Subscribe……but to jump into the fray about the prez’s speech to schools on Tuesday: all I can say to those who oppose the concept of this speech and the optional lesson plan is “No Child Left Behind”, anyone?
Anvil or Hammer
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I found this completely by surprise in the NYTimes, a few minutes ago. For all the crappy op-ed pieces that appear (I’m glaring at you–Dowd, Douthat, and Krugman as of late), this one is quite good:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/opinion/09barber.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
Some of this anyone who is familiar with plant diseases already knows, but it’s a nice surprise for the Times.
Go, Drake!
Despite my “meh/this was really more difficult than it needed to be” experience in the music department, I have to say that Drake did earn its respect from me as an institution in several aspects. When bad communication and management is a precedent, the student body of a college or university can tell–and Drake by and large seemed free from such side-effects in the student body population.
Some of the comments I’ve read on the returned exit surveys gathered from students here attest that their experiences as students differed greatly from my undergrad and master’s degree experiences. So I am pleased to announce that once again, anecdotal information has arisen that supports the notion that not all colleges and unis are managed the same way (this is not news to you as reader or to me, but it apparently is to various colleagues of mine). The Chronicles of Higher Ed published results from the latest employee-satisfaction survey, and Drake did extremely well in several categories. Yes, there are always caveats in employee-satisfaction surveys. But I have to say that the perception of the school from outsiders matches more closely what the insiders seem to believe and say. Here are the categories where it received an “honorable mention” among universities of its size. The groupings of universities were kept to 10 universities within one of three size categories:
Healthy Faculty-Admin Relationships; Collaborative Governance; Confidence in Senior Leadership; Internal Communications; Tenure Clarity and Process; Health Insurance; Tuition Reimbursement; Housing-Assistance Programs
The reason that the first four categories mentioned are important is that it implies solidarity and comfort with processes among admin and faculty. While some faculty and staff may consider this sort of environment confining, it can help foster a bit more freedom to tackle academic issues at hand if there is a dearth of in-fighting. This allows for more emphasis to be placed on academic programming, students, research, and field work. It also implies a certain amount of central administrative control that faculty are comfortable with, which is pretty difficult to achieve. And having coherent, cohesive, functional central control is vital to an academic institution. If foundational philosophies and practices aren’t functional, nothing else can be built and maintained. In regard to my current employer that confuses “entitlement management” with “coherent, cohesive, functional central control”, we’ve got a long way to go, baby………
The following link is to the official honor roll itself, as well as the specific categories that I culled Drake from.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i41/great_colleges_full_list.htm
……am I a bad person for not feeling bad that Michael Jackson is dead? I don’t feel any gravity with his death. None. It’s like a tree that fell in the forest that everyone keeps bringing to my attention when I turn the TV on, so I”m taking the dog for her nightly walk, early.
I am so trying hard not to be snarky, since he had children, but I had the feeling that he would never go through with his concerts this summer in London–he always found ways to get out of performing for the past 10 years. It’s sad that he was always such a messed up person who was very talented early in his life. Farrah Fawcett can’t even get any respect that she deserves today, after the poster boy for pop culture over the past 40 years kicks off…..which is what doing two-a-day rehearsals plus working out with Lou Ferrigno will do to you. It’s a little tough on the ticker for anyone at the age of 50.
Barry and Reggie were taking a walk outside the condo last night, and were trying to attract Bern’s attention–hence the being distracted while on the phone (sorry!). Barry and Reggie are two parts of a trio (with Jean) who split their residence between Maryland and Florida during the year. All three of them seem to love their time in Florida, and hate coming back to Maryland–I don’t really know why they don’t put the Maryland condo on the market and live in Florida ful-time. Reggie (short for Regina) is a maltese who has increasingly grown out of her shyness over the past three years, and enjoys being approached by Bern and playing with her a bit. I let Bern off her leash last night to play with Reggie, and get attention from Barry.
The good news about work: other than a few transcript errors that need to be fixed (don’t get me started, but a few people who run certain reports to place notes on transcripts do NOT double-check their work, and take their own sweet time in fixing the errors that they created that negatively affect GPA and credit totals), spring diplomas are all printed and will go in the mail on July 6. The timing is due only to the fact of where the 4th holiday falls on the calendar, since many people are taking off for a long holiday and I don’t want a diploma to sit unattended at anyone’s house July 2-6 during that long weekend. I have July 3 off, and am not sure whether Mike does or does not. The odd news about work: the ‘everyone-has-to-know-everything-about-how-my-life-is’ people at work have been out in full force this week. It occasionally pops up, where i (and others) learn about the marital skirmishes in the office, usually over benign things like thermostat settings, how the dishwasher is loaded (or not), phonecalls from retired significant others at the grocery store to their spouses who are still working, “tweaking” of backs (not referring to significant injuries), the odd “don’t you feel that 2-3 month breaks should be allowed for couples to take without penalty?” “the real housewives of new jersey is fascinating” ”i really think that person X on america’s next top model should win” out-loud musings that really exist beyond my boundaries of workplace comfort. The ‘real housewives of new jersey’ isn’t really inappropriate for work conversation, but it definitely treads in the realm of “bad taste”. Which isn’t a crime 
I know that I’m not alone in this sort of thing, and I do wish for the best for my coworkers without regaling them with stories about how Bern kept hopping on the bed uninvited last night, and decided to stalk/pounce on an unkown/imaginary organism that crept past her and under the chest last night. Because I know that they’re deeply interested in hearing about our dog’s occasionally irrational sleeping habits.
