21st Century Scholar

Peter Scott uses the metaphor of “the angle of repose” in his nice new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent. The angle of repose is an engineering term, but I know it as the title of a book by one of my favorite authors, Wallace Stegner. In engineering an “angle of repose” is the angle at [...]

Recently, a friend asked us for a loan. This is someone we have known for a long time and because of the vagaries of the stock market and a downturn in the economy he has seen his savings diminish at the same time as he lost his job. The prospects in this economy for a [...]

The proverbial buck stops with the President. More than any other lesson learned here is that the President and Board failed. If the President was not fully briefed and informed about the events then he managed a slipshod operation and should have been removed. If he did know what was going on and engaged in [...]

When the athletic director and the vice president heard from Paterno about the alleged rape, they certainly did not appear to act with determination or forceful deliberation. The concerns about Mr. Sandusky also had surfaced prior to Paterno’s meeting with them. We are in a litigious environment and I suspect that one hesitation may have [...]

Recall that before I was at ‘SC I earned tenure and promotion at Penn State. During my first year there I went to lunch at the Nittany Lion Inn, a faculty club of sorts that always made me feel as if I was sitting at the adults’ table. One day I was in the outer [...]

Let me begin with the 28-year-old graduate student who supposedly saw Mr. Sandusky violating a young boy in the showers late at night. This incident was the easiest for commentators to state what they would have done. Whether it was MSNBC or