For some time, we’ve been seeing a curious trend: Young adults are attempting to delay adulthood, while preteen children are hurrying—or being hurried—into the roles and attitudes of young adults. It’s no accident that child psychologists have extended their definition of adolescence into the 20s or that primary-school kids are pushed into beauty pageants where […] … learn more→

A couple posts back I examined why administrators don’t want to give faculty even a crumb: administrators are trained to think that way in their graduate level administration courses. The reasoning as given in the course is simple—the administrator is terrified that the faculty’s knowledge will become worthless, and thus faculty are a waste of […] … learn more→

About a year ago, Steven Krause (of Eastern Michigan University) and Charles Lowe (of Grand Valley State University) came up with the idea of a collaborative anthology of essays on MOOCs, twinning an experiment in scholarship with exploration of an experiment in education. The anthology appeared last week, showing the success of the approach to […] … learn more→

In 1854 the young Russian officer Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was stationed in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. For several weeks French and British forces had laid siege to the city. An aspiring writer and inspired Russian patriot, Tolstoy transformed his observations into the Sevastopol Sketches, three long dispatches that won him the regard not just […] … learn more→

Under the mantra of civil rights, billionaires such as Eli Broad, Bill Gates and the Koch Brothers and the powerful corporate-funded lobby group the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are using venture philanthropy and the political process to press for school reforms in the United States. The ongoing Vergara law case in California in which […] … learn more→

One of the few Wall Street insiders to have been prosecuted for fraud related to the sale of sub-prime mortgage securities has been Fabrice Tourre, also known as “Fabulous Fab.” In 2007, just ahead of the economic collapse caused in great part by the bursting of the housing bubble, Tourre made $1.7 million largely from […] … learn more→

When you do research on candidates running for public office, you seek to learn their positions and promises. And later, when you’re deciding whether they should keep their jobs, you compare what they have done against that election-year rhetoric. The same holds true in other leadership posts, including the one I hold: community-college president. To […] … learn more→

I thought my dissertation would be rigorous because of how much research and writing I would have to do, which is true, but I did not anticipate how challenging it could be to keep in mind the size and scope of the project, which at times can seem overwhelming, while finding ways to move forward […] … learn more→

Last month I appeared as an expert analyst on four news shows and three radio shows. This is perhaps not unusual for someone whose specialty is foreign affairs, but what is unusual is that in each situation I was asked to talk about Russia. I commented on the likelihood of terrorism at the Sochi Olympics, […] … learn more→

Many times I’ve given some indication how faculty feel about administrators, but perhaps it’s time to hear from a chief administrator how he views faculty. A former Poo-Bah of a major university is teaching an 8000-level graduate administration course, and has generously allowed much of the material online. As is so often the case in […] … learn more→