One of my favorite shows is “Renovation Realities” on diy and occasionally hgtv. A new episode was on this morning about a couple by the last name of Fingers who are renovating their bathroom. The wife is extremely industrious and isn’t doing a bad job at all, but the husband…….does just about everything that you don’t want to do if you wish to keep your marriage intact: goes to the office intermittently throughout project; speaks for his wife, confusing her extreme anger toward him with “exhaustion” for not putting down his work phone, his laziness, whininess, and wrecking parts of her actually competent work; makes her take him to the ER for having a strained shoulder (well, no shit you’re going to probably wind up sore if you rip out the entire shower floor out yourself); turns off his neighbor’s water instead of his own house’s water; husband knocks the work of a friend who comes over who actually DOES know what he’s doing and repairs the drainage piping that was wrecked by the shower removal; and generally belittles everything around him while he delicately makes his “executive decisions” (his actual wording).
All of the above makes me very happy to be married to Mike.
Anywho, the past week and current weekend have been pretty calm. Mike had class only two days this past week due to previous professor commitments, plus he was able to work from home yesterday and got quite a bit accomplished. The dog got her yearly checkup at the vet, and I was poked in the eyes on Thursday at the eye doctor. We went to Wegman’s last night, and have started a Friday routine of getting a Wegman’s pizza made while we finish our grocery shopping. We’re pretty pleased with the pizza results, although we walked away with someone else’s pizza last night and didn’t realize it until we opened the box: pepperoni, mushrooms, black olives, and sausage, whereas we only ordered pepperoni and mushroom. It was very trashy and very good, but somewhere, someone else probably opened their pizza box and went “what’s this???”. Bern snagged some bits of sausage, but was even happier after we returned from a brief mall trip yesterday to price kitchen knives and returned with a chopping knife and chocolate. She obviously didn’t score any chocolate, but was happy to try.
If you are living under a rock and haven’t watched this, do. It. Now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY
Don’t care about the audience. Don’t care about the temporary “cynicism wiped away” from the judging panel. For every twenty thousand Hyacinth Buckets with theatrical talents, there is a Susan.
I avoid talking about/hearing too much about/giving more attention to the U.S. economy than it is worth, mostly because I have huge disagreements with financial media priorities. Although I am not always in agreement with Paul Krugman, he wrote probably the best summation/brief economic history and conclusion that I’ve seen yet (points for succinctness, too–Nouriel Roubini will drone on and on to get to an accurate point):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/opinion/27krugman.html
If you are not able to access the op-ed above, please let me know and I will email the link if you are interested.
Watchmen: The only comprehensible, watchable portions were the sections where Neil Gaiman obviously supplied the storyline content to Moore (Dr. Manhattan, Rorshach), as Moore’s work reeks of “copycat”.
Mike crawled out of bed at his usual time this morning (5 a.m.), and there was virtually no snow on the ground–maybe an inch and a half, and that is a generous description. Bern went on her morning walk, and I got an automated text message to my phone from school that we weren’t opening until 11 a.m. Mike left for work at his normal time, with virtually no snow.
I crawl out of bed this morning at 7, and was also non-plussed by our overnight “snowstorm”. The snow finally picked up around 7:30 this morning, and we now have maybe 4 inches on the ground. It’s really not much, but I called Fran to see if she would be offended if I took a personal day today. And if I have to choose where I’m going to blow a day, I’d rather do it at home. Fran was absolutely OK with it, and was a bit baffled by the snow forecasting, too, since everyone was under the impression that today would be awful. She and Frank were going about thier usual routine this morning, too, when there was no snow, and suddenly very steady snow with a lot of wind.
All in all, we *might* wind up with 5 or 6 inches total, which isn’t huge. I entered an “out of office” message on my work email account, and will probably take care of emails again later this afternoon. I can tell that all the public school teachers either have the day off–or were required to report to work anyway and have abundant free time–because virtually all of my email this morning came from students in the College of Ed wanting to know about commencement, degree-conferral timelines, certification requirements, etc.