All the way back in 1989, seemingly hundreds of years ago, David Whitford wrote A Payroll To Meet: A Story of Greed, Corruption, and Football at SMU. I picked it up at a used book store, curious about a scandal I had heard about, but did not really follow. I’m glad that I read it.…
Category: Deanspeak
Posts about the wide realm of higher education from a deanly perspective
Leaders & Leadership: Revisiting Guidance
Leading effectively can be a life’s work. Inherently situational, leadership is defined and informed by context, people and circumstance, all of which constantly change. Recent experience hammers this home: figuring out how to lead in a pandemic, in the crucible of the recent crises, calls out for tools that can offer assistance and perspective. Recently…
Merit Debunked
One of the most insightful books about higher education in the past few years is The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America, by Anthony P. Carnevale, Peter Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl. It received a good degree of notice and mostly positive reviews, and was mentioned as one of Forbes Magazine’s…
Communities of Practice – New Models for New Times
This summer, amid social distancing and the challenges of remote work, between zooms, more zooms and the occasional conference call, I joined Dr. Jabari Bodrick of the University of South Carolina as a co-facilitator in a Campus Compact’s Community of Practice. It was interesting, offering direct insights and a provocative lens for reflection, worthy of…
Good Grading, Good Grades
Several colleges and universities have changed spring semester grading processes in response to the pandemic and our collective shifts to distance learning. The debates and decisions about grading prompted me to return to one of my all-time favorite higher education books, Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment, by Barbara Walvoord and Virginia Johnson…
Spaces and Schools
Educational work is now remote. As we social distance, protecting our students and each other, interaction is mediated by screens and phones. This is our new normal. The loss of face-to-face, of being at my college, has made me think – and rethink – the value and importance of being in a shared physical space…
Crisis As The New Normal
Goldie Blumenstyk is an editor and reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education. She’s been writing about academia for decades and has rightly established herself as one of the most respected journalists covering the field. I read her regularly and trust her judgment, as do many others who work in higher ed. Five years ago…