Blogs

On the same day a few weeks ago, I happened to be looking at a Hofstra Alumni newsletter and an article that I had clipped from The New York Times. To digress for a moment, “clipped” is the right expression since I was reading the actual newspaper, not the online version. I only read the paper version on weekends. During the week, I read my paper online and am very efficient in reading only those articles that I identify as of great interest. On the weekends, and at a more leisurely pace, I look through the entire paper and just by skimming find additional interesting articles to read. There is clearly a role for both, though it will be interesting to see if the economics of printing a paper, in an online world, is viable.

Several weeks ago, I sat through a play that was three hours long, with no intermission. The friend I went with joked that the omission must have been a strategic decision on the director's part, because if they had let us out, surely nobody would have come back in. I didn't blame the playwright. She was obviously impassioned about the subject matter, and assumed that everyone else would be, too. Maybe she had exercised great restraint in cutting it back from five or six hours. But at some point, someone should have intervened.

I’ve been calling references for job candidates of late, and starting to wonder if there are better questions to ask.

Here at University of Venus, we talk a great deal about work/life balance — how to maintain the balance between family, private life and the demands of academia, which are many.

We care about innovation at our institutions. We are determined to invest our scarce resources in areas that will improve quality, increase access, and lower costs. Where should we be investing?

As a former High School English teacher, I have experienced the overwhelming tsunami of having to provide feedback on a weekly basis to ~150 students. Between that experience and my more recent experiences teaching online students, I've thought a lot about providing feedback on student writing and student products.

It's the end of the semester, so it's time to get trivial!

Central to the subject of Economics is the idea of “utility maximization.” This concept proposes that people choose the optimal assortment of work, goods and leisure given the constraints they face. As calculus is applied to compute such choices, it is assumed that the economic agent is strictly self-interested, an assumption I find myself thinking about as we celebrate Mother’s Day this weekend.