While most all of us who pursue careers in higher education are idealists, those that are willing to share their aims and ideals are not all that common. The realities of academia in the twenty-first century are sobering and it’s often safer to keep idealism closeted. When we do encounter the baldly stated hope for education that…
Author: David Potash
More Readings For the New Community College President
Did the holidays come and go without you finding the perfect gift for the new community college president on your list? Or the aspiring college president? Rest easy – I have two reading recommendations. Even though full-time administrators rarely curl up with a book, I am confident that these two volumes will be read, studies,…
Institutionalized Inequity and Chicago Real Estate
Beryl Satter’s Family Properties: How the Struggle Over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America is a brilliant book. A historian with a personal history with Chicago real estate, Satter’s father, Mark Satter, was a lawyer and landlord in Lawndale, a working west-side neighborhood in Chicago. Mr. Satter died in 1965, short on funds and…
Beautiful Collection – Nagle and Picking Up
Twenty some years ago at New York University I met an engaging and super smart anthropologist, Robin Nagle. She had a reputation as a very good teacher (well-deserved) and I was carried away by her enthusiasm and curiosity. We started talking about her interests and she told me that she was fascinated by garbage. I…
Scott Nearing – Much to Admire, Less to Like
Scott Nearing was one of the most influential thinkers of the homestead movement. His book Living the Good Life, written with his wife Helen in 1954, marked a critical development in the concept of a sustainable lifestyle. The Nearings’ promotion of living simply from the land was no post-WWII American anti-consumerism fad. Instead, it was the…
Neighborhoods and the Great American City
Chicago is a big and complicated city. As a newcomer, I read widely to get a better understanding of my new home. The staff at the Unabridged Bookstore, an independent in the Lakeview neighborhood, has organized a section filled with Chicago books, ranging from the coffee table variety to academic monographs. On that shelf with a…
Performance Funding & Academic Incentives
Can a funding scheme based on for-profit world motivation make a positive difference in the not-for-profit world of higher education? I am optimistic – but not for the reasons that policymakers may suppose. Public higher education in the United States is increasingly supported through Performance Based Funding (PBF). A recent report by the Education Policy…