Opinion

Deciding whether a candidate is right for a faculty job should be based not on intuition but on evidence, writes Elizabeth H. Simmons.

One of the big trends for 2012 is sure to be educational data and analytics. As the year draws to a close, Knewton, Pearson, Grockit and now EverFi are all making their moves to build learning algorithms and student data models.

In the New York Times this past Sunday, there was a front page article on the inadequacy of law schools in preparing lawyers for the work they will do. The culprit? The faculty write too many law review articles, according to the reporter. If they were teaching (or even practicing law) instead of writing arcane articles they wouldn’t be so out of touch. The journalist cited a law review article on how few law review articles get cited.

Why do are students willingly miss classes, celebrating the canceled class?

I was never much of a batter. I wouldn’t make contact terribly often, and when I did, I only ever hit down the third base line. If you’re a right-handed batter like me, that’s a sign of swinging too early.

Two book recommendations for Thanksgiving 2011 are Robert Frank's The High-Beta Rich and Michael Lewis' Boomerang. These books go nicely as a pair, as the first seeks to explain the consequences of the financialization of wealth and the second follows this trend to its ultimate conclusion (world economic crisis and default). If you were planning on going crazy on Black Friday at Best Buy with your credit card, you might be wiser to download (buy?) these books and stay home reading.

Sometimes I wonder how we even have telephones or email accounts. These tools when misused can lead to severe FERPA violations. However, at some point, our professional common sense prevailed and we realized that banning communication tools isn't a FERPA requirement.