News Archives: Blog

Blog Post 20

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 […]

Blog Post 19

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 […]

Blog Post 18

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 […]

Blog Post 17

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 […]

Blog Post 16

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 […]

Blog Post 15

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 […]

Blog Post 14

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 […]

Blog Post 13

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 […]

Blog Post 12

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 […]

Blog Post 11

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 […]