Category: Academia

No, I’m not talking about the sort of thing where teams play cooperative, non-competetive games, and everybody gets a trophy at the end. I’m talking about academia, here, and specifically the recent flurry of colleges and universities offering child care support: In the last week, both Stanford and Yale Universities have announced significant expansions of… Continue reading Family Friendly Competition

I’m currently on a committee that’s investigating whether to switch to an honor code system for academic honesty issues, and possibly social violations as well. This is about as much fun as it sounds like. For those not up on the internal practices of academia, schools with honor codes require students to sign a pledge… Continue reading When Honor Codes Go Bad

From an all-campus email this morning: A non-specific bomb threat was discovered overnight in [Building]. A note was discovered at 4:16 a.m. Following our emergency response plan, the Schenectady Police were immediately notified. A sweep of the building was conducted by the Schenectady Police, State Police and the Sheriff’s Department and it was determined there… Continue reading People Are Scum

The NCUR meeting and associated activities (including a minor little adventure into San Francisco) have kept me really busy over the last few days. We’re headed out early this afternoon, which means that we finally have a morning without any obligations. And, of course, there’s a cold, steady rain falling after two days of spectacularly… Continue reading Conference Report

Inside Higher Ed today offers a column by Daniel Chambliss of Hamilton College, taking issue with the Spellings commission report on higher education, and its analogies comparinf education to manufacturing: By the conclusion of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings’ recently-convened Test of Leadership Summit on Higher Education, I finally understood why her proposals are so… Continue reading Analogies Are Like a Thing That Can’t be Stretched Too Far

Eugene Wallingford talks about a great idea for a conference session: At SIGCSE a couple of weeks ago, I attended an interesting pair of complementary panel sessions. I wrote about one, Ten Things I Wish They Would Have Told Me…, in near-real time. Its complement was a panel called “It Seemed Like a Good Idea… Continue reading It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

The Dean Dad takes up a critical and shamefully neglected question about the academy: Which superhero would make the best dean at a community college and why? It’s not really my genre, but there are some good suggestions, including Batman (“His whimsical dilettante cover would make him non-threatening to members of the establishment but his… Continue reading Superheroes of Academia

In addition to the argument that labs are pedagogically bad, which I don’t buy, Steve Gimbel offers some more reasons to get rid of lab classes on sort of procedural grounds. There are a bunch of interrealted things here, but the argument boils down to two main points: Labs are very time-consuming, and students would… Continue reading Labs and Naivete