The cover of Jeffrey Jensen Arnett’s Emerging Adulthood has the title superimposed on a L train entrance. The L train runs between the Meatpacking District of lower Manhattan (14th Street & 8th Avenue), through Union Square and across Manhattan into Williamsburg and Bushwick, the heart of hipster Brooklyn. It is hard to imagine an area with…
Author: davidpotash
Principles, Policies and Procedures
A principle is a general tenet, a basic rule, a generalized proposition of the highest level. A policy is an organizational plan of action. A procedure is a particular set of actions. Principles exist across institutions and sectors; they emerge through complicated, almost philosophical debate. Policies exist within organizations; they are localized, developed, implemented and…
Scribed Thoughts on Technology and Change
The Livescribe Echo pen is a fascinating technological innovation. A pen with the ability to record sound, connect it with the text that it writes and then upload it to computer, the pen truly is “smart.” Recently profiled in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Clive Thompson “The Pen That Never Forgets“, the Livescribe…
Binging and Moderation
Barrett Seaman, a longstanding journalist for Time Magazine with a fantastic name for the press, became a trustee of Hamilton College, his alma mater, in 1989. Hamilton College is a strong liberal arts institution with a storied history in upstate New York. When Time Warner merged, Seaman took an early retirement and started investigating college…
September 11 – September 18
Most everyone who lived in New York City on September 11, 2001, has something to say about it. The part of my story, my day, that I want to share here is as much about September 18th as 9/11. September 11, 2001, was a lovely Tuesday morning, brilliant blue skies and the kind of late…
Credit Hours – The Tie That Binds
The ubiquitous credit hour figures largely in higher education. From our first orientations sessions when sincere advisors explain the reasons that we needed nine credits of this or fifteen credits of that, to counting credits when planning for graduation, to looking at jobs and institutional practice – academic credit is the currency in the realm…
American Higher Education Transformed, Smith & Bender, eds.
American Higher Education Transformed, 1940-2005: Documenting the National Discourse, Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender, eds., Johns Hopkins University, 2008 Smith and Bender’s book is a small encyclopedia of primary source documents about higher education. A short introductory section provides an overview of key topics. The editors chose an interesting structure of broad categories: The Terrain…