Opinion

Last week at this time I was about to leave for my annual conference, which is now over. As I mentioned, I brought my daughter with me, and I promised to report back on how attending a conference with her went. In a word: great.

In the wake of the mess at UVA, in which a President was pushed out by a rogue faction of a Board that felt she lacked “strategic dynamism,” those of us who follow these things have been left to wonder just what that might mean.

We’re halfway through the academic year in South Africa, and like many of my colleagues, I’ve been catching my breath after the deluge of marking which arrived at the end of the first semester. I’ve taught since beginning my graduate studies, and have marked students’ essays and exam scripts both in South Africa and the UK. Over the past eight years, what has struck me is that the quality of students’ writing and research hasn’t varied all that greatly; I can remember a few very bad, and some brilliant, pieces of work, but I haven’t noticed a decline or marked improvement in the standard of the work submitted to me.

It's retreat season once again. Does your department, team, division, or group have any plans for an offsite retreat? Where are you going? Can you offer any advice about retreat best practices.

When ifttt (it's lowercase, so it has to be cool, right?) first appeared on the social tech scene, I took a gander and then I moved on. Thankfully, I know enough about companies with unique names to not put them on permanent ignore. ifttt (I was going to make a bell hooks reference about capitalization…it didn't work.) is all about figuring out the connections between "if this then that." The functionality of ifttt is built around tasks, actions, and channels. For example, let's say you wanted to save your Instagram photos into your Dropbox account. With ifttt, it's simple, the community has already created that particular recipe.

Some topics never go away. Collegiality and its evil twin, incivility, is one of them.

Most of us have been there. Standing in line at the annual conference of [insert national association of scholars of some discipline or region here] and protesting the length of the time to register. Wondering why it takes the conference committee so long to accept or reject our abstract. Locating typos in the conference program. Complaining about the seemingly mismatched papers on a panel. But have you ever sat on the other side of that registration table? Considered volunteering for or organizing a conference yourself?

A great university’s board has just illustrated how not to fire a president. Susan Resneck Pierce offers advice on how trustees should act when confronted with the possibility of a termination.