Blogs

It’s funny, how sometimes the best way to understand big issues in big, complex, institutional contexts is to solve little problems in little, simple, personal contexts. A case in point ...

Sustainability’s a huge topic. And higher education is an industrial sector not renowned for the agility of its participants. So where do you start greening a campus, and how? To the extent ...

A column by a British (sometime-) academic may point the way toward research opportunities for American universities. George Monbiot has been a visiting professor of environmental science, ...

Erin O’Connor, an English prof at Penn, blogs about higher ed, sometimes from a position politically to the right of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Last Friday, her post spoke about the sustainability ...

If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’ll keep getting what we’ve been getting. What most of us have been doing, all our lives, is making choices and forming habits which make sense, ...

It’s said that the modern university consists of a large number of academic and administrative departments united by a common heating system. We’ll get to academic and administrative ...

I’m not sure what my pet peeves #2 through n are, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out in time. #1 is pretty clear, though. It’s students (some staff, a few faculty, but mostly students) who open ...

In days of old, when students were bold, computers were both more impressive and less powerful. They also generated a tremendous amount of heat, so that data centers invested almost as much in ...

In a recent post, Oronte Churm comments on Hinterland University’s reluctance to cancel classes due to weather. My own campus gets serious winter, and I’ve long noted that senior administration ...

Kind of on the heels of the (no) dining hall trays idea: I just saw an item in the Sunday paper about how Ireland has instituted a 33 cent tax on disposable shopping bags. The government ...