Region // Browsing posts in Region
Changing Athletic Conferences
As many know, Mason has decided to leave the Colonial Athletic Association in favor of the Atlantic 10. We have been mulling this move off and on for a year. It was never an easy decision: the CAA had been good for us in many ways, and we will continue to value relationships with the ...
Super Sandy
We’re still assessing lessons learned from Sandy, and the process remains interesting particularly as it impinges on “the next time”. First, of course, we were very lucky, and my continued sympathies for colleagues in NY-NJ who face ongoing adjustments both on campus and at home. Second, Mason is pretty well organized now, a large team ...
Budgets and Tuitions
A recent visit from a legislative official—seemingly a nice, responsible guy and a friend of Mason—brought comments about his bafflement about how higher education costs keep soaring, tuitions keep rising, there must be a storehouse of waste and inefficiency. I was, frankly, nonplussed—not at the comments, which are now common enough, but at the source, ...
Commuters and Commuter Schools
Two preliminaries. First, the initial spur for this blog came from our new University president, who has a knack for asking timely questions. I hope I am usefully embellishing the thought. Second, this is an unabashed effort to have my institutional cake and eat it too, but I think our record warrants the combination; you ...
Mason’s Vision Series
We’re about to launch the new round of our now well-established Vision Series. I’ve written on this before, but a renewed note is appropriate. We conceived of the series now five years ago as an opportunity for faculty from all sorts of fields to present their work to a general audience. Our hope was that ...
Accreditation
American accreditation procedures are unusual, to say the least. Rather than federal government oversight—which we’re all supposed to say would be horrible, and indeed perhaps it would be—basic accreditation falls to regional associations, essentially governed by a mixture of federal rules, fears of possible federal rules, and membership stipulations. Membership is from the participating universities ...
Mason and the Region
To me, the most interesting thing to emerge from the University’s annual planning retreat last week was the reminder of our historical connection with Northern Virginia and the opportunity to renew and redefine this connection to mutual benefit. It’s pretty well known that regional leaders first sparked an interest in having a higher education institution ...
Recent Posts
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Good Things
Ends of semester are always a bit tense, particularly in the spring....
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When It's Time to Leave Academic Administration
What follows involves a delicate topic, probably insufficiently discussed because of its...
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Inclusiveness
As many of my readers know, we have a new strategic vision...
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