Opinion

I have a confession to make. I don’t love writing my dissertation. In fact, there are days when I open documents on my computer and start to cry. I am, at times, filled with an overwhelming anxiety, and there are moments when even thinking about my dissertation makes me want to throw my computer out the window and join the circus.

Why do we love apocalyptic metaphors so much? Nobody reads. Libraries are doomed. Higher education must change radically or die; no, wait, it’s already dead. R. David Lankes (author of The Atlas of New Librarianship) says it’s time to close the crisis center when it comes to libraries, and I agree. Yet there is something about heightened anxiety that is so tempting.

There is a classic problem from Algebra that torments many a math student. If one driver leaves New York going 150 miles an hour, and another leaves Chicago going 200 miles an hour, where do they meet? (the answer- jail; they both were arrested for speeding!) Another classic problem haunts Calculus students, in which the volume created by revolving a function around a line is calculated. It is that latter problem that I was reminded of as I watched daughter, who would soon be too big to be riding such a small animal, ride a pony last weekend.

Any time I indicate that a market-based solution to any given problem might be less than optimal, I get beaten over the head with Adam Smith's "invisible hand". A lot of folks (including a lot of folks on Greenback's campus) seem to think that Smith's classic Wealth of Nations defined, once and for all, the innate superiority of "free markets" in all goods, all services, all circumstances.

A four-year degree in three years? Why stop there? Carolyn Foster Segal asks, wryly.

Ask most alumni relations professionals the secret of success and they will have a common refrain.

I should have paid heed when I was still in my work clothes of sweats and greasy hair. Everyone told me to plan a career while I was a Ph.D. student. Don’t just think deep thoughts and write about them. Frame the work in a career trajectory so that I could launch myself straight through the windows of the ivory tower before the ink on the diploma was even dry. I didn’t listen.

The media has supported an outpouring of grief and anguish for the victims of the Aurora, Colorado massacre at the midnight screening of “The Dark Knight Rises.”