So, my project for the summer is to restart, for about the umpteenth time, a book project about facing fear and anxiety over social media tools. Thankfully, I have two wonderful colleagues, Leslie Madsen-Brooks and Barbara Sawhill helping me out. We decided to dive in after our latest presentation on the topic and have set [...]

Inside Higher Ed, among other sources, has been reporting on several incidents of institutions gaming the US News and World Report ranking system. No one should be surprised, today’s report says, especially when the stakes are so high. These incidents dovetail nicely with my own recent thoughts about college expectations for my kids. My brother-in-law [...]

I thought this Inside Higher Ed article was an interesting discussion of they way that people outside the academy seem to value a liberal arts education more than those within it. Ho notes that many humanities faculty, despite having defenders among CEOs and business leaders, shun business, withdrawing from potential allies. Further, she notes, the [...]

So, I’m going to wade in here, where I’m not wanted, to talk about the article by Mark Taylor, in the New York Times. I liked the article. I thought it made some really good points. But around the blogosphere, there’ve been some misgivings, not unwarranted misgivings, but misgivings. Not unsurprisingly, Marc Bousquet is concerned [...]

Heh. This article in the Chronicle (behind the paywall, sorry) explains how one college is getting their staff and administrators to teach classes in order to save money: Ms. Townsley said officials were selecting teachers from a pool of staff members and administrators “who are professionally qualified and want to teach so that we maintain [...]

I attended and presented at my first purely academic conference since 2003. I popped my head into the MLA in 2006, but I’m not really counting that. Having attended technology conferences and workshops for the past 5 years, going to this conference was a bit of a shock. First, there was the fact that I [...]

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I’ve been working a lot lately. The beginnings of school years often show pretty clearly how much or how little either one of us does around the house. When the work hours bleed into the home hours, there’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t get done. [...]

Yesterday, I sent a link to my faculty of the “Top 100 Liberal Arts Bloggers.” I recognized quite a few of the names and thought that it might make interesting summer reading. I, in fact, billed it as such–like beach reading. I got a response pretty quickly from someone saying that he/she was disappointed that [...]

I’m getting all my good ideas from Dean Dad lately. Yesterday he writes about golf serving as a generational boundary. The comments are especially good and I’d recommend reading this one from Eyebrows McGee. He gets at some of the complexities behind Dean Dad’s discomfort with “Of course, there’ll be golf.” It’s about jobs, economics, [...]

Dean Dad comments on the IHE article from yesterday about studies showing that academics have fewer kids than other professionals. Dean Dad asks specifically how we make this work. Honestly, it’s gotten easier as the kids have gotten older, but it’s still hard. I especially feel guilty that I can’t be here when my kids [...]