In the 2016 election, Montanans voted nearly 2-to-1 for Donald J. Trump. In Flathead County, the proportion was even greater, with 64 percent of the vote going to DJT. (These figures come from the New York Times interactive electoral map.) I can only speculate on how the majority of locals feel about the Flathead Beacon’s …
A Fan’s Notes
By nature, educators can’t help giving away information; administrators, by nature, have a talent for withholding it. (What qualifies as information, and how it is valued, is beyond the scope of this aphorism.) It turns out that the namesake of Plato’s Academy, the minor Greek hero Akademos, was celebrated for telling Castor and Pollux where …
Organization Man
August marked the first anniversary of my university job search. I could not have known that it would remain a search, though I do not think that a person can earn an advanced degree in higher ed without being inoculated with a healthy skepticism about the field, or about institutions themselves. On the other hand, …
Ivory Power
Picked up a free Wall Street Journal again. Learned that since the 2015 student uprising, the University of Missouri has been hemorrhaging students and sports fans, with layoffs and forced retirements to follow. I am asked to believe that this no mere correlation. Indeed, the headline is pretty straightforward: “Mizzou Pays a Price for Appeasing …
Discontents
I drove through Charlottesville, Virginia a couple of summers ago on my way back from New York. It was a serene afternoon, and I had not set foot on Jefferson’s campus in over 30 years. The Rotunda was caged in scaffolding, unfortunately, but I enjoyed meandering around the semi-vacant grounds, peering into Poe’s old dorm …
Help Wanted
Touching down in Chicago for several hours after two weeks in the Russian hinterlands, my wife and I were finally able to access reliable internet and check our voice messages. Among my voicemails was a ten-day-old invitation to a phone interview for an international student advisor position at one of the bigger local HEIs. To …
Ending En Saga
As of today, Finnish university education will no longer be free for non-EU students. The long-dreaded regulation (actually passed by Finland’s parliament over 18 months ago) comes to at least €1,500 ($1,634) in yearly tuition for those pursuing undergraduate or Master’s degrees. Don’t get too excited by the low figure: according to Masters Portal, the …
Diversions
"I shall not need here mention swimming when he is of an age able to learn and has anyone to teach him. 'Tis that saves many a man's life: and the Romans thought it so necessary that they ranked it with letters; and it was the common phrase to mark one ill educated and good …
Young, Gifted, and Cleared By State
It took less than a week for the Gambian Robot Team to break the State Department’s blockade and get the students the visas they need to attend the FIRST Global Robotics Competition in Washington, D.C. I was probably not alone in initially assuming that the whole affair could be blamed on Trump. However, I was …
Old Schools
Reading Jude the Obscure and The Education of Henry Adams for the first time since college, I’ve struggled to reconstruct what it was that once captivated me about these books. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Henry Adams (1838-1918) were exact contemporaries, and the writing and/or publication of what amounted to the authors’ respective swan songs (in …
THE HIGHER EDITION 