Blogs

Last year, more than 1,000 stories, photos, videos or tweets were collected and curated during #UWRightNow. Framed as a "multimedia project designed to capture the breadth, depth and spirit of the University of Wisconsin-Madison during a 24-hour period," the 2012 version of #UWRightNow was a crowdsourced social media masterpiece. Combining "staff-produced and user-generated content," the day-long project provided a snapshot of what it meant to be a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison community.

It's that time of the year again, where we wring our hands about another cohort of incoming PhD students.

A book review, of sorts, of Kio Stark's Don't Go Back to School, along with the larger "don't go to college" narratives.

On 29 March - coincidentally my birthday and the day General George Patton took Frankfurt - Susan Patton published a Letter to the Editor in The Daily Princetonian titled “Advice for the Young Women of Princeton: the Daughters I Never Had” that made a stir at my doctoral alma mater. Like me, Patton has two sons. Like me, Patton has adopted highly accomplished female undergraduates at her alma mater as surrogate daughters. Like me, Patton finds endless banter about “leaning in” to careers vapid unless it engages women’s private as well as public personas. Unlike me, she advises Princeton women to graduate with a diploma and a marriage license. Ms. Patton’s prescription depends upon three flawed premises, all rooted in assumptions.

When the Swedish Language Council released a list of words that are not in the Swedish dictionary but are used in common parlance, on it was “ogooglebar” which roughly translates as “ungoogleable” in English, and gave its meaning as “something that cannot be found with a search engine”. Google objected to that definition arguing the word Google is trademarked and therefore if it is ungoogleable it means that it cannot be found on the web by using Google. The interesting part of what is essentially a specific aspect of the internationalisation of language and knowledge transfer is that Google is claiming it has trademarked an activity as well as a company.

In a perfect world, I would grow and raise my own food and cook every meal that I ate from scratch. I enjoy cooking because it’s so rewarding to eat something you made and that you know all the ingredients that go into it. But grad school has challenged my love of cooking in many ways.

At this writing, I’m still reeling from the news of the Boston Marathon explosions. Rumors are flying, and nobody yet knows who did it or why. I hope that by the time people read this, we’ll know.

Almost five years ago I wrote my first blog post for Inside Higher Ed. At the time I had a daughter about to graduate from high school, and a son just finishing elementary school. While my child care needs were vastly different from those of my colleagues with children in pre-school, still in many ways I planned my days and my semesters around my children’s schedules. In that first post, I noted the many things I no longer needed as an academic parent—“a lactation room, on-site daycare, or reduced work hours to be with an infant . . .. a referral to a good nanny, or a preschool that's open in the summer, or help installing a carseat.”