October, 2010 // Posts published in October, 2010
Political Wings
It’s fairly well known that George Mason harbors several groups of relatively conservative (politically conservative) faculty, including several devoted to free market principles. This is hardly unique among American universities, though the fact that it comes in for some remark is interesting, suggesting a perception among some liberals that proper universities should be uniformly in ...
Regulation Nation
We’ve got an interesting problem, and not an easy one. Numerous faculty and department chairs believe that we, as a University, have become over-regulated. They are certainly correct that rules have proliferated, and also that they emanate from a variety of offices (business affairs, safety, assessment, equity, ITU, etc) that do not really talk with ...
Everybody Speaks English
The word is that the administration of SUNY Albany has essentially closed all modern language programs except Spanish and (after current students finish up) fired the faculty. The other programs were French, Russian, and Italian. It’s already been clear, in school districts as well as some colleges, that cutting global education, including languages, is a ...
How Many Students?
We’ve just set up a group to ponder, over the next couple of months, how big Mason should get over the next few years, taking into account budget, new program possibilities, demography and so on. The question is prompted by several factors: we’ve overshot enrollment targets for the past couple of years (though not much ...
Recent Posts
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Changing the World
This is an adaptation of some brief graduation remarks I recently offered,...
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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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