Category: Uncategorized

I came across an interesting article in the CHE called “The Authentic, and Effective, College President,” by Rita Bornstein, who is president at Rollins College. To anyone who has even glanced through this blog before, you probably understand why I’m intrigued by this article. While the advice in this piece is overly general and mild, I suspect even this simple advice will once again be ignored by the EMU Board of Regents and others.

One passage I thought particularly interesting given the current scandals:

The power, perquisites, and bully pulpit provided by the presidency can cause some presidents to inflate their importance and sense of entitlement. They can be swept away by the opportunity to act on a broad stage and participate in so many local, regional, and national activities that they neglect their primary responsibilities for institutional oversight, decision making, and governance. They can begin to believe in an “imperial” presidency and fail to develop and maintain relationships of trust….A few presidents who have viewed themselves as superior to others have even acted as though social norms and laws did not apply to them, engaging in misconduct that has included impersonating a police officer and stealing college funds.

Bingo.

By the way, there is a “celebration” of the Kirkpatrick era happening this week– Thursday, I believe. I was invited (along with just about everyone else at EMU), but I won’t be able to make it because I’ll be out of town. I thought about going. I wondered what exactly Kirkpatrick et al would say about the “good works” that were done under his leadership. Honestly, I can’t imagine that part of the talk lasting too long. Interestingly enough, this is the exact kind of event that would be perfect for the “University House;” but because of the controversies around all that, it’s being held out at the Eagle Crest golf course clubhouse.

Update:
Late this afternoon, I (along with everyone else at EMU) received this message:

The Eastern Michigan University Foundation has announced that the
Farewell Reception scheduled for Thursday, July 29, 2004, for EMU
President and Mrs. Samuel Kirkparick, at the Eagle Crest Golf Club, has
been cancelled.

The Foundation apologizes for any inconvenience.

Somehow, that seems a fitting end to all this. Or at least an end to this chapter….

Check out what the cartoonist Tom “Dan Perkins” Tomorrow, the guy who does the very cool cartoon This Modern World, had to say about a day in the orbit of Michael Moore at the Democratic National Convention. What a great story.

It wasn’t for WMDs. It wasn’t for terrorism. It wasn’t because Saddam was a bad guy. It wasn’t even for oil or for revenge against Saddam after Gulf War 1.

It was for reality television.

Go figure.

I don’t know why I’ve never actually come across this before (perhaps because I’m not an adjunct– at least not anymore and/or right now), but one of my grad students who is writing about adjunct issues referenced this site, AdjunctNation.

Great site. Besides info about and some articles from the magazine Adjunct Advocate, it also includes a lot of helpful tips and pieces of advice for would-be and current adjuncts and a lot of cartoons that are funny because they’re true(this one made me laugh outloud while my students were working on their web sites in class), and heck, it even has a version of “hangman” called “Adjunct Hang Prof!”

Check out this New York Times map of the election as it stands right now. Interesting data, and given that there are 180 electoral college votes in “swing states” right now, it looks like it’s going to go down the last minute.

Though some of these states as “swing states,” well, I don’t know. I mean, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota are all “swing states,” but all of them have gone Democratic for the last three or four or more elections.

I haven’t had a chance to look through this much yet, but I stumbled across this, DNC 2004 Weblogs: News Aggregator. Basically, it provides highlights from folks blogging from the convention in Boston. Pretty cool, and probably a lot more entertaining than the actual convention…

Nick Carbone sent this article on “Art Mobs” in Slate to the tech-rhet mailing list. I think I posted earlier about “mobs” and the ‘net.

Anyway, a couple quick thoughts:

* They talk in this article about Wikipedia too, which might also be a good topic to bring up for 516.
* The stuff about collaboratively created fonts and music jams are cool and interesting, though I don’t know if it actually fits in with anything that I do in my academic work.
* Nick Carbone always finds cool links.
* I ought to read Slate more often than I do.

I successfully avoided Art Fair this year, but I did get a chance to see a couple of cool things via the web.

First, as noted in the AA News “Talk about Town” feature on the art fairs, I could have been playing Art Fair Bingo. It’s a PDF file, but well worth the download.

Second, via Arbor Update, which has several good tidbits about the fairs, I came across the artwork of Steve Shepard. Neat stuff. Here’s a couple examples of what I mean:

You gotta love lefty folk art, right?

I just noticed that the spring 2004 issue of the online journal Inventio has finally been released. It carries a commentary/article by yours truly called “Yes, but is it writing?” I say “finally” because the editors of Inventio asked me if I’d be interesting in submitting something after an email discussion/blog discussion that took place after the Computers and Writing Conference– in 2003. It’s another one of those things that suggests to me that even when academic publishing takes place online, it can still take forever!

Anyway, it’s out now and that always pleases me. The article was finished a long time ago, but it really feels “finished” now. I like the way that they broke it up into hypertext-friendly chunks, too.

… is coming from that previously mentioned Dell computer (my son finished his game) with Firefox. No problems at all– it remembers who I am, the spell check seems to work, etc.

Weird, huh?