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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 [back to the: “I have no boss” kind of relationship to work]. Some of us aspire to take on those positions, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]