flynn056

As much as I enjoy technology, in-person conferences offer some upsides that webinars just don’t.   Reconnecting with old friends is always great.  Putting faces to names is helpful. But the best have to be the serendipitous hallway meetings.   One involved an impromptu hour-and-a-half nerdout with some folks from EAB and the CCRC.  I was innocently eating breakfast, as I am wont to do, when one sat down and started talking data.  Then another, and another, and another. Soon five of us were looking at line graphs on a laptop and debating the merits of various sorts of studies of student attrition.  I don’t usually nerd out over data with groups of five until at least lunchtime, but this was fun. A second involved some folks from a community college in Ohio who had read a piece I had posted last Fall about a “buy one, get one free” scholarship, in which good performance in the freshman year would be rewarded by a free sophomore year.  They’re actuall...

The AACC is really two organizations.  There’s the one on stage at the plenary sessions: self-assured, stately, sometimes a little stuffy.  And then there’s the one in the smaller meeting rooms: critical, restless, sometimes a little snarky.  The distance between the two is wider this year than I’ve ever seen it. -- The AACC does a lot of award presentations, which are what they are.  I’ll admit, though, that this year one of them affected me a little. It gave a posthumous award to Sueanne Roueche, honoring her diversity work.  Her husband, John Roueche, was on stage behind the podium while their son Jay gave a thank-you speech. Whether by accident or forethought, the giant screens captured John’s face as Jay spoke. As antiseptic as these ceremonies can be, that was a very human moment.  John tried to remain stoic, and mostly succeeded, but you could see the struggle as his son paid tribute to his late wife.  He maintained a dignified pose, but the e...

A note to my administrative colleagues at Southern Illinois University: We administrators are constantly portrayed as cartoonish villains, somewhere between Dr. Evil and Scrooge McDuck.  That image does real damage, as it undermines the trust we need to make positive progress. Putting out a call for faculty to work for free is not helpful.  It reinforces the stereotype at a level I honestly thought was a parody when I first read it. Drop it.  Drop it now, and apologize to everyone involved.  You have no idea the damage you’re doing, not just to faculty and students, but to your counterparts elsewhere.  Teaching is work, and work should be paid. Matt -- As if in confirmation… The end of the NY Times story on public employees sliding down from the middle class really says it all.  A teacher whose pay has been stuck for years finally gets a small raise. She asks her brother how he feels about it.  He responds that she deserves it, but he shouldn’t have...

It isn’t often that I get news over the phone that surprises me so much that I blurt out “wow!” so loudly that the rest of the office wants to know what happened. NEASC shot down Connecticut’s proposal to collapse twelve community colleges into one. In my neck of the woods, that’s earthquake-level news.   NEASC is the regional accreditor for the New England states.  In my time at Holyoke, I was in their territory; I even did a couple of site visits for them in Connecticut.   Connecticut’s plan, called Students First, was a system-level reorg with the overall purpose of saving money.  That’s important because Connecticut as a state is caught in a fiscal squeeze, and demographics aren’t going to save it.   My understanding of it is that Connecticut built its political economy largely on the proceeds from high-wage NYC workers who wanted to live in suburbs.  With millennials favoring NYC much more, and with corporate headquarters no longer favoring Connecticut...

In grad school and the first few years after, I was a pretty severe skeptic about academic conferences.  The major one in my academic field, the APSA, struck me as an inconveniently scheduled, anxiety-generating festival of nametag-gazing.  (In my defense, it was.) The smaller regional ones I attended were so small that they didn’t really feel like conferences; at one panel of the Northeast PSA at which I presented, the one audience member left early, so the panelists were left talking to each other.  It’s almost sweet in retrospect, but at the time, it just felt sad. I didn’t really see the positive purpose of conferences until I stumbled on the Undergraduate Education section of the APSA, which dealt with innovations in the classes I actually taught.  Suddenly I wasn’t a supplicant, hoping that some big name would somehow notice me; I was an active participant in a conversation that was actually about something. A few years after moving into administration, I dis...

Tennessee is blowing the curve for the rest of us. I say that with admitted envy. It’s expanding its best-in-the-country free community college program to include working adults with some college experience, but without degrees.  The idea is that it’s easier to increase the number of degree-holders in the workforce if you start with people who are already partway there, and who have shown the interest and aptitude for college-level work. The most heartening piece of the Tennessee Reconnect program, though, is here: “ Colleges were asked whether popular offices that oversee financial aid, veterans’ services and student support were open on weekends or past 5 p.m. on weekdays. They also were asked about food pantries on campus, available childcare or adult-specific orientation.” That’s just excellent.  To borrow a phrase from Michelle Asha Cooper, it’s about creating student-ready colleges. The tricky part, I suspect, will be reaching critical mass.  I hope the program arc...

Anya Kamenetz has a good piece at NPR about relatively traditional bachelor’s degree programs aimed at working adults.  The line that won me over was David Scobey’s observation about working adult students “self-authoring” new narratives of their own lives.  (He attributed the term to Marcia Baxter Magolda, with whose work I’m unfamiliar.) In the headlong rush towards short-term vocational training, it’s easy to sacrifice seemingly abstract goals.  But as Scobey notes throughout the interview, the skills that hold up well over time and across industries tend to be the more “abstract” ones.  Pure training grows obsolete quickly. And there are goals beyond money. The liberal arts are called that because they were originally understood as “the arts of liberty,” or the education required to take part in a self-governing society.  The kind of empowerment Scobey describes shouldn’t be the exclusive province of the wealthy. -- Susanna Williams tweeted out that “our ...

I don’t often do reruns, but for reasons I’d rather not elaborate, this seems like an especially good time to revisit this piece I wrote and posted in September of 2017.  I stand by it. My Recurring Nightmare I’ll admit to some raised eyebrows reading about the lecturer at NJIT who was recorded apparently praising Hitler in class.  He claims he was taken out of context. As someone who used to teach political philosophy, a scenario like this is my recurring nightmare. Among other things, I taught the Greatest Hits of the Western canon of political thought, or, as we called it, “From Plato to NATO.”  I assigned actual texts -- in translation, when necessary, but still -- and spent class time helping students decipher them. Some of it involved reading comprehension, but much of it involved trying to get the overall perspective of each thinker.  A middle-class American 18 year old may not find, say, Locke’s Second Treatise terribly relatable at first blush, so part of ...