If you’re looking for a hero in American history whose work and words have increasing relevance today, it would be difficult to find a better candidate than Ida B. Wells. Born in 1862 in slavery and living until 1931, Wells had an extraordinarily productive and courageous life, fighting for racial and social justice. She truly…
Category: Reviews
Reviews of books, articles, and the like
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…
Addressing Addresses
Deirdre Mask, I would wager, is an outstanding dinner companion, the kind of person you’d like to have sit next to you on a delayed airplane flight. I’ve never met her, so this may be idle conjecture. If you dip into her recent first book, though, I would be surprised if you thought otherwise. The…
Leadership Theory and the Community College
One of the most well-known professional development parables is the story of a rookie lumberjack who is a phenom when first let loose in the forest. Many trees fall but as the days add up, the new lumberjack cuts fewer and fewer trees. Frustrations mount and our lumberjack considers quitting. Only when a seasoned colleague…
Learning Science?!?
Foretelling the future is impossible. But measured predictions, from smart and informed people, using good data, hard work and solid evidence, can be possible and reliable. A good example is Robert S. Feldman‘s Learning Science: Theory, Research, & Practice. Making claims about higher education and technology is inherently risky (Did anyone anticipate Zoom? Remember the…
Ginzel on Choosing Leadership
“Leadership is a choice.” Professor Linda Ginzel of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business begins her book, Choosing Leadership: A Workbook, with that deceptively simple sentence. It’s a powerful claim, an assertion that carries with it expectations and consequences. Leadership, she asserts, is a “skill that needs to be constantly practiced and developed.”…
An Economist’s Call for Equality
Economists, I think, often tend to have a different way of looking at things. They ask particular sorts of questions and often arrive at different kinds of answers than us non-economists. For us, economic work often can seem to take place in a world unto itself. Sometimes, though, what economists argue and and call out…