These unprecedented times have called me to give extra care and attention to how I carry out my leadership responsibilities to benefit the students, staff members and faculty members at our university. In approaching the divisional dean position, I recognized pre-emptively that my reflections and lessons learned during my first year might serve as a helpful resource for other people who are considering a leadership position in higher education.
Read MoreEven though many colleges and universities are making changes to career service centers in this time, I wanted to use this space to discuss the privileges I had participating in a job search and ask hiring committees to make changes to traditional hiring practices to move toward a more equitable model.
Read MoreImagine you're a college student trying to network for a first job or an internship when you don't know a single person in the field you're interested in, or even that "Networking" is a thing that other students regularly do to land an interview or learn about a career.
Read MoreThe Georgetown study finds that the return on a liberal arts education is not typically immediate - at 10 years, the median return is $62,000 - but over the decades of a career, it is solid.
Read MoreDirty Trick No. 1: "Accidentally" make a colleague look bad. Dirty Trick No. 2: Push a target off a "glass cliff." Dirty Trick No. 3: Go silent. Dirty Trick No. 4: Sow seeds of doubt. Dirty Trick No. 5: Slow things down.
Read MoreClassrooms should be places where students can engage in candid, spontaneous discussion on complex topics, even when doing so could involve saying things that might be considered innocuous today but offensive by the social-media mobs of the 2040s.
Read MoreThe wealth premium has collapsed precipitously over the past 50 years.
Read MoreAt least once a semester, I have a conversation that goes something like this: a colleague looks at her students' essays and moans, "They just can't write." When I ask how much class time she spends talking about student writing, I'm told quite sharply that "There is way too much material to cover to spend time on that, so I just give them a handout. I mean, aren't they supposed to learn this stuff in first-year comp?".
Read MoreA couple months ago, my 17-year-old daughter's guidance counselor called her into his office to ask pretty much the only question that adults ask high school seniors: "What colleges are you applying to?" When Ella tossed off a handful of universities, he said, "Have you thought about going to art school?".
Read MoreThe dream of some administrators is a university where every student is a model student, adhering to disciplined patterns of behavior that are intimately quantified, surveilled and analyzed.
Read MoreIn 1990, researchers Peter Salovey and John Mayer coined the phrase emotional intelligence, to mean "The ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions." Since then, emotional intelligence research has linked this skill to success both in school and beyond graduation.
Read MoreThe real question is: Why aren't we reporting more of the cases that we do detect? If you've taught in higher education, you no doubt have discovered plagiarism on a written assignment or cheating on an exam.
Read MoreIn the hope that they might help you think about news you hear and buildings you see, here are a few of the lessons that campus buildings have taught me over the years. American college campuses are full of memorable buildings - Jefferson's Rotunda at the U. of Virginia, Charles Z. Klauder's Heinz Chapel at the U. of Pittsburgh, Eero Saarinen's Ingalls Rink at Yale U. You could spend a month listing them and still miss many favorites.
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