A Rare, Explicitly Political Post


Voting beats the alternative.  Do it, even if you have to use just one well-chosen finger.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alternatives to “Use It or Lose It”

Has anyone seen an intelligent and practical alternative to “use it or lose it” with budget lines? Folks who’ve worked with department budgets in large organizations know the drill.  There’s not enough money in the budget for unexpected contingencies, so they wind up squirreling money away in lines for, say, office supplies.  (Ideally, it would go into a “contingency” line, but most of those vanished several cuts ago.) The excess gets tapped as emergencies arise, which they do. Towards the end of the fiscal year, usually in the Spring, a memo goes out reminding everybody of the purchasing deadline for the fiscal year.  Savvy managers immediately rush to spend down the excess, because they know that any money left over at the end of the year will be cut from next year’s budget, never to be seen again.  The organization winds up with an odd mix of austerity and hoarding, as a central office practice that seems rational in a vacuum -- “if they didn’t spend it, they obv...
Read more

Career Navigation as a Gen Ed

This week I attended a meeting of another industry advisory board for one of our vocationally-oriented programs.  I’ve been attending those since my DeVry days, at four different colleges and in more programs than I can immediately remember.  In every single case, without exception, the employers have had the same request: “It’s the social skills, the interpersonal skills.” It’s fashionable now to blame smartphones, and sure enough, some mimed the phone in front of the face with thumbs flying madly.  But they said the same thing back in 2001, before smartphones were around. Phones in front of faces are symptoms, not causes. Some of it is probably a variation on “kids today…,” a complaint as old as generations.  Some of it probably reflects the uncertainty that many younger employees have as they take jobs they don’t love just because they need to take something.  Looking back at the way I carried myself at some summer-temp jobs at that age, I can’t say I was an...
Read more