Category Archives: Uncategorized

Last chance on EMUTalk NCAA B-ball tourneys!

Posted on March 14, 2012 by | 1 Comment

The deadline for the men’s pool is noon today, and the women’s pool soon. Go ahead and put your brackets into the mix; the less you know about basketball, the better!

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Posted in Uncategorized

Vacay midterm: faculty vs. administrators

Posted on July 20, 2011 by | 9 Comments

Minnnesota sunset
I’m writing from an unusually warm family vacation in Minnesota– that’s a picture of a beach area that I liked. Since I’m inside and being air-conditioned for a while, I thought I’d write a brief post on the sort of contrast of opinions I’ve heard very recently about what’s wrong with universities nowadays.

Shortly after arriving for this reunion of sorts, my father, who is fairly conservative and definitely not an academic, wanted to show me this editorial in the Des Moines Register, “Gartner says Iowa’s state universities need to change quickly.”. Basically, former regent member Michael Gartner is all over the place with the problems of the universities in Iowa, blaming it mostly on lazy and shared-governance seeking faculty, the places not being run enough like businesses, and (and I swear I’m not making this up) binge drinking by the students.

At almost the same time, an alert EMUTalk reader sent me a link to this CHE piece, “The Strategic Plan: Neither Strategy Nor Plan, but a Waste of Time,” which is from a book called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters by Benjamin Ginsberg. The headline is almost all you need to know about the Ginsberg piece, especially for those amongst us who have had to deal with some kind of program review paperwork mumbo-jumbo.

Anyway, the conservative point of view is that the problem is the faculty, and the liberal point of view is that the problem is the administration. I tend to agree with Ginseberg, though Gartner is not completely wrong, either. The troubling thing for me is that the Gartner view seems to have a lot more play with non-academic types like my family.

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Posted in Administrator Life, Board of Regents, EMU-AAUP, In the media..., Uncategorized

What’s the deal with email?

Posted on November 16, 2010 by | 3 Comments

Maybe it’s just me, but has EmuMail I mean Eaglemail been acting all wonky lately.  What’s up with that?

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Posted in Uncategorized

Pray-Harrold in Exile begins….

Posted on September 9, 2010 by | 9 Comments

The beginning of the school year is always hectic, and this year, I think it’s fair to say that the remodeling of Pray-Harrold (not to mention the ongoing work in Mark-Jefferson) makes it extra-crispy chaotic.  Thus the Pray-Harrold exile kicks in at full speed.

Believe it or not, I’m planning to do a scholarly presentation about all of this dislocation in late March/early April 2011, so my hope is that this post is the beginning of a series of reflections on all of this academic relocation that will help me plan my talk.  And I’m also hoping to use these kinds of posts to solicit some feedback and input from EMUTalk fans.

Anyway, after the “continued” part, a few observations I’ve had so far:

Continue reading →

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Posted in Uncategorized

Just testing something.

Posted on June 27, 2010 by | 1 Comment

Testy-test

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Posted in Uncategorized

Extensive story on three budget forums in FOCUS

Posted on April 7, 2010 by | Leave a comment

The latest edition of our weekly, online campus newspaper, FOCUS, contains a story on the three Academic Affairs budget forums that were held in Welch Hall last month. I hope you folks get time to read the piece, and others in this issue. http://www.emich.edu/focus_emu/040610/budgetforum.html

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Posted in Uncategorized

Reacting To The Past, with Prof. Higbee

Posted on March 25, 2010 by | 2 Comments

Folks, I hope you find time to take a look at this week’s FOCUS. It features a story on the “Reacting To The Past” teaching method, as practiced by Professor Mark Higbee here at Eastern. You will see why this story was great fun to report and how students become immersed in this method of teaching. Here is a link. http://www.emich.edu/focus_emu/032310/

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Posted in Uncategorized

I’m guessing there will be no Halle rave anytime soon

Posted on December 8, 2009 by | 1 Comment

Apparently, there was a “rave party” at the library at James Madison University on December 6. Here’s a link to a story about it on the blog OnwardState (which is actually a student run blog about stuff going on at Penn State), and here’s a link to some YouTube video of the event:

I have a good friend who teaches at JMU, so naturally, I will be sending her an email to ask for more details, if there are any.

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Posted in Uncategorized

While I was away….

Posted on November 29, 2009 by | 9 Comments

In the last six days, I am certain that I spent at least 25 hours in the car and most of it behind the wheel. A long but good family trip. Anyway, I’m a bit behind, but I came across a couple of things I thought I’d group together in one post to kick off the race to the end of the semester.

  • EMU Football finishes perfectly bad season. I don’t want to dwell too much on the emu’s perfectly wrong, 0-12 season, mainly because I’ve dumped enough on them already and I don’t want to kick ‘em when they’re down. But a sports savvy colleague of mine pointed out a problem that I hadn’t really thought about before. Sure, we should give Ron English at least one more year as head coach; but what exactly has this guy got to recruit on? “Hey, come play for me at EMU– we’re already at the bottom!”
    • “Gov. Jennifer Granholm: Without big change, massive higher education cuts on horizon.” One of the “fun facts” from the article: in 1960, state appropriations made up 77% of the budget at the University of Michigan; today, it’s 22%. And it’s likely to get worse, too. Speaking of which:
  • “Haves vs. Have-Nots at Public Universities,” from The New York Times. A lot of interesting points here, including the idea that maybe students from different income levels ought to pay different amounts of tuition at public universities.
  • “Faculty objects to changing UT’s tenure process,” from the Toledo Blade, though I saw a version of this story a couple weeks ago in Inside Higher Ed. Basically, the president at the University of Toledo wants to be able to interview faculty going up for tenure to help aid his decision, and the faculty union is not happy about it. I think this is one of those situations in which both the suits and the union are wrong. I mean, the union shouldn’t be freaking out about faculty talking to the president; rather, I think faculty ought to be happy that the president wants to be a part of the process. Conversely, if UT President Lloyd Jacobs thinks that a 30 minute interview is all he needs to make an informed judgment about the tenure worthiness of faculty member, well, he’s nuts. The Blade article quotes the president of the faculty union as saying “Dr. Jacobs is on record talking about how he’ll be able to judge people on the basis of gestures, intonation, and other things.” That’s a little disturbing.

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Posted in College Fun, Uncategorized

Pray-Harrold No Smoking “pilot” zone

Posted on October 27, 2009 by | 6 Comments



This was new to me today (mainly because I have been working a lot at home lately): as this flyer taped to the window indicates, there’s a “Entrance Pilot” program at Pray-Harrold right now to enforce a no smoking zone entrance.

My pictures are not that great here for giving perspective, but the zone includes a sign by the trees kind of in the “square” of the southeast entrance area, and this red “line in the sand” (or paint on the pavement).


On the one hand, I applaud the effort.  But how come these same rules don’t appear to be in place at the northeast entrance of the building, the one that is nearest to the College of Education and far busier than this entrance?  I mean, having this southeast entrance a non-smoking zone and the northeast entrance a smoking zone is kind of like being in a restaurant and being sat right on the borderline between the smoking and non-smoking sections.  (Oh, and when is Michigan going to join radical states like North Carolina and ban smoking in restaurants and bars, anyway?)

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Posted in Buildings and Grounds, EMU Images, Uncategorized