting was in Canada. I never left my office in Hanover NH. We did the whole thing on a Web based collaboration platform.

I was working on my laptop (as usual) while my children played around me. They were dressed up in play costumes, started marching and kept referring to each other as Susan and Elizabeth. When they started chanting “Women should vote,” I realized, of course, they were playing 1st wave feminist movement (don’t you love the nerdy games of professors’ children?). I’ve been reading Sheryl Sanderberg’s new book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead and watching the COO of Facebook on television call it a “sort-of -feminist manifesto” to inspire a new women’s revolution. I began thinking how the children of the future might re-enact her movement.

Last spring when the Northern District of Georgia issued a decision in the Cambridge University Press, et al. v. Becker, et al. observers viewed it rightfully as a victory for higher education. The recent decision in Kirtsaeng, DBA Bluechristines99 v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. suggests that optimism about copyright reform may not be restricted to colleges and universities. It would appear that where the executive keeps a blind eye, and where the legislature is too paralyzed to act, the judiciary is stepping into the future.

Patrick Sanaghan, Mary Hinton and Steve Riccio consider why it is so hard to shift institutions -- and strategies for building support to do just that.

On a literary lecture tour in China, Martin Puchner finds much interest in how American authors responded to industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I can tell I’m getting older by what gets me excited. There was a time when a story had to feature Winona Ryder and/or Paul Westerberg to get my attention. Now I read about the Department of Education issuing a guidance letter on competency-based education and financial aid eligibility and get all worked up.