= Premium Content

  • Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Previous

Next

Shop Talk: Monday, May 2

May 2, 2011, 6:00 am

By Lawrence Biemiller

Upper Iowa U. campus centerHaving outgrown its old dining hall, Upper Iowa U. built a new one—and added event space, a bookstore, a game room, and offices for student organizations and student-affairs staff members. (Chronicle photograph by Lawrence Biemiller)

• Upper Iowa U. Opens $15-Million Campus Center With Dining and Banquet Spaces

• Giving $1.8-Million, Texas Tech Chancellor Is Biggest Donor to Chapel Project

• As Other Construction Wanes, Baltimore’s Colleges Enjoy a ‘Favorable’ Market for Building

• Case Western Reserve U. Picks Perkins & Will for $50-Million Student Center Project

This entry was posted in Shop Talk. Bookmark the permalink.

  • Print
  • Comment
  • velvis

    I’ve always wondered why there hasn’t been a national core. As a military brat I moved a lot and why when I left Virginia dealing with long divisions and decimals and landed in Pennsylvania still doing long divisions but with remainders. 
    I expect cultural differences – War of Northern Oppression vs Southern Rebellion — and so should a  national core

  • tenured_radical

    Very timely.  I am doing the slow exit — teaching a last term before going on the year’s leave that would end in resignation if everything works out at the new house.  I have been going for gracious, but it is exhausting, and because of that it’s hard not to fantasize about having my say.  But you are right:  it ain’t nothing they don’t know.

  • austinbarry

    “I can remember when I lived in Australia in the early 1980s having to wait up to two weeks for replies from the U.K. ”..  I remember a brief period in the mid to late 80s during the proto-internet days when email from one network to another could take 2 weeks or a few seconds.  The weird thing was the recipient didn’t know it took 2 weeks, and might send a short response waiting for a reply.  

  • gringo_gus

    Here’s an exemplar of new modes of communication, which speaks to your own university, and your own authority to comment on, well, anything really. Put your own house in order, vice-chancellor Thrift:

    http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=6084 

    Scroll down folks.

  • gavin_moodie

    I have read the brief article and many of the posts on the web site that gringo_gus and rorschach1984 refer to.  I don’t see their relevance to Thrift’s article not indeed to his performance as a vice chancellor.

    Thrift is vice chancellor or president of the University of Warwick.  The web site is of the University and College Union criticising the management of Warwick Business School.  It seems that the new dean is planning changes, apparently to improves the school’s research performance, which may result in a number of academics and staff losing their jobs.

    Most but by no means all of the comments on the web site are highly critical of the school’s new direction.  Many criticise the dean’s policy implicitly, others explicitly.  Some posters support the school’s strategy to various extents, but some with reservations about implementation.

    In my view vice chancellors or presidents should give deans considerable discretion in how they manage their schools.  Even the more egregious cases of poor strategy and implementation given by posters wouldn’t warrant a vice chancellor’s intervention in my view.  However, if the school is still unsettled when the dean’s contract is up for renewal I would think the vc should take that into account in deciding whether to renew the dean’s contract.

    Returning to the substance of Thrift’s post, I agree and suggest that his observation explains the importance of design as well as function and hence the stunning success of Apple.

  • gringo_gus

    to reply to Gavin (kudos to whom for using a real name, I guess. I don’t have the courage). First, the column states:

    “Or think of managing a university. That requires business cards, usually
    in the language of the country you are visiting. In many countries it
    requires a plethora of (small) gifts. It requires a flight case and
    maybe a laptop bag. It requires the requisite amount of information
    technology so as to be able to keep constantly in touch–I have a
    Blackberry Torch welded to my person and I carry either an iPad or a Mac
    book according to how long the trip will be and if I have to write
    something, such as a blog. ”

    So, Thrift adduces his standing as university manager to make comments about changes in media, and then goes on to talk about how he virtually manages his university. Yet, the data on the other website (a) challenge his claims to authority based on his managerial competence (b) undermine his argument about technological change enabling his university to be managed when he is at a distance.

    Second, not only does the link I gave suggest that actually, the management of WBS is worse than egregious causing the school against which others benchmark themselves in the UK to implode  (the situation for WBS is so bad, it would seem, that waiting for the end of the Dean’s term will be too late); but the postings thereon – both for and against the current Dean – are the like of something I have never seen before; and actually speak to the same theme that Thrift here pontificates upon – new forms of virtual communication. And what we see is immediate, and unmediated speaking from the heart to the world by angry Warwick Faculty. Business School Faculty, too, not the traditional campus radicals. Reputational damage is resulting. Go manage that, Nige. But, my recommendation – some face-to-face work is needed.

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.

  • The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • 1255 Twenty-Third St, N.W.
  • Washington, D.C. 20037