Thursday, April 28, 2005

Community Service

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“Isn’t that something you’re sentenced to?” – apocryphal student comment Among other changes, my current college is considering tweaking the...
Monday, April 25, 2005

Return of the Rubber Chicken Circuit

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It’s ceremony season. As the end of the semester approaches (two weeks until finals!) every last program, department, and club has its end-...
Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Profit and Purity

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I’ve started reading one of those lefty-authored, bemoan-the-corporatization-of-higher-ed anthologies that became a genre a few years ago, a...

"All of a Suddenly..."

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The Boy recently fired off "all of a suddenly." I really liked that, even if it's technically redundant. (I don't think ...
Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Blame (and Envy) Canada

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As a blue-state American, it’s hard sometimes not to envy Canada. They have a health care system that actually makes some degree of sense (...
Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Do the Hustle: The Bradys at Midtier State

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I’ve had some gratifying feedback on yesterday’s entry about the mismatches between graduate school and life on the faculty of a teaching in...

Sentence You Never Want to Hear, and a Haiku

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Great fun with the dentist. A sentence I heard, that you never want to hear, ever: "You don't seem to be responding to the novocai...
Tuesday, April 12, 2005

How Grad School Fails, or, Playing Well With Others

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I’ve been reading a whole bunch of grad student and junior faculty blogs lately, and enjoying them, but I couldn’t help but notice a persist...

Day of Atonement

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Today's actual, no exaggeration to-do list: 1. Four-hour meeting about technology issues. 2. Finish tax return. 3. Get tooth filled. Com...
Thursday, April 07, 2005

The Scariest (Common) Student Question

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What Should I Take? Such an innocent question, but it still scares me. How the hell should I know? It’s easy if the student already has a ...
Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Vultures and Budgets

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It’s hard, sometimes, not to feel like a vulture. My office got a call today from a very senior professor asking about the paperwork for ret...
Monday, April 04, 2005

We're Raising Him Right

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A few mornings ago, we walked into The Girl’s room to find The Boy standing on a stepstool, peering into the crib, serenading her gently wit...
Wednesday, March 30, 2005

The Only Time I Will Ever be Happy to See Her Standing on the Couch

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The Girl is standing! She needs help to get there, but once you prop her up, she can stand while holding onto the couch! The look on her f...
Monday, March 28, 2005

Alligator Alert

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They're at it again. According to this article in the Tallahassee Alligator (!), Republicans in the Florida legislature have voted in c...
Friday, March 25, 2005

Interesting Times

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In terms of the storied curse, “may you live in interesting times,” these are interesting times. The Chronicle reported today that the Amer...
Tuesday, March 22, 2005

GOP 1, FIPSE 0

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The Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) is one of the only agencies out there to fund projects that take comparativ...

Taking the Show on the Road

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The speech went really well – it was gratifying to see such an enthusiastic response to the themes and topics I’ve been developing in this b...
Thursday, March 17, 2005

Putting the Puzzle Together, Part 2: Commodity Hell in a Handbasket

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I've started working on the implications of the health care/higher ed analogy. Assuming that our political culture is too far gone to e...
Monday, March 14, 2005

Putting the Puzzle Together, Part 1

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In preparing for a speech I’ll be giving soon about some of the dilemmas of higher ed, it hit me that higher ed and health care are similarl...
Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Higher Ed and the New York Yankees

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First, a disclaimer: I can’t stand the Yankees. That said, they make an awfully good metaphor for a recent development in higher ed. The Yan...