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September 9, 2019
Time Passages
Welcome back a couple weeks in. Welcome first of all to our new faculty. To 2019-2020. It will be (just about) twenty years for me at FIU. I am of course not alone. In my home department there are, I believe, still four colleagues who preceded me at this point.
I have been thinking a ...
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March 11, 2019
Faculty and Administrators, Administrators and Faculty
I have, for almost four years now, been trying to crack the nut of the origins of, and solutions to the multitude of tensions/misunderstandings/etc. between administrators and faculty members. There is something, I suspect, both particular and universal about this relationship. I have listened and watched and felt frustrated at ...
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November 5, 2018
Sympathy For the Devil?
It has been ashamedly a very very long time since I have written about my experiences on the 5th floor of PC as Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Provost; perhaps long enough for newly hired folks to not know anything about this blog and wonder why these words are coming ...
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October 19, 2017
The Dark Side
It has been a minute. I am back and in the meantime some colleagues have accused me of crossing over to the Dark Side; they have suggested that I might be too understanding of our academic leaders; too sympathetic to our FIU President and Provost. They may be right. I am increasingly sympathetic. ...
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April 24, 2017
The Shifting Ground Beneath*
*These are my words…and no one else’s
One of my jobs as Faculty Fellow has been to write, to communicate with you, colleagues from all over the university, about what is new on the fifth floor of PC. I have failed you all. I have gone silent. Too much to say and yet ...
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December 7, 2016
Post-Election It’s Political
I have been struggling to write this, to write anything, since November 8. When I arrived at a friend’s place to celebrate what seemed to be a certain, at least likely, victory for the first woman president of the United States of America, my daughter was accompanying me wearing a shirt that said: ...
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October 25, 2016
Supporting Our Faculty from Soup to Nuts…
So I have not written a blog in a while, not since getting back from Moscow well over a month ago. I have been struggling with which subject to settle on: convocation and the masterful and meaningful speech by my college and friend Bianca Premo; the visit that I ...
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September 13, 2016
From Miami to Moscow and Back Again
I am in Moscow. I have been here a lot over the years. It is part of what I do as a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union; I visit archives, libraries, bookshops and talk with as many people as are willing to listen to my now strained ...
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August 30, 2016
Power in the Academy
Welcome Back Colleagues! I hope each of you has had a productive, yet relaxing, summer. I know many of you – most of you? – do not cease to work over the summer, so the whole idea of summer break is misplaced [each summer for all these years my doctor sister says ...
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June 10, 2016
Berlin 2016
Well…I imagine you know that FIU reaches well beyond 8th street and West Miami Dade. I am sure that you know about the BBC campus or might even teach there. How about MBUS? I-75? Brickell? What about our campus in Tianjin, China? Have you heard that FIU now has a permanent office in DC? ...
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May 20, 2016
The Good, the Bad and the Necessary
Well…as the fall/spring academic year comes to an end and the summer begins, I have been thinking a lot about my own perspective shift over the course of this year. Allow me a few moments of (perhaps narcissistic) self-refection and then I will get to the part where ...
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April 28, 2016
Top Scholars, etc.
A few nights ago was the Top Scholars awards at the President’s House. As Faculty Fellow I had the honor of issuing kudos. If you have not been to one (and I have not, or at least not yet, for my own achievements), allow me to describe what it is. Those individual faculty members ...
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April 12, 2016
Blog on the Blog: It’s Worth the Risk
This morning a friend sent me a video message; she knew I had been struggling with this blog and with the issue of open dialogue and managing risk. She shared with me a tidbit from Dharma Punx: “Buddha says: people will criticize those who stay silent, those who ...
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March 21, 2016
The FIU Nature Preserve After the Fact and Lessons in Communication
When I first heard that the integrity of our Nature Preserve was under threat from a colleague in my department, I was worried. I was worried for the university, for faculty, for students, and, honestly, for myself. How could I work shoulder to shoulder ...
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March 7, 2016
The Truth in Numbers?
One of the first things that I learned in history graduate school, in Ann Arbor, in the 1990s, was to be skeptical of facts. Facts or truth are always, and inevitably, shaped by context, by the questions asked, by the agent with a pen, by the political ideology, by the biases of ...
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February 15, 2016
Blog Five: Carnegie Highest Research Activity (R1)
Well…. I began my day (as I often do) with my phone by my side. I looked at my email: nothing. Then Facebook: there it was. “FIU achieved Carnegie Classification for Highest Research Activity (R1)”. I smiled and felt a wave of pride sweep through me. Ha! We ...
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January 22, 2016
Leadership. A concept that I think many academics shrug off in their particular work orbits… there are chairs and associate deans and even provosts, but they are relatively invisible in the faculty member’s consciousness . Some of us aspire to take on those positions, ...
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December 18, 2015
Among the best things about being an academic – and especially a tenured professor – is the flexibility, autonomy and having no real boss. Sometimes I am very aware of this when my husband who works at the Wolfsonian, also a PhD in Russian History, has to be at work at a particular time, meet ...
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November 30, 2015
Well, it has been a series of months now since I began work in the Office of the Provost in earnest, and I have learned a lot. When colleagues ask how I like my job, I pause, take a breath and then say one of two things (usually depending upon the audience): “I have much ...
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November 4, 2015
It has been quite a couple of months or so. Once all of the email congrats (“glad it is you and not me”) and the “don’t go over to the dark side” died down among colleagues who saw the announcement that I was to be the new Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Provost, ...
Rebecca Friedman is Faculty Fellow, Office of the Provost (2015-2019) and is an Associate Professor of History. During her tenure as Faculty Fellow, Friedman will work closely with the Office of the Provost. Her research is focused on modern Russian cultural and gender history. During her 20 years at FIU, Friedman has participated in multiple interdisciplinary programs and served in numerous administrative capacities, including GSIPA, the Humanities Program at BBC and Women’s Studies. As Director of the EU Center, she has served as PI for numerous grants from the EU Commission, which collectively have brought the university approximately one million dollars in grant monies and institutional supports.