Jul 20, 2019

The orgiastic pleasure of Trumpism

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The most troubling thing about Donald Trump is his supporters. They are numerous, consolidated, and show no signs of weakening their resolv...
1 comment:
Jun 10, 2019

The secret lives of proxies

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We need them, we get used to them, and they take on lives of their own. This is a pitch to always remember that a proxy measure is just a ...
Jun 3, 2019

Relation-Centered Education, a Call to action

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Critiques of test-based accountability abound; alternatives to it are few and far between. The demand for accountability is not an aberrati...
2 comments:
May 28, 2019

The optimism bias and starting a university from scratch

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Apparently, bad planning is in our genes. According to this Freakonomics show , we humans have an inherent optimism bias, and a related bia...
May 13, 2019

The third spiral, or Why education is so interesting to study

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Understanding education is key to understanding the story of our species. Like many of our animal cousins, we supplement the gifts received...
May 5, 2019

We are not that similar

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There was an interesting discussion about generational misunderstanding in my Russian part of Fb. A teacher considered why a certain histor...
1 comment:
Apr 22, 2019

The Third Kind of Intelligence

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A recent HBO documentary Future of Work shows how computers and humans are intelligent in different ways. For example the world-class ches...
Apr 8, 2019

How to tell a good journal from a bad one

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It is not a trivial task. Beall’s list was imperfect and it does not actively exist anymore. No universally accepted rating of scholarly j...
Apr 1, 2019

When is it time to quit?

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Some people believe one should never quit, and try until one succeeds. That is a very stupid belief, because it leads people to waste their...
Mar 23, 2019

The false starts and all that Zen

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A very common, but largely invisible part of my work is pursuing opportunities for the College that turn out to be dead ends. One recent ex...
2 comments:
Mar 11, 2019

Leaders as superstitious pigeons

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TED Radio Hour released a show on luck, fortune, and chance . One of the ideas  is that we routinely underestimate the influence of chance ...
Mar 4, 2019

Dealing with incommensurability after police shooting

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Congrats, you were not afraid of the word. Incommensurability is an old term meaning that two theories cannot be reconciled with each other...
Feb 25, 2019

Faking understanding

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I wish people would stop pleasing each other by pretending they understood something they really did not. After all, the party fooled now w...
Feb 7, 2019

Kill the Catalog

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Catalogs were the primitive foreshadows of websites before the websites. You would get a thick book with everything about a university in i...
1 comment:
Feb 4, 2019

Limits to transparency

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When I first turned to the Dark Side, and became an administrator, I thought I would be different, would be transparent. I’ve got nothing t...
Jan 28, 2019

Innovation and the ego

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In education, both K-12 and higher, too many innovations are driven by leaders’ egos, and not by the needs of their respective organization...
1 comment:
Jan 22, 2019

What happens in two years

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It has been two years since I came to Sacramento. An experienced nomad, I can tell you what normally happens at about two years mark. The h...
Jan 14, 2019

The Sidorkin’s Law: Why is institutional data always wrong?

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Institutional data has come a long way. I still remember the hard copies of IR annual books; they were the only way to get any kind of stat...
Jan 7, 2019

The lecture trap

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Sometimes university instructors, especially the novices, get into the lecture trap. They somehow assume that lecturing is the “real” teach...
1 comment:
Dec 17, 2018

How do you rest?

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The last night’s rain unlocked a whole host of smells on campus. Fallen leaves brew slowly, giving off the fine drug my brain craves. Anoth...
Dec 10, 2018

Practical polyphony

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A friend of mine Dmitry Grigoriev had passed away a year ago, from a brain cancer. He was 43. Next week, a group of his friends and colleag...
1 comment:
Nov 30, 2018

The unrealistic expectations of perfection

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If you want to be constantly disappointed, expect perfection from people, or from yourself. Human beings, on average are messy, slow, prone...
Nov 26, 2018

Campus closures to come

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Northern and coastal universities have adopted to an occasional snowstorm or hurricane closures. Sac State never closes, but it did just fi...
Nov 5, 2018

University is a kibbutz

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I like when people come to me with an idea or a solution to a problem: here is what’s wrong and here is what we should do. I like it less w...
1 comment:
Oct 29, 2018

Supplying hope for the evil

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It is hard to blame Trump for the synagogue shooting itself, but he is rightfully blamed for contributing to the atmosphere of hate. How di...
Oct 22, 2018

Making an effort to trust

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In his famous 1993 book Making democracy work, Robert Putnam found that a democratic society needs a certain level of trust. American polit...
Oct 15, 2018

California’s misguided regulations of higher education

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Here is where California’s legislators got it wrong. The education code prohibits “supplanting” state-funded courses with self-funded cont...
Oct 8, 2018

Fall in the Central Valley

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In these parts, autumn is timid and gradual. For me, it also hides within a distinct feeling of spring. In the Central Valley, summer is...
1 comment:
Oct 1, 2018

Nimble, humble, and simple: Strategic planning and the questioned wisdom of KPI

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Conventional wisdom encourages one to create specific measurable outcomes or benchmarks in any strategic plan. For example, we are trying t...
Sep 24, 2018

Living with mistakes: Charter schools and evidence

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About 37% of all births in the US were unintended ; they are mistakes. Should that fact affect the lives of people born by mistake? I hope ...