Opinion

The Boy continues to careen into tweenhood. On Wednesday morning I dropped him off early at school for jazz band. As we approached the front entrance, a girl started to cross, and I stopped to let her pass. He got oddly quiet. Later that night, he told me that she’s his crush, and that he was silently praying that she didn’t see him in the car.

When I teach Economics, I often find myself teaching about the effects of a tax on the supply and demand curves for a product. While a tax can be levied on a producer or a consumer, it is generally the case that the producer and consumer will each pay a portion of that tax in the end, once the equilibrium price changes in response to the tax. Indeed, the degree to which a consumer and producer share the cost of a tax depends on how willing those agents are to change their behavior in response to a change in price. In economic language, we say that who actually pays a tax “depends on the elasticities.”

One of the best things about working in higher ed is that you get to start all over again at least twice every year.

Pat McCrory of North Carolina is the latest governor to question the value of a liberal arts degree. This is the story of how its provided one kind of value (economic) to me.

A couple years ago, The Onion ran a story headlined “Unemployment High Because People Keep Blowing Their Job Interviews.” I was reminded of that in reading about the governor of North Carolina, Patrick McCrory, and his fusillades against the liberal arts in general and gender studies in particular. He’s the latest in a string of governors to declare that the recession lingers because students keep studying the wrong things, like he did. (McCrory was a double major in education and political science.) If only public colleges and universities would stop teaching the liberal arts and just focus on STEM, he implied, all would be well. Um, no.

This post is intended to open up a dialogue with the leadership at Adobe. I hope that people at Adobe read this post in the context of a larger discussion that is going on about the merits of outsourcing, a discussion that The Economist captures really well in its recent Special Report: Outsourcing and Offshoring. Please do not mistake these concerns about outsourcing e-learning product development and support with any negative arguments partnering with colleagues from India. As I've written in other places, I very much believe that India is positioned for a source of strength in e-learning in the years to come.

This is going to be my last post for Mama PhD. Contributing to the initial book and then to this blog has been an incredibly rich and rewarding experience. It has allowed me a public place to examine and articulate the intersections between my personal and professional lives, to push the boundaries between the private and the public, and to become part of a community. Writing this blog has also coincided with a decision on my part to be more authentic, less afraid of revealing myself, of speaking the truth. But it’s time to bow out and let other voices be heard -- in particular, I think we need to hear from adjunct Mama PhDs!