Blogs

In my perfect world, the “disruptive innovation” people and the “crack down on fraud” financial aid people would be locked in a room to fight it out, and nobody could pass any new rules until there was a clear winner.

Last May, Inside Higher Ed reported that Russell Berman, past president of the Modern Language Association (MLA) and Stanford University professor, has put forth a proposal together with five other Stanford colleagues to rethink the humanities PhD there. They tackled the question of whether and how to make the humanities PhD relevant today. In order to accomplish this, they posit that time to degree must be reduced and students should be trained for a diversity of career tracks, not limited to the traditional tenure track career path.

Summer vacations, weekends, and the lack thereof -- in and out of academia.

Why do universities want foreign students? If institutions are willing to pay a commission for them, then it feels a lot like a business transaction with the expectation of a good ROI (return on investment) — pay a commission and expect an ROI in the form of full tuition and fees.

What edtech conferences do you attend? My list has included EDUCAUSE, ELI, ELI Learning Technology Leadership, ECAR Symposiums, BbWorld, various NERCOMP events, and a growing number of gatherings contiguous to our edtech ecosystem. So far I have not been to a Sloan-C event or an NMC conference, and I hope to make it out to InstructureCon one of these days.

In a typical year, I attend one Hofstra commencement ceremony in December and four during May. The May commencement exercises have individual ceremonies for undergraduate, graduate, Law, and an Honors Convocation while the December ceremony has all of the above for midyear graduates. Only one of our May ceremonies, the undergraduate ceremony, has been held outdoors regularly and for this year’s ceremony, the weather was perfect. Not too hot, not too cold, nice breeze, not raining, no thunder and lightning. For an outdoor ceremony, you could not have had better weather. And yet, within two weeks of this year’s ceremony we made a decision that going forward the undergraduate ceremony would be divided by colleges and schools into two separate ceremonies and would be held indoors in our comfortable air-conditioned arena.

Sometimes things change really quickly, forcing you to re-evaluate everything.

Sometimes we don't learn anything from our failures.