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A decade or more ago when I began work in higher education administration, many a nose looked down on Microsoft. For some time now that perspective has been changing.

How dependent on foreign (non-EU) student fees is the UK (2010-2011)? Very much so, though at variable levels.

What’s happening at U.Va. is hardly an isolated phenomenon, though this example is more public than most. In fact, the focus of my dissertation research is this process of “strategic change” at universities, how it’s imagined and implemented, and how it’s perceived and experienced by organizational participants.

My response to Joshua Kim's story yesterday about the lack of education-related news at Google IO.

I'll probably never have it all; does that make me a failure?

I just wrote a memo to a group of budget people explaining (again) why it takes library staff with good technical skills, time, and lots of patience to make sure that when you click on a button in a library database to find an article, you actually find the article. Since it’s all online, now, it’s much less work, right? Well ... no. And why that's so is one example of the issues John Palfrey and Urs Gasser address in their new book, Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems.

The bloggers’ union called and threatened to revoke my card if I didn’t at least try to write something about UVA. If nothing else, I hope the whole episode will help some folks understand the crosscurrents that academic administrators have to navigate.

I'm trying to decide if the mounting evidence of our irrationality, poor decision making, and now even dishonesty is depressing or liberating. Reading Ariely's previous books meant accepting the fact that we will make bad decisions, and what we learn from his latest book is that given half a chance we will also lie about our actions.