Monthly Archives: December 2009

The year that was at EMUTalk.org

Posted on December 31, 2009 by | Leave a comment

I just posted something kind of like this on my own blog, so I thought I’d do the same here, a sort of “greatest hits” of posts from 2009– at least the most popular based on the number of comments and/or posts I liked and/or thought were important:

The post that received the most comments this year was the one about the student who was supposedly forced to endorse gayness, but I think the biggest news of the year was actually about the government relations search, which is a “developing story,” as the saying goes.

Anyway, Happy New Year!

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Posted in EMUtalk.org News

Remainders of the term

Posted on December 18, 2009 by | 4 Comments

This may very well be my last post here of the year. The holi-daze is upon us, and sitedad will be traveling to see various relatives, as per the custom. I won’t have a computer for much of my time out of town (though I will have my iPhone, which does allow me to approve comments to emutalk.org and do minor edits/changes). So I thought I’d go ahead and have a bit of a “miscellaneous stuff” post to round out the fall term and 2009.

  • Simon Fraser University use “bait” laptops to combat theft on campus. I thought this was interesting since EMU has traditionally had a bit of a theft problem. This might not be a bad strategy.
  • Showdown in Pittsburgh on Tuition Tax Idea. I had posted about this here recently; apparently, this tax is being voted on again. I am sure that lots of underfunded college towns are keeping an eye on this– places like Ypsilanti, I would think.
  • This post about Journalism and education reporting. I think this one is kind interesting because of this passage which specifically references our area:

    In 2005, The Ann Arbor News, for example, fielded two full-time reporters and one part-timer to cover 10 school districts, charter schools, the University of Michigan, and Eastern Michigan University. Now, with the newspaper replaced by an online-only news operation, one “digital journalist” watches over everything education-related. The county’s lowest-performing district gets almost no attention. Parents complain, but there’s little that David Jesse, the reporter, can do.

    I don’t know; I wasn’t all that keen the way the Ann Arbor News was reporting stuff about EMU when they were still in business, and I’m not sure what I think about what annarbor.com is reporting now. Speaking of which:

  • Eastern Michigan University considers initiatives to address poor retention rate. To quote from the article:

    The initiatives are:
    • Creating a required seminar course to better engage first-year students.
    • creating a comprehensive early-warning system to provide students with more timely academic feedback.
    • Creating a comprehensive guide for all instructors working with first-year students.
    • Creating integrated academic probation, financial aid and repeat course policies.

    EMUTalk.org regular Mark Higbee is quoted as speaking favorably about the first year seminars, too. Well, as time is limited at the end of the term, I’ll mention only two things. First, my first tenure-track job was at a university with a first year “seminar” program designed to improve retention and it just about bankrupted the institution. Second, notably absent from the Board of Regents list is the initiative “improve admissions standards.”

  • In my field (generally speaking), jobs are disappearing. Not exactly news, but perhaps an indication of the nature of the academic job market.
  • One last piece from the most recent Inside Higher Ed: an interview with Cary Nelson about his new book, No University is an Island, which looks like an interesting read, especially given the discussion here about things like tenure and academic freedom this semester.

Oh, and one last thing for the term here: regular EMUTalk.org readers will recall a discussion here about the misspelled signs outside Pray-Harrold’s non-smoking area. Here’s a link to the old sign:

Old PH smoking

Note the lack of an “r” in the Harrold part. I noticed the other day that these signs were gone. And then today I happened to be on campus and I saw this:

Now, this is clearly an improvement. However, as a regular EMUTalk.org who I happened to see as I walked out of the building pointed out to me, this new sign is not quite right because it is lacking a hyphen– that is, “Pray Harrold” instead of “Pray-Harrold.” I suppose this is true, but this is at least closer, if not close enough. Whether or not the non-smoking area was far enough away from air intact vents is another story (and I agree it isn’t– that is, the line might be far enough from the doors of the building but not from where air gets sucked into the building).

Anyway, that’s about all dare mention now. Once again, happy holiday season– whatever it is you celebrate– and enjoy your break.

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Posted in Administrator Life, Buildings and Grounds, EMUtalk.org News, Faculty Life, In the media..., Ypsilanti

Swing space plan for Pray-Harrold, Science Complex in development

Posted on December 16, 2009 by | 3 Comments

Former Ann Arbor News reporter/columnist and current EMU PR/writer guy Geoff Larcom sent me an email suggesting that I post a link to this Focus EMU article, “Swing space plan for Pray-Harrold, Science Complex in development.” It runs through the basic plans for what to do about space for offices, teaching, etc. for everyone who is impacted by the Mark-Jefferson ongoing project and the up-coming Pray-Harrold project.

And yes, the project is indeed upcoming: the projected start date now when faculty will be moved out of the building and construction will begin will be the end of the winter 2010 term. Looking back at the original Pray-Harrold pool, it looks like it’ll be between MathGeek and Peter.

Here’s a quote from the Larcom article that kind of runs-down the time-line:

If all goes as planned, the building would reopen for the fall semester of 2011. IT staff on the first floor would be affected only during the calendar year 2010, and would move back into the building once first-floor renovations are completed in August 2010. But the rest of those faculty and staff who use Pray-Harrold face more than a year of temporary, new classrooms and offices at another location on campus.

That fall 2011 date/prediction is definitely a variable. I am on this Pray-Harrold committee, and I think its fair to say that fall 2011 will only happen if there are no problems and everything goes just fantastic. And that seems unlikely.

I don’t know exactly where everyone in Pray-Harrold is going, but I do know that a lot of the faculty/staff offices will be in Hoyt Hall, which is one of the tower dorms. On the plus-side, there should be a fair amount of room and lots of bathrooms. Some of my colleagues were joking about the ability to shower at work. On the down-side, I don’t think Hoyt is air-conditioned and it’s way the hell over on the other side of campus and far far away from most of the classroom buildings.

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Posted in Administrator Life, Buildings and Grounds, In the media..., Pray-Harrold Renovation Pool, Staff Life, Student Life

To be called “Dr.” or not

Posted on December 16, 2009 by | 4 Comments

This morning, I skimmed through an article that came out back in February in The Los Angeles Times called “Hi, I’m Jill. Jill Biden. But please, call me Dr. Biden.” Basically, it’s about how Joe Biden’s wife, our nation’s “second lady,” has been teaching a couple of classes at Northern Virginia Community College since her husband took office and this makes her the first wife of a vice-president who has held a paying job while her husband is in office. Well, if you call teaching part-time at a community college a “paying job.”

Anyway, this was the paragraph that struck me:

In 2007, at 55, Jill Biden did earn a doctorate — in education, from the University of Delaware. Since then, in campaign news releases and now in White House announcements, she is “Dr. Jill Biden.” This strikes some people as perfectly appropriate and others as slightly pompous, a quality often ascribed to her voluble husband.

Slightly pompous? I don’t know, but I guess this falls into the “perfectly appropriate” to me.

Generally, I’m okay with students (and everyone else) calling me “Mr. Krause” or “Steve,” as long as they don’t call me “hey you.” But I have to say that if people aren’t going to call me Steve, especially while on the job, I prefer “Dr. Krause” or “Professor Krause.”

Anybody else out there have a title preference?

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Posted in College Fun, Faculty Life, In the media...

WCC rents some EMU parking spaces

Posted on December 13, 2009 by | 9 Comments

From the Washtenaw Voice comes this news, “WCC offers shuttle from Eastern to ease parking.” Here are the opening paragraphs:

In order to free up parking spots on campus for the Winter 2010 semester, Washtenaw Community College will rent the parking lot located across the street from Rynearson Stadium at Eastern Michigan University, at a cost of $100,050.

Just south of Huron River Drive on Hewitt, and a little over a mile from WCC, the lot will allow more than 1,000 drivers the opportunity to park quickly, and immediately be shuttled to the front of the WCC Student Center building.

Two free shuttle buses will transport students, faculty and staff from the Rynearson lot — and back — beginning at 6:45 a.m. until 6:15 p.m., Monday through Thursday, beginning Jan. 11. The college is working with a number of vendors to possibly have “beverages, coffee and hot drinks” available to participants, according to Vice President of Administration and Finance Steven Hardy.

I don’t have a lot to do with WCC, so I guess this is kind of a naive question: is parking there really that bad?

And I also don’t know how much it typically costs to rent a large parking lot, but $100K? Really? For space that EMU really wouldn’t be using otherwise?

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Posted in In the media..., Parking, Washtenaw Community College

Dueling budget analyses

Posted on December 11, 2009 by | 5 Comments

In the ongoing saga of the presence or absence of a budget surplus (see this and this), EMU-AAUP’s Howard Bunsis offers this analysis of the financial condition at EMU in response to this “Q&A” (sorta) with Chief Financial Officer John Lumm. I know, that’s a lot of reading to assign right before finals week, so I’ll try to paraphrase:

Back in October, EMU-AAUP president Susan Moeller sent around an email about how Lumm had reported EMU is running a $5.8 million surplus. I wrote a post that might be summed up as “oh really? I don’t get that.” Moeller emailed me and I posted her response in November, which can probably be summed up “yeah really, we have a surplus,” and she sent me the Lumm spreadsheet that indicated that surplus.

A couple days ago, Lumm responded to questions asked by the Echo (though I have to say the questions seem kinda soft to me, which makes me wonder if he responded to all the questions from the Echo folks) where Lumm more or less back-peddles from all that surplus talk (he calls it a “forecast” and says “I’m not sure I’d characterize it as a surplus of money,” etc.), and he suggests a lot of doom and gloom for FY 2010-11, up to a 20% cut from the state.

Shortly after Lumm’s statements, Bunsis posted his analysis of why Lumm is wrong, and, to Howard’s credit, he cites his sources and makes a pretty compelling argument that most of what Lumm said is either debatable or flat-out wrong.

Now, I don’t much about the budgets on this scale, but I do know two things. First, of course the administration is claiming poverty and the faculty union is claiming there’s plenty of cash to go around! So while I think that the faculty union generally has better and more reliable numbers, but clearly these people are arriving at different conclusions on EMU’s finances based on perspective.

Second, no one has a clue what sort of budget cut there is going to be next year from the State. I think that Lumm is being pretty alarmist in suggesting it might be as high as 20%, and I think that Bunsis is being very optimistic to suggest that we’ll get about the same from the state in 2010 that we got in 2009. But again, that’s just a logical guess– no one knows, and that’s part of what makes some of this budget talk fuzzy and speculative at best.

But hey, at least the conversation is happening. That’s a heck of a lot more transparent than it’s been in past years.

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Posted in Administrator Life, Budgets, EMU-AAUP

Wow, they really don’t want people to meet candidates for the CIO

Posted on December 11, 2009 by | Leave a comment

Walter Kraft just sent around the following:

Open forums will take place next week for the Chief Information Officer candidates. All forums will take place from 1:15 – 2 p.m. in 205 Welch Hall. The schedule is as follows:

Monday
Dewitt Latimer, Deputy CIO & Chief Technology Officer, Assistant Provost/Assistant Vice President, University of Notre Dame (Indiana)

Tuesday
Amy Brooks, Executive Director, U of M, Information Technology Central Services

Wednesday
Frank Monaco, Information Technology Consulting, Frank J. Monaco & Associates, LLC

Friday
Carl Powell, Vice President & CIO, Metropolitan State College of Denver (Denver, CO)

Now, I realize that the Chief Information Officer position is one of those things where maybe the need for a public forum for the candidates is pretty minimal. Still, it seems like holding these forums during finals week is pretty silly.

By the way, how come Connie Schaffer isn’t on this list?

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Posted in Administrator Life, EMU Technology

Finally, a smoking ban in public places coming

Posted on December 11, 2009 by | Leave a comment

I’m posting this here mainly because smoking has been a topic off and on over the years: I just heard on public radio this morning that a smoking ban finally passed the state legislature and will almost certainly be signed by the governor. There are some exceptions to the law– casinos, home offices, and (and this was a weird one) the cabs of freight trains.

I don’t think this will have a lot of impact on smoking (or not) on campus, but it will make going to bars a lot more pleasant for adamant non/former smokers like me.

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Posted in In the media..., State Government

Recent robbery/carjacking story near campus takes a turn

Posted on December 9, 2009 by | Leave a comment

I’ve kind of stayed away from posting every message that comes my way from DPS about some sort of crime near campus, but the most recent notable crime has taken a sort of odd turn. Just yesterday, DPS said there was an “abduction/armed robbery” at the corner of Ballard and West Cross (by one of those liquor stores down there, I presume). That story was that two EMU students drove behind the store and then were jumped by a guy with gun and told to go to a different ATM to withdraw money “from the passenger’s bank account.” The driver then dropped the gunman off. Here’s a link to the story at Annarbor.com

Well, today, DPS sent around another email saying that two EMU students have been arrested: one of the “reported victims,” and another who was involved in the “setup” of the abduction and robbery. Here’s the Annarbor.com link to that story. What it looks like to me is that the poor guy who was the passenger in the car was I believe what the criminal element refers to as “a mark.”

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Posted in In the media..., Security and Safety, Student Life

McKanders Leaving EMU in February

Posted on December 8, 2009 by | 19 Comments

An alert EMUTalk.org reader sent me an email complementing me on posting about the “hiring/nonhiring” for the EMU government position, but then pointing out that I had missed the fact that EMU has posted an ad for University General Counsel. “Does this mean that Ken McKanders is gone or being forced out?”

Well, this pointed me to a little internal research: according the news briefs section of Focus EMU, “McKanders (is) leaving EMU in Februrary.” The article doesn’t say why he’s leaving, but it suggests he will be “pursing other professional opportunities.” I don’t know if that means he’s being forced out, but you would think that if he was taking a better job that this would be mentioned.

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Posted in Administrator Life, EMU President, Staff Life