I’m sure I’m not the first of my kind who, in times of professional self-doubt, always reached for that snippet of dialogue between Sir Thomas More and Richard Rich from the film version of A Man for All Seasons. More, the career administrator, and Rich, the unscrupulous climber, engage in a frank exchange on the …
Tag: Higher education
Geist Story
My moratorium on “news” came to an end a few weeks ago with the December 2 issue of the Sunday New York Times. But when I pledged to unplug from all sources of cognitive dissonance, I must have known that my plan (which by my reckoning spanned a little under five months) would be more diet …
The Origin of Species
Lessons learned or relearned in the six months since I last wrote an entry for this blog: 1.) Some of us work on who we are, while neglecting what we are. Others work on what they are, while neglecting who they are. As a “Who” person, I can say that we are always evolving, without …
Transitions
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 …
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, …
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 