Confessions of a Community College Dean

Nate Kreuter’s latest is well worth checking out. It’s about the fear -- sometimes founded, sometimes not -- that people have when they look for other jobs that their current employer will hold it against them.

In college, I don’t remember spending much time worrying about syllabi. They’d typically be about a page, and would include the professor’s name, office number, office hours, the course title and number, sometimes a brief description of the topic of the course, a list of major (graded) assignments, some due dates, a list of required books, and maybe a late paper policy. Many of them looked like they had been copied from copies from years before, and they may have.

The kids (and TW) had a snow day earlier this week, so she took them sledding. At one point, when she was standing on a sled, the sled went one way and she went another, with her knee sort of splitting the difference.

American Career Institutes, a for-profit higher ed chain that specialized in computer-based career-oriented majors, just closed abruptly. It had campuses in Maryland and Massachusetts, including one in Springfield, which is HCC’s largest feeder city.

Apparently, San Jose State University has contracted with Udacity to run credit-bearing basic algebra classes -- both developmental and college-level -- at a cost to students of $150. Some folks are already manning the battle stations.

I read somewhere that the mark of an educated mind is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time. If that’s true, then I’m feeling particularly educated of late.

There’s a great scene in the film version of The Grapes of Wrath that I don’t remember in the book. A farmer is facing down a man on a bulldozer; the man on the bulldozer has been hired by the bank to repossess the farm, because the farmer has defaulted on a loan.

The book is out, and shipping! ----- Fearless prediction time: The City College of San Francisco will get some sort...