Blogs

"Greenwashing", of course, is the practice of ascribing supposed sustainable qualities to a product or service for purposes of boosting market share. It's increasingly prevalent, and I generally just ignore it. But today, two examples totally gob-smacked me.

Most people in higher education love to hate the rankings. Not me – I find them highly imperfect but fascinating.

A longtime reader writes: I've been told by one of my employers that I am not allowed to accept friend requests from students on Facebook or any other social media site save Linkedin. In my field (probably in most fields) networking is really important and therefore this is a serious bummer.

Ph.D. students: How to finish your dissertation and enjoy your time writing it

Attendance directly correlates with academic success. But is it a direct line?

Imagine that you had the opportunity to spend 30 minutes with the person who runs Google's higher education business. What would you ask?

Last week, as I prepared my office for an upcoming move to another home, I had a realization: when was the last time I actually took something out of my filing cabinet? The filing cabinet sits in my closet in my home office. It include four drawers: two full of articles, one full of research notes and photocopies, and the other full of personal items, like bills and so on. I bought it during my first year of graduate school, when I realized I would be accumulating a lot of paper. This was before sheet feed scanners were popular (or affordable) or tablets or iPhones had hit the market, so reading on the computer was not something a lot of students were doing: it certainly wasn't where I was then. I used the photocopy machine. A lot.

In which I reveal all.