Guidelines // Browsing posts in Guidelines
A Little Global Review?
One of the advantages of no longer being Provost, but retaining interest in some of the issues that attracted me before, is that there is an opportunity for additional thinking and reflection. This can be slightly embarrassing, when one realizes that some of the thoughts should have been thought before, when there was more chance […]
My New Book (on higher education)
This blog is only a bit more than a shameless plug for my new book, Guiding the American University: contemporary challenges and choices, which has just been published by Routledge. My flimsy excuse for blogging about it stems from the fact that the book relates strongly to the regular series of blogs I did in […]
Journal Editing: it works!
The Tuesday, Aug. 4 Metro section of the Washington Post, on an article published by the Journal of Social History concerning Irish immigrants, makes an implicitly interesting point about journal editing. The article has a needless tendentious heading, and it does not directly explore the editing process involved; hence an additional comment. Here’s the story: […]
International Students
As we near a decision about a project to increase significantly the number of international students at Mason, at both graduate and undergraduate levels, a word on the most commonly asked, and perfectly appropriate, question. Why do this? Note that my answer applies to our strategic commitment to grow the numbers, regardless of the current […]
Accreditation
American accreditation procedures are unusual, to say the least. Rather than federal government oversight—which we’re all supposed to say would be horrible, and indeed perhaps it would be—basic accreditation falls to regional associations, essentially governed by a mixture of federal rules, fears of possible federal rules, and membership stipulations. Membership is from the participating universities […]
Will the Real George Mason…
The past decade plus has been a dynamic period for George Mason. We’ve grown, added programs, added facilities, etc. There is every reason to take pride in the varied achievements and the basis they provide for the future. It’s also important to note that in many ways we’ve been trying, in this same period, to […]
Background Checks
I know I opined on this recently but thought an update would be in order, and I welcome further reactions. It’s not necessarily a huge issue, but a tough one. We are under increasing pressure to administer background checks to all newly-hired faculty (currently we only do selected, as in fields involving younger children or […]
Death in the Family
I write today about a problem I hadn’t pondered before, not common, but potentially quite important to those involved when it does surface: A student recently raised an interesting issue. Last semester he suffered a death in his family and missed a test in one class. The professor involved insisted on seeing a death certificate […]
Regulatory Excess
Last year we faced a crescendo of faculty concerns about excessive, unnecessary or unexplained regulations. Focus was particularly on human subjects review, which has since been substantially modified. But there was a general sense that things were spinning out of control. So we came up with a statement about proper procedures: try, whenever possible, to […]
Background Checks
Discussion of further moves toward background checks for faculty and others is once again on active agenda at various institutions including George Mason. Any campus crisis now escalates attention, and there’s no easy way to avoid response. A few years ago when the discussion last actively surfaced, we generated a compromise approach with background checks […]
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