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…
Category: Deanspeak
Posts about the wide realm of higher education from a deanly perspective
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…
Cities, Sustainability, and Schools – An Educated Guess About an Urban Future
To get a really clear view of the uneasy tension between what makes us feel good and what makes ecological sense, tour residential college campuses. Most likely you will need a car to reach the college of your choice, and once you arrive, you probably will have to hunt for the appropriate parking lot in…
On Shakespeare and Stoppard, on Reading and Recommending
Reading combines pleasure and utility, and does so elegantly. Whether curled up in a book or poring over a tome, thoughtful reading affords an extraordinary opportunity to engage while disengaging, to travel while staying still, and to connect while remaining alone. The gift of a book and the power of a thoughtful recommendation is much…
A Tale of Two Systems
The nation is dependent upon its public higher education systems to educate and train millions of students. Approximately 70 percent of everyone who is enrolled in higher education today, about 14 million people, is studying in a community college, a four-year public colleges, or a public university. Our focus, however, is almost always upon the…
Business and Technology Bring Continuous Innovation – But Will Higher Education Take Advantage?
Making sense of ever-changing conditions is one of the primary functions of the mainstream business press. Regardless of one’s line of work, publications like The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, and the Harvard Business Review offer a lenses and perspective on the almost incomprehensible dynamism of human economic and technological activity. They are…