= Premium Content

  • Monday, May 28, 2012

Previous

Next

Presidential News Snippets

March 10, 2008, 12:42 pm

By Gabriela Montell

William R. Brody, president of the Johns Hopkins University, has said he will retire at the end of this year, the Baltimore Sun reports.
Beloit College’s president, John E. Burris, has resigned unexpectedly to take a job as president of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a foundation in North Carolina, the Associated Press reports.
Mississippi State University’s president, Robert H. (Doc) Foglesong, resigned abruptly last week, after only two years in the post, Karin Fischer reports on The Chronicle’s News Blog.

This entry was posted in Administrative Hiring. Bookmark the permalink.

  • Print
  • Comment (12)

12 Responses to Presidential News Snippets

jpminnc - September 29, 2011 at 6:14 am

“Ah me, I was a fair young curate then.”  G&S The Sorcerer.  If curators curate, then what do curates do?  Clergify?  

Btw, it’s interesting that you view this not-in-the-dictionary usage (of ‘curate’) so positively.  Could it be that dictionaries aren’t always the best arbiter for whether a word is apt or not?  Care to comment?  

dank48 - September 29, 2011 at 8:37 am

The Web doesn’t work that way. Of course, neither does the world nor, despite the best efforts of us editors, has it ever. Vogue words and nonce words come and, mostly, go. (Have you noticed the merciful fall-off in “proactive” finally? One more word used vigorously and, as usual, with an altered meaning, until everyone’s tired of it.) “Curate” is pretentious, of course, like a lot of words with what’s essentially snob appeal.

King Canute went to the seashore and ordered the tide not to come in, because he wanted to demonstrate to sycophants that he was perfectly aware that there were limits to his power. I bet he’d have been a hell of a good editor.

janesdaughter - September 29, 2011 at 9:21 am

“Expert taste and judgment.” When I go to a museum, I always hope that the exhibition I came to see (the product of traditional curators) has those qualities. But the distinguishing features of the old-fashioned curator also include deep knowledge of the subject, strong analytical skills, and the ability to communicate. This skill set goes well beyond taste and judgment, the key attributes of the connoisseur, which are acquired usually through a lifetime of careful collecting and study. It is possible for one person to be both (a curator and a connoisseur) but there is a critical difference. In the examples listed at the beginning of the essay, I think we’re talking about a marketing tactic that aims to sell products by playing to the ego of a customer who would like to think of him/herself as a connoisseur. I for one hope the scholarship of excellent curators everywhere does not become debased by turning “curate” into a verb, if “taste and judgment” are the operative functions.

marcleavitt - September 29, 2011 at 10:35 am

This is a tempest in a pot of tea. The usages cited here imply organization with knowledge of the thing(s) knowledgeably organized. I have no problem with it. As to the question: Is it a nonce word? Time will tell.

22015822 - September 29, 2011 at 11:10 am

I agree with Prof. Yagoda that there’s a need for “expert taste and judgment,” but do we also need another pretentious usage (oh, good: another noun we can use as a verb) to denote it?  

rrhersh - September 29, 2011 at 11:57 am

dank48:
“Have you noticed the merciful fall-off in “proactive” finally?”

No, I have not.  I have, however, noticed a merciful decline of whining about “proactive”.  As for the word itself, it is routinely used without attracting special notice.  Don’t believe me?  Put it into Google News and you will find any number of examples.

dank48 - September 29, 2011 at 2:49 pm

Well, there went the merciful decline of whining, RRHersh. “Proactive” is a perfectly good and needed word, going back to 1933, meaning (MWNCD10) “relating to, caused by, or being interference between previous learning and the recall or performance of later learning [proactive inhibition of memory].” Then people started using it in the second sense, “acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes,” i.e. in a sense scarcely distinguishable from “active.” Granted, there is a shade of meaning, but is it really worth it?

On the other hand, if you happen to like the word, the good news is that, like “curate,” it will stand or fall depending on whether people continue to use it, not on whether I like it.

Andy Hollandbeck - September 29, 2011 at 2:57 pm

I didn’t know “curate” was so young a word. I was surprised recently, though, to see one of Word’s little red squigglies appear under “curation” when I was writing about “social media curation tools.” I turned to the handy dictionary, and it wasn’t there, either.

I think the existence and growing popularity of social media curation tools — and the general desire to have some knowledgeable people pick out and organize the most interesting/important/relevant/etc. content on the vast Internet — will give both curation and the new(ish) meaning of curate some staying power.

eschlatt - September 29, 2011 at 5:09 pm

Nice post and great examples. I wrote about this last year from the museum curator’s point of view, in an article called “A New Spin: Are DJs, rappers and bloggers ‘curators’?” for Museum magazine. It wasn’t all negative, which some folks might find surprising. Here’s a link to it http://www.aam-us.org/pubs/mn/newspin.cfm

John McIntyre - October 2, 2011 at 12:04 am

So using “curate” as a verb is pretentious, but sneering at people who use “proactive” isn’t? Not particularly fond of the latter word myself, and don’t use it, but neither does it produce the same reaction that ragweed does. 

Sean S - October 3, 2011 at 3:11 pm

look at the bike snob blog, he has been lambasting curate’s usage for a while http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/search?q=curate  and http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-customs-changing-language-changing.html
thanks

dank48 - October 5, 2011 at 1:17 pm

I don’t sneer at people who use “proactive” to mean “active”; I dislike it, but so what? Most language mutations, like the other kind, are one-time and die quickly. A few catch on, more or less, for a while, and then either become accepted and “standard,” or fade away like last year’s fashions in clothes and haircuts.

The problem with using fashionable words–hegemony, paradigm, proactive, light-year–and expressions–go ballistic, quantum leap, at the end of the day–either in a conventional or in a nonce sense is that they go out of fashion quicker than we expect. Next thing you know, you’re looking at something you wrote awhile back, like looking at old family photos, and wondering, “What in heaven’s name possessed me to go out in public like that?”

Copyright 2012. All rights reserved.

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