June 2012
36 posts
“Our power is always going to be in the faculty,” she says. “They’re the people with the ideas. I feel sometimes in higher education we’re forgetting that.”
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Now Hiring: Hundreds of Professors - Faculty - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Susan Herbst, president of UConn, expanding on why she set a target of hiring 300 faculty over the next four years.i
“In short, the same five conservative Justices who in their pre-appointment phase had inveighed against “judicial activism” and “legislating from the bench,” while promising to live the gospel of judicial “humility” if confirmed, went out of their way, in a ruling written by Samuel Alito, to decree new law contrary to what Congress had ordered and other courts had long approved.*”
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Politics - James Fallows - SCOTUS Update: La Loi, C’est Moi - The Atlantic
Preparing for the SCOTUS ruling this week.
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Dragas has virtually no support for the decision on U.Va.’s Grounds — opposition has come from all the deans, the faculty senate, the provost and even her handpicked designee as interim president, McIntire School of Commerce Dean Carl P. Zeithaml, who has backed away from the position.
But she does have a key supporter in Paul Tudor Jones, a Connecticut billionaire and U.Va. alumnus and donor — the university’s John Paul Jones Arena is named for his father. Jones wrote an opinion column for The Daily Progress in Charlottesville last Sunday, outlining some of the same concerns that Dragas raised about challenges facing the university.
” —Helen Dragas: The woman at the center of the U.Va. storm | Richmond Times-Dispatch
In general, this is a balanced article on Dragas, but it is remarkable that so many at UVa oppose the Board’s decision.
Department Of Omnishambles: MARTIN HEIDEGGER →
departmentofomnishambles.tumblr.com
10am
Arrived at the cabin; mist-enrobed, the utter calm led me to experience at first hand the authenticity of being as dwelling. Can there be anything more attuned to the Germanic spirit than the Todtnauberg?
10.48pmStill trying to log into the remote e-learning system which the Freiburg…
“Universities are communities composed of numerous stakeholders, all of whose voices should be reflected in decision making. Leadership calls for relentless consultation, the balancing of goals, of conflicting ambitions and agendas along with contrasting, often antithetical, priorities. Choices are inevitable. Presidents, faculty, and boards must find common ground, especially in difficult financial circumstances. A unilateral act by one part of the triumvirate (as is the situation at UVa) diminishes not only the power structure but also the soundness of the institution.”
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I have been reticent to make proclamations about the #UVa situation because I am in no position to be privy to the real dynamics of the situation, but this statement by Stephen Trachtenberg, president emeritus of George Washington University, resonates with what I understand about institutions of higher education.
“So in striking down the least popular part of Obamacare — the individual mandate — the Court will inevitably bring into question one of its most popular parts — coverage of preexisting conditions. And in so doing, open alternative ways to maintain that coverage — including ideas, like the public option, that were rejected in favor of the mandate.”
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Robert Reich: A Back Door to the Public Option
Reich is perhaps to optimistic here, but a little optimism is needed once in a while.
“What does it mean when a university press fails? It means not that its authors are not successful or that its press was not run well. Rather it means that its university has abandoned part of its scholarly mission: namely, supporting the publication of books that are the lifeblood of its faculty — and academia.”
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Essay on closure of University of Missouri Press | Inside Higher Ed
I am not sure the comparison with athletics on the financial side is sound because of the difference in revenue generated and the scope of influence. But from a wider perspective about what we in higher education ought to value, the juxtaposition is apt.
“Still today, we humanists shudder at incompleteness, protecting our ideas from the public, polishing them toward perfection in the private confines of the library or the book lined study. We prefer the silence of these spaces, nurturing our ideas until everything is said just right. Only then are we prepared, reluctantly, to reveal them to the world.”
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Wonders & Marvels – A Community for Curious Minds who love History, its Odd Stories, and Good Reads
An attempt to suggest how humanities scholarship can be more public and collaborative.
