Jul 29, 2022

The pull of the rough draft

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In general, executives try to walk out of any meeting with minimal to-do list in their hands. When discussing a project, we have a temptatio...
Jul 11, 2022

“My dog is racist”

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Googling “My dog is racist” will return 1.2 million hits. “Are dogs racist?” – over a million hits. Of course, dogs are not intrinsically ra...
Jun 28, 2022

Can I zoom into your class, professor?

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This seems to be a persistent post-COVID request, a difficult one to address. On one hand, instructors want to be accommodating and compassi...
Jun 12, 2022

A shoestring conference. Downshifting in the academia.

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No deep thoughts here, just some practical tips on how to run an international conference with no budget and minimal support. There is an in...
May 14, 2022

Misreading intentions

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Human conflict almost always starts with misreading the other’s intentions. The ability to infer intentions from behavior is a gift that com...
May 9, 2022

Parallel universes and the freedom of speech

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Sci-Fi is full of stories about parallel universes. The Man in the High Castle is one of the most vivid recent examples. It shows a univers...
May 2, 2022

This war is against the future

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My heart goes out to Ukraine, but I worry more about Russia. While Ukrainians undergo tremendous destruction and human suffering, they are f...
Apr 25, 2022

The ethics of false promises, or What education cannot do

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Could Russian educators have prevented the moral catastrophe of popular support for the aggression? Could American educators have prevented ...
Apr 18, 2022

Workflows or How do we tame Higher Ed inefficiency

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One of the main causes of low organizational efficiency is that universities do not routinely review their procedures. It does not seem to b...
Apr 11, 2022

After the pandemic: soft or hard landing

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Many large CSU campuses have not yet dealt with the anxiety of dropping enrollments so prevalent in most of the country. Because of our youn...
Mar 24, 2022

Changing the name of this blog and the question of identity

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"It used to be called “The Russian Bear’s Diaries.” When it started in 2006, I was at the University of Northern Colorado, whose mascot...
Mar 14, 2022

Compartmentalizing and its discontents

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In one part of my life, a horrendous war destroys cities I know and love. In another part, we need to organize our requests for faculty hire...
Feb 28, 2022

Is collective responsibility just? Невинны ли русские бабушки?

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This one is in two languages, and the versions are not the same. Этот блог на двух языках, но это не прямой перевод. Русский ниже.
Feb 21, 2022

The sublime art of complaining

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Many students, staff and faculty do not know how to complain well. People should defend their rights, and it is important to know how to do ...
Feb 14, 2022

Expecting a war on Wednesday

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It has been a tense couple of weeks. US intelligence is predicting an invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Like most Russians, on both conservativ...
Jan 31, 2022

Cause-blind solutions and the puritan sense of fairness

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In social affairs, it very difficult to untangle multiple causes of a problem. Here is a recent example. Our DWF rates have risen during the...
Jan 20, 2022

Designed to Fail or A little Taylorism is OK, really

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Let’s say you have a campus with 1200 non-academic staff. You want to launch a process where every one of them submits a form, and you appro...
Jan 10, 2022

Living with the virus, living with mortality

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It seems highly unlikely that COVID will be eradicated like smallpox or polio. The current debate about continuing the restrictions or tryin...
Dec 20, 2021

Vision, mission, and other sacred nonsense

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Few management concepts in academia are subject to such wide-spread misuse as mission and vision statements. Every university has a page wit...
Dec 11, 2021

Solidarity versus identity

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I encourage most people, including student call me by my first name. I am an older and bearded gentleman in a Dean’s office, so I want to be...
Dec 6, 2021

The end of the average student

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This is really a part II of the previous blog . Despite all the rhetoric, large organizations like universities have a hard time dealing w...
Nov 8, 2021

Post-COVID innovations to consider

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We should bite the bullet and start thinking about offering students on-line tracks. No one wants to do it, and I don’t want to do it either...
Oct 22, 2021

There is no shortage of teachers, only shortage of money to pay them

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The absolute majority of policy-makers work under the assumption that the laws of labor markets somehow doe not apply to teachers. The profe...
Oct 16, 2021

The White People’s Problem

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Empathy works through identifying with others’ pain, or with other strong emotions. If you are not a psychopath, you can empathize with some...
Oct 11, 2021

Wearing your failure as a badge of honor?

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In education, it takes two to tango. Hence, it is not always easy to tell who fails. In any normal year, some students struggle with their c...
Oct 2, 2021

How good departments self-destruct

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The path to self-destruction most often winds its way through the terrain of prolonged and intractable personal conflict. Educational relati...
Sep 27, 2021

Academic freedom and disciplinary authority

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Here is a case: Another unit at the University has invited someone to be a guest speaker at a public event. The speaker happened to be in on...
Sep 20, 2021

Cooler winds sweep through Central Valley

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Every summer, the Valley restarts its probation period. ‘Can you withstand the heat?,’ - it asks, and then again – ‘Are you sure? How about ...
Sep 9, 2021

When reasonable people disagree they don't get mad at each other

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Here is another interesting tidbit from our internal debate on COVID contact disclosure. Someone from the other side of the university prese...
Sep 7, 2021

The ethics of COVID disclosure and the unlikely events

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Let’s say a student in your class tells you he has tested positive for COVID-19. The first steps are obvious: please stop coming to class, i...
Aug 28, 2021

Nostalgia is a poor guide to the post-COVID future

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Some people want to get back to the happy times where students were buzzing around the campus, faculty had passionate debates in person, whe...
Aug 13, 2021

Modality and morality or Do not go back to normal if it was abnormal

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There we go again. I felt smug about figuring out a perfect solution, only to realize it does not work in real life. In ASL, facial expressi...
Aug 9, 2021

From the dictatorship of tests to a new educator preparation framework

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It took a global pandemic to start undoing the damage done by the regime of teacher preparation that can be describes as over-under-regulati...