Blogs

As we begin a new school year, I'm sure many of us are prompted to reflect on the challenges and opportunities ahead. Perhaps you are taking on a new leadership role or confronting some other professional change which brings both anticipation and apprehension. For those of you looking for answers or inspiration, might I suggest you turn to Joyce Carol Oates' most recent novel Mudwoman?

As a grad student in my last year of study, I enjoy a pretty flexible schedule and work environment. I work from home a few days a week, and conduct a lot of my research in online spaces, so being constantly connected to the internet is essential for me. However, this constant connectivity is a double-edged sword; I find myself distracted from my work almost as often as I'm focused on it, and as I settle in to struggle with my dissertation and job market materials, I have a hard time shutting out the siren song of Facebook. Lucky for me, a cottage industry of anti-distraction apps has sprung up to keep people like me from destroying themselves one tweet at a time. Here are a few of them.

If non-elite colleges and universities want to avoid the fate of travel agencies and film companies, what should they do in the age of free MOOCs?

I'm tired of being used by the digital tools.

Have I told you how much I love audiobooks? Have I mentioned how much I enjoy the instant purchasing, lower prices, and multi-platform flexibility of Kindle e-books? Have we talked about our concerns about the ever widening gap between the curriculum and consumer content experience? Well, things have just gotten better. And things have just gotten worse.

So we've made it through the first two weeks of my semester, and the first week of Nick's. And what have I learned so far?

Last year’s student protests in Chile had as one of its main targets the pursuit of profit in education. The argument defended by demonstrators and shared, according to opinion polls, by a large majority of Chileans, was that financial gain from education is morally illegitimate and ought to be legally banned. Most people seemed to believe that education cannot be, under any circumstances, a business enterprise.

After talking to dozens (perhaps hundreds) of sustainability staff on a wide range of campuses, I've come to the conclusion that almost all of them fall into one of two categories: either they're administrators or they're strategists. (OK, that's a gross over-generalization, but when have I let a little thing like that stop me?)