This time of year brings with it the annual flood of program reviews, employee evaluations, and end-of-year wrap-ups. (Between the academic year and the fiscal year, we hit the 'reset' button on July 1.) That means that the second half of June becomes an exercise in speed reading and diplomacy.
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June 9, 2009
A story on NPR this morning spoke of how, while it's going downhill slower than the financial or manufacturing sectors, agriculture is starting to suffer from the current economic crisis.
June 8, 2009
The Chronicle and IHE each have articles about succession planning for college administrators. They're both relatively supportive of hiring internal candidates, and for many of the same reasons.
June 8, 2009
Did you hear the news? Over-parenting is over. So decree the arbiters of lifestyle trends — or, at least, Lisa Belkin, who has been writing about parenting in the New York Times for the better part of this decade.
June 8, 2009
Sunday evening, I was driving with Mrs. R. in a town near our farm. We were proceeding down what used to be the main commercial strip, bustling with car dealers, supermarkets, discount stores, specialty shops, restaurants, etc. These days, half of the storefronts are shuttered and much of the space that's occupied is on lease to low-rent tenants (tanning salons, rent-to-own robbers, pizza joints and the like). Where there were once three car dealers, now there's one lone Dodge store that (judging by the front lot) recently lost its franchise.
June 8, 2009
Dear Susan,Seven years ago I started graduate school, a year after I had gotten married and moved to a brand new city. I commuted 85 miles each way daily (for most semesters) for three years. I loved my program and poured myself into it. My last year of PhD course work, I got pregnant, due the following July. But that summer also ended up including a 1200-mile move to another part of the country and our baby coming a month early and being born profoundly deaf.
June 7, 2009
In discussing a nearby park, TG asked me “why did they put a hill there when they designed the world?” We saw Up on Saturday, and I have to admit, it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. Pixar has a high batting average anyway – Cars and Finding Nemo were nifty, and The Incredibles was flat-out great – but this one had a sweetness to it that the others lacked. There's a short almost-silent mini-movie in the beginning that traces a couple's lifetime together that almost stands as a movie in itself.
June 6, 2009
My acquaintance Rory has a Ph.D. in American literature and is an administrator and a poet of sorts himself. At lunch yesterday, talking around a mouthful of Chicken Tikka in a restaurant he tried to tell me was Thai, he began to dissert on those he called “hillbillies,” whom he admires very much. Despite his predilection for tasteful shirts, fad diets, Wallace Stevens, and Miles Davis, he called himself one too.
June 4, 2009
When I entered graduate school, I once proudly proclaimed to someone I had just met that “I don’t want to be normal”. I have no idea what they must have thought of that statement, or of me, but it was basically true. I saw myself as changing the world, as saving the world from its economic messes with my little equations. Who wanted to settle for “normal” when they could go down in the history books?
June 4, 2009
Most colleges set aside at least some 'professional development' money for faculty and staff. The idea behind it is that fields of expertise don't remain static, so for people to remain current, they sometimes have to be exposed to the latest developments. That can mean workshops, or conferences, or webinars, or subscriptions, or whatever, but the goal is to make sure that people don't rust in peace.
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