Opinion

At the beginning of January I opened a word document and started to write my dissertation. I hadn’t collected a single participant and am probably a couple years away from defending my thesis. That being said, it felt good to start writing and here are seven reasons why you should be writing as soon as you begin anything related to your thesis collection:

In comparison with business and political leaders, leaders in academia appear different (and I use mostly the Swedish/European case as example for my ideas). At least in Swedish universities, academic leadership is collegial and limited in time.

We are teetering on a very fine line between the right of scholars to express informed opinion and the right of enterprises to be protected from libel. Yet the increasing threats of lawsuits inhibit expression as scholars weigh risks before voicing opinions. There are serious consequences for academic freedom.

In the aggregate, higher ed fund raising seems to be rebounding.

We are getting close to implementing our Honor Code and Honor Board and I am very excited by the our progress in this critical area. It is not that our campus is any different from most other campuses. We know that there is academic dishonesty taking place on virtually every college or university campus. We have just, however, made a commitment to push for a measureable decrease in such behavior.

When I was in my twenties and early thirties, I studied acting and singing here in New York. I got work in small productions and the occasional film, but I never made enough money to quit my day jobs. This may have been partly due to a lack of talent, but I'll never know, because the fact is that I didn't try very hard. I hated auditioning; hated the feeling of selling myself; and I jumped on every possible excuse to avoid them.

In a previous post, we shared responses to the question “What has been the most significant change (either positive or negative) in the higher education 'industry' since you began working in it?" Although answers relating to the increased influence of business in higher ed and the ‘corporatization’ of the university came in fourth place in terms of number of mentions (close to a three-way tie for second, though), it would have come in first place had we measured responses by the heat or passion of the response.

Eric Cantor's proposal to end funding of social science research is foolish, and could do real damage to American capabilities, writes Carol Geary Schneider.