Then you’re literate and fortunate. And it is good to remember just how fortunate we are. John Wood is an unusual man who did more than remember – he did something about it. An MBA and successful Microsoft executive, he left the company after a chance encounter while on a hiking holiday in the Himalayas.…
Category: Deanspeak
Posts about the wide realm of higher education from a deanly perspective
Awkward Hero
In 2005, Auburn University Professor W. David Lewis finished Eddie Rickenbacker: An American Hero in the Twentieth Century. A labor of love and personal obsession, the biography took Lewis decades of research. It is a magisterial tome, the definitive work on one of the major celebrities of early twentieth century America. Accomplished in multiple arenas…
Saxifrage – A Provocative Model
Will innovation in higher education come from technologically sophisticated low-cost disruptors? Can costs be contained without reliance on MOOCs? A different model is the Saxifrage School. Founded by a young visionary, Tim Cook, the school will offer students a career focus and liberal arts education at a low cost. Dependent upon charity and a catch-as-catch-can…
Function, Form and Student Learning
In 2005, the Regents for the University of Minnesota shuttered UM’s School of General Studies and moved its faculty and students to the University’s College of Education and Human Development. The School of General Studies, created in 1932, was something of an anomaly: a two-year developmental unit at a four-year flagship university. GS provided a…
Making the Unfamiliar Familiar – Many Thanks to Will Gompertz
One of the job requirements of a provost is the ability to communicate with faculty across the disciplines and sound moderately intelligent and informed. You cannot present as more informed than the faculty – that simply shuts down conversation and fosters resentment (see Larry Summers at Harvard). One the other hand, if you don’t know…
Being a Professor – There’s Stress and Then There’s Stress
Forbes Magazine’s recently published a list of the ten least stressful jobs, borrowing from a post by an online job site called Careercast. At the top of the list? University professors, of course. Faculty enjoy high status, relatively high income, good job protection, and suffer little by way of accountability. Like a game of telephone,…
Making Sense of How We Lived, When We Lived
Truly knotty complicated questions rarely fall into tidy categories. This fundamental truth challenges deans, departments, faculty and students, for disciplines only go so far and then it is necessary to find different perspectives. Marjorie Garber is a literary scholar who has consistently and successfully strayed beyond English. She has served as Director of the Humanities Center…