I recently made a consulting visit to a respected university school of nursing where I found a useful research framework employed by the school and its faculty, a taxonomy of “transitions,” including not only health/illness transitions but also developmental (life stage), organizational, and situational (in the life or career of an individual). In this schema, [...]
Our local newspaper has announced the sudden (but not unexpected) news that the president of one of our two state universities in town (I’ll call it Stepping Stone State University) is leaving for another university presidency after seven years on the job.
We are fortunate to have two respected state universities in town: a historically black [...]
According to the results of a recently released survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, they don’t go to television and radio to find information in order to solve a problem (or only 16% do).
A substantial majority of respondents (58%) claimed the Internet as their source. Many of them are using public libraries [...]
Textbook expenses in higher education have come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, with the burden of managing costs being placed mostly on professors (as if we were responsible for textbooks’ costs).
Why are they so expensive? In part because publishers insist on coming out with new editions every three to five years, even in fields [...]
The recent annual Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting took up the theme, The Humanities at Work in the World.
For the uninitiated, the humanities are those fields of human labor, knowledge, and creativity that include languages and literatures, fine and performing arts, and history (if you don’t call history a social science).
The MLA scholars pondered two [...]
On the third day he arose at 6:00 (more than an hour before dawn) in order to arrive on time in the hotel conference room where the panel on which he was presenting a paper was to convene at 8:30. (He hates waking up in the dark.)
Unfortunately, the Hyatt Regency was designed either by a [...]
Jeopardy question: What does graduate school prepare you for?
I’ve just spent what is always the two most rewarding hours at the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting (now in day two): volunteering for the “Chats with an Editor” booth hosted by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). This annual service provides one-on-one counseling with [...]
I hate having to wake up in the dark, a recovered memory perhaps of the summer between high school and college when I had to wake up at 4:00 am to work in a sand pit loading sand dug from the alluvial plain of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, into dump trucks that hauled ass down [...]
Who else but thousands of scholars in language and literature would fly from around the world to a cold northern North American city between Christmas and New Year’s (as if American air travel were not bad enough) in order to confabulate, cruise, interview job supplicants . . . I mean “applicants,” be interviewed as job [...]
