The ha’penny competency
I have a bridge to sell, quite cheap. All it will cost you is the following: One halfpenny (British, before metric conversion) Three drachmas One lira Three euros One franc (French) Four thalers (the coin, not the economist) One escudo One ekwele Ten qirans Five kroons One hundred C.S.A. dollars (paper bills only) When I […]
Past practice and other arcane collective-bargaining matters
Now that the spring semester is over, it’s time for me to catch up on a bunch of reading. In the current-higher-ed-commentary genre, I just finished Matt Reed’s Confessions of a Community College Administrator, and am looking forward to Jeff Selingo’s College (Un)bound, which came out this week. I thoroughly enjoyed Reed’s book, though I […]
Semester debriefing
We’re at the end of the semester here at USF, and this is a short debriefing of the semester. My particular form of craziness this semester was teaching three courses while serving as department chair. Technically, I was teaching four sections of our undergraduate Schools and Society course, but two of them met in the […]
The quadruple face-palm and academic freedom
Sports Reporter #1: Here comes Florida Atlantic associate professor Jim Tracy, just off his triple face-palm asserting a conspiracy over the Sandy Hook shootings. Sports Reporter #2: Let’s see what he does here. Tracy is relatively new to high visibility academic nuttery, at least at this level of competition. #1: Tracy looks at the timekeeper, […]
Paper deadlines and grace periods
For some years now, I have been giving undergraduate students a 24-hour “grace period” after the formal deadline for papers. If a student is trying to upload a paper five minutes before a deadline and the student loses her internet connection, I don’t need the hassle of making a decision on where to give extensions, […]