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Over the years, I have participated in many telephone interviews of potential candidates for positions at Hofstra as well as for not-for-profit boards that I have participated on. Interviewing candidates in this way has always struck me as second best (but certainly better than not participating).

Over the past week, as we attempt to return to normal after Sandy, the term that recurs most often in conversation with friends and colleagues is "9/11," as in, "Remember after 9/11, when we..." or "People were more eager to volunteer after 9/11."

For the first time in ten years, I was able to devote my entire week to the EDUCAUSE National Conference. Allow me to share some take-aways from the experience.

What are your big takeaways for EDUCAUSE 2012?

Congratulations to the long-suffering California public higher education system, which received a stay of execution from the voters. Proposition 30 raises enough revenue to prevent the next round of cuts, and to actually plan something. Even better, the voters sent enough Democrats to the legislature to achieve the supermajority status that California quixotically mandates for any tax increases. (Tax decreases don’t have the same requirement.)

I get a little testy when every attempt at developing a new way to share scholarship is required to pass a sustainability test. What we’re doing now isn’t sustainable. So why should new things have to prove they can do something our current system cannot do? I’m all for thinking through the implications and having a some kind of plan. I’m not in favor of abandoning ideas because we can’t figure out how to put them to a test that the status quo has already failed. Miserably.

The same day that I read Afshan’s post on taking her 7-year-old daughter out of public school in order to homeschool her, my five-year-old daughter came home with her first report card. Although there were no letter grades, she had clearly done outstanding work, particularly in the “Social Skills/Behavioral” area.

When I teach statistics, I often point out that some values we calculate have different notation depending on whether they are calculated from the entire population or a from a sample taken from that population, even if the calculations are identical in the different situations. I explain this to my students by telling them a woman’s name, and asking them if they know who that woman is. They almost always have no idea who she is.