Oct 26, 2020

Teaching is not political activism

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The Antiracist movement captured the academia, provided urgency, energy and a new focus to our work for justice. Many of our previous effort...
Oct 19, 2020

The harsh professor syndrome

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It happens to those professors who do not learn how to teach and relate to students reasonably well within the first 3 years or so of their ...
Oct 12, 2020

Churches, unmasked

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Some 19 per cent of Americans do not believe masks are effective in preventing the spread of COVID-19 . Many of those are Christian, and chu...
Oct 4, 2020

Black Lives Matter: (Only) or (Too)?

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In conversations with my Russian friends, I suddenly realized that some of them completely misunderstand what “Black Lives Matter” means. Th...
Sep 27, 2020

We are the tools that need care

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Let’s not pretend this is normal, because it is not. The entire year online feels like a sentence to an exile. The conditions are reasonable...
Sep 21, 2020

Past mistakes do not set precedents

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Precedents are important in law and in all policy applications. Considering a precedent helps to ensure consistent and therefore fair applic...
Sep 14, 2020

Don’t replicate, recreate: Observational learning in an online course

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In his effort to overcome the limitations of behaviorism, Albert Bandura demonstrated the existence of observational learning, a subspecies ...
Sep 7, 2020

Why can’t universities become tech companies? An investment opportunity

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 If you follow business headlines, you probably heard that Walmart has turned into a tech company, and Tesla is not a car manufacturing firm...
Aug 31, 2020

The parallel universe does exist: Education after the pandemic

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The current pandemic is not that interesting on its own; history knows a plenty of similar tragedies. What is interesting is that for the fi...
Aug 6, 2020

Tool fetishism in online teaching

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Anxiety about online teaching skills often manifests in an interesting way: instructors are drawn to the vast array of digital tools, platfo...
Jul 27, 2020

Wait and see

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Imagination is normally an administrator’s friend. What we do is anticipate problems, plan, and prepare; all of these rely on the ability to...
Jul 11, 2020

All public sculptures should go

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I never understood public sculpture of leaders, never liked them. In any city I visited, they are an eye sore: all these marshals, generals,...
Jul 5, 2020

Is teacher preparation in California racist?

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OK, let’s get serious, even if we have to get a little controversial. We know that any artificial barrier will disproportionately affect peo...
Jun 28, 2020

The quarantine and the relational self

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Today I stumbled across a fascinating 2002 paper, The Relational Self: An Interpersonal Social–Cognitive Theory , by Andersen and Chen. The...
Jun 22, 2020

Regulatory Paroxysms or How to Control the Uncontrollable

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Universities have largely been successful in transitioning to the online environment, much more than almost any other industry. Victims of t...
Jun 15, 2020

Racism, the Old Deluder

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One can slice racism in several ways, but at a minimum, it has the overt and the covert parts. The former includes explicitly racist polici...
Jun 1, 2020

Manufacturing racism

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28 years ago, I was watching the Rodney King riots in LA, in a living room of a Notre Dame dorm. I was in this country for about 8 months, a...
May 26, 2020

Wisdom of the crowd, and the expert bias

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Scientists working on several vaccines against the virus do not really need wisdom of the crowd . The public at large knows nothing about vi...
May 17, 2020

Is there an administrative bloat in higher ed? A history of one glitch

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In theory, the glitch could have been preventable, but the probability of something like that happening is very high, because it is a one-t...
May 10, 2020

How do you know your online or hybrid course is good-enough?

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It looks like at least some of us will be teaching online or hybrid in the Fall. This semester was in the salvaging mode; not utterly failin...
May 2, 2020

Adjacent markets: How universities can get out of the financial death spiral

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Michael Poliakoff of Forbes wants universities to cut “the fluff” like excessive gened offerings, “to stare down intransigent faculty and ...
Apr 23, 2020

The convertible course or How to prepare for the unknown

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Like many universities, we cannot make a call yet about the modality of the Fall semester. New science findings come up every day, and most...