May 4, 2012
-From Prof. Carol Swain’s twitter feed. Somebody thinks they’re important.

-From Prof. Carol Swain’s twitter feed. Somebody thinks they’re important.

May 4, 2012

Naomi Schaefer Riley must not read a lot of disserations

The Higher Education InterWeb (TM) has been kind of blowing up the last couple of days with responses to Naomi Schaeffer Riley’s Chronicle post on the legitimacy of ‘Black Studies’ as a discipline. Her evidence? She sites what appears to be three in process dissertations based on a reading…of their titles. Now listen, there’s a lot of hay to be made about the increasing specificity of disciplines and the problematic nature of narrowcasting Phd programs (and I say this as someone about to start a doctoral program in Higher Education). But if you’re going to make an argument about the legitimacy of a field of study maybe actually read the work you’re critiquing? Or even better- maybe actually read the significant works in the field. Dissertations on the whole are generally beginners work because the represent the start of a scholars career, and not say the culmination of year’s of extensive critical thought on a subject. The point of a dissertation is to show that you are prepared to transition from apprentice to scholar. It might actually be the worst indicator of the health of a field of study, if only because it is the most nascent ill formed work.

Schaefer Riley makes much of a dissertation focused on the experience of black midwives. When I initially read that all I could think was, “Jeez, my roommate (a birth coach in training) would LOVE that. And I can think of far too many people in my life who would read that ravenously.”

For a much more thoughtful critique, Inside Higher Ed has a guest post: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/college-ready-writing/guest-post-inferiority-blackness-subject

May 2, 2012 • 1 note • asqknowledgecenter
asqknowledgecenter: SOFT SKILLS FOR TQM In an article for ASQ Higher Education Brief, Everard van Kemenade, Ph.D., explores the soft skills that are needed for total quality management (TQM) and examines whether accreditation standards in higher education adequately require institutions to address these needs.

asqknowledgecenter:

SOFT SKILLS FOR TQM

In an article for ASQ Higher Education Brief, Everard van Kemenade, Ph.D., explores the soft skills that are needed for total quality management (TQM) and examines whether accreditation standards in higher education adequately require institutions to address these needs.

May 2, 2012 • 1 note • http

let me suggest a few things that I think that a president who is charged with bringing about change can and should do:

Presidents need to be clear from the outset of their discussions about who will be responsible for what in terms of decision-making. For example, if making a particular decision is clearly a presidential prerogative, the president should consult appropriately before making a decision but should also make it clear to the campus from the outset that the decision will be his or hers to make. On the other hand, if a decision will be in the purview of others, whether the board or the faculty, the president should also from the outset be clear about that.
Perhaps most critically, both new and experienced presidents need to recognize that to be successful change agents, they need to make it clear how the changes they are initiating will benefit their institution and especially their students. In so doing, even as they may not win universal support for their ideas, they will have at least achieved understanding. Their colleagues are also apt to appreciate their candor.
Presidents simultaneously need to engage their colleagues in brainstorming about matters of importance to the college and university and then need to invite and take into account their honest reactions to the president’s ideas as well as to take seriously any proposed alternative actions.
Presidents inevitably will benefit from finding someone from outside the institution whom they trust and who will keep their confidence — whether a friend who is a sitting or former president who will serve as a mentor or a consultant, someone who will raise questions about proposed actions, give honest advice and/or simply offer a confidential space in which the president can explore ideas. This confidante, however, should become familiar with the campus and if possible get to know a bit its key players so that they are not advising president without a good understanding of institutional context.
Presidents need to understand and acknowledge the good work that goes on in their institutions (and indeed, no matter the institution, there will be a good deal of good work taking place).
Presidents need to establish priorities and then find the resources to achieve the most important of these priorities. In other words, they need to do more than talk about the future; they need to make good things happen.

From Susan Reseneck Pierce’s essay on how college presidents succeed. Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2012/05/02/essay-how-presidents-succeed-or-fail-promoting-change#ixzz1tk6Jt340
Inside Higher Ed
May 2, 2012

Harvard, MIT, and EDUx: Learning On and Off Site

I downloaded the Khan Academy app (and itunes U) a couple of weeks ago. There are some statistics refresher courses on both that I intend to do before I start my doctoral program in the fall, but I haven’t actually tried to learn anything yet. I was doing Code Academy’s “Code Year” program- for a little while anyway. All of which to say is that my understanding of distance learning is pretty limited.

You may have seen today that Harvard and MIT launched a joint venture called EDUx which from the description seems like a web platform for folks to upload their curriculum. Right now it’s just MIT and Harvard courses (and from a cursory look at least through itunes MIT courses are already abundant), although there’s the expectations that other universities will start to collaborate. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, where I will be in the fall, is joining a similar program through CourseSea (or something to that effect).

As a practitioner of higher education this presents a lot of questions. At Vanderbilt we are in the process of launching a new co-curricular platform through Campus Labs’ Student Link software. Adoption has been largely driven by student organization registration, and most of the functionality is geared towards increasing student participation (and tracking student engagement) in out of the classroom experiences. The long term expectation is that this will produce a co-curricular portfolio for students to share with potential employers, graduate schools, and fellowships. Its too early in the product cycle to make any guesses about how our students will really use the tools at their disposal (I have a better sense of how a practitioner might, but a lot of that is driven by the amount of time you’re willing to dedicate to adapting the software to your purposes).

In the EDUx case, rather than building a more integrated campus culture as in the intention with the student link project, the intended outcome here seems to be to democratize access to courses that were previously available to those enrolled tuition paying students. The experience is far from the same, but it may prove to have a disrupting effect on how students learn on campus. I’m ex

May 1, 2012 • 5 notes • berfrois
The Dismantling of a University Culture- University College Dublin’s new management berfrois: University College Dublin was a semidemocratised institution until about 10 years ago. Since then its representative structures have been dismantled. Furthermore, despite much chat about synergies, the channels by which academic staffers normally communicated with each other were closed down. There is no hard-copy phone book in the modern UCD, and it is possibly the only major university in the English-speaking world not to have such a phone book. The annual President’s Report, a large book that routinely reported the publications and other professional activities of the staff, ceased to be issued. The annual staff listings, which told you who worked where and when, also ceased to appear. The faculties, with their internal representative structures and freedom of speech, were closed down and replaced with Soviet-style top-down “councils” that passively received and passed on instructions from on high. Attendance levels at these local kangaroo parliaments were and are very low. Departments were merged according to an ideological doctrine that claimed bigger was better. An extraordinary managerial rhetoric evolved, and in a few years a tide of nonsense on stilts pervaded the university. An indescribable grey philistinism increasingly characterised the public culture of the college, and a hideous management-speak drowned out coherent communication. Within a few years, nonacademic staff in UCD far outnumbered academic staff. Prof Gerard Casey of UCD’s school of philosophy put it marvellously in 2006: “At present there are those who ask: ‘Why cant the university be more like business?’ (Oddly enough not many ask the equally pertinent question why businesses can’t be more like universities!)” In this atmosphere it should come as no surprise that the many and varied schemes that have been proposed for the rejuvenation of business eventually trickle down to the academy. Among the army of initialisms that are known to the cognoscenti, we can find PPBS, MBO, ZBB, TQM/CQI and BPR, which stand, respectively, for planning programming budgeting system, management by objectives, zero-base budgeting, total quality management/continuous quality improvement, and business process re-engineering. Two additional schemes whose names have not been turned into initialisms are strategic planning and benchmarking. The hulks of such schemes litter the shorelines of academia. “The bleak future of the Irish university”, Tom Garvin, The Irish Times

The Dismantling of a University Culture- University College Dublin’s new management

berfrois:

University College Dublin was a semidemocratised institution until about 10 years ago. Since then its representative structures have been dismantled. Furthermore, despite much chat about synergies, the channels by which academic staffers normally communicated with each other were closed down. There is no hard-copy phone book in the modern UCD, and it is possibly the only major university in the English-speaking world not to have such a phone book.

The annual President’s Report, a large book that routinely reported the publications and other professional activities of the staff, ceased to be issued. The annual staff listings, which told you who worked where and when, also ceased to appear. The faculties, with their internal representative structures and freedom of speech, were closed down and replaced with Soviet-style top-down “councils” that passively received and passed on instructions from on high. Attendance levels at these local kangaroo parliaments were and are very low. Departments were merged according to an ideological doctrine that claimed bigger was better.

An extraordinary managerial rhetoric evolved, and in a few years a tide of nonsense on stilts pervaded the university. An indescribable grey philistinism increasingly characterised the public culture of the college, and a hideous management-speak drowned out coherent communication. Within a few years, nonacademic staff in UCD far outnumbered academic staff.

Prof Gerard Casey of UCD’s school of philosophy put it marvellously in 2006: “At present there are those who ask: ‘Why cant the university be more like business?’ (Oddly enough not many ask the equally pertinent question why businesses can’t be more like universities!)”

In this atmosphere it should come as no surprise that the many and varied schemes that have been proposed for the rejuvenation of business eventually trickle down to the academy. Among the army of initialisms that are known to the cognoscenti, we can find PPBS, MBO, ZBB, TQM/CQI and BPR, which stand, respectively, for planning programming budgeting system, management by objectives, zero-base budgeting, total quality management/continuous quality improvement, and business process re-engineering. Two additional schemes whose names have not been turned into initialisms are strategic planning and benchmarking. The hulks of such schemes litter the shorelines of academia.

“The bleak future of the Irish university”, Tom Garvin, The Irish Times

May 1, 2012 • 1 note • http

Let’s all pay for our student load money with the money we would pay for pap smears (or at least the half of us who get pap smears):

Yesterday (Friday the 27th), the House voted on a hastily introduced bill: “Interest Rate Reduction Act”, H.R. 4628, which would extend the Stafford loan interest rate reduction for one year. The bill passed, 215-195. Only 30 Republicans voted against the measure. They were joined in their opposition by a large majority of House Democrats. Why did they oppose the bill? The legislation would pay for the extension by shutting down the Prevention and Public Health Fund, a key tool for maintaining women’s health, created by the 2010 health-care law. Now the president will likely veto the bill, and student loans will become a political football between now and July 1.

“Romney Takes a Turn on Student Loans” The Chronicle (via stillinmediasres)

(via stillinmediasres)

May 1, 2012 • 1 note • stillinmediasres

Has anyone ever tried to do a people's atlas on campus?

May 1, 2012 • 1 note • http

Student Activism, Social Media, and the Egyptian Revolution

(via stillinmediasres)

April 27, 2012 • 1 note

Rethinking Education