Blogs

In thinking about teaching persuasion, I revisited a 1965 debate between Buckley and Baldwin and maybe discover a thing or two for myself.

I read with interest the recent article in Inside Higher Education regarding the retiring President of Westminster College preparing for retirement by compiling an eportfolio. President Bassis prepared the eportfolio both “to reflect on his 41 years in higher education…but also as a way to communicate to students and faculty members his steadfast belief in electronic portfolios as a method of cataloging and assessing student work.”

Magazines aren't something that I generally purchase. However, when I'm at 30,000 feet jet-setting off to my next consulting engagement, or heading home to Boston, magazines are one of my favorite ways to pass the time. On a whim, I recently picked up the April edition of the outrageously priced Harvard Business Review. While reading an article about data and good decisions, one of the headlines made me immediately dog-ear a page and pop open my laptop. Part of the focus of the article was that businesses need to develop "more informed skeptics." My brain immediately leapt over to my "radical student affairs" post and connected skepticism to being a more radical practitioner. Questioning is learning, innovating, and being an agent for change.

In years past, I used to worry about what to "do" with Ben during his school breaks. This year, he had to remind me not to wake him up on Friday morning, because the start date of his spring break kept slipping my mind.

The United States is truly moving into the era of the commercialization of international higher education. International students, particularly, are being seen as “cash cows” that can bring in needed revenues at a time of austerity.

How does the fear that you and your institution will get sued for copyright infringement alter the way in which you provide educational materials for your students?

The Girl: “If you dug a tunnel to China, would the hole in the earth make a whistling sound as the earth turned?”

I was born logical and creative and comical and dark and practical and dreamy and compassionate and angry. I was born understanding myself as a whole; I never questioned my own composition. For a long time in my life, I believed that I could be anyone. But lives move forward in choices and in those choices there is growth. Most of those choices are necessary, but some of them are false. It never occurred to me that one day I would have to begin the doppelgängers's dance, the double-walking life of one made to divide one’s self. Again and again in my life I have been presented with a choice that I now know is false: the choice between artist and analyst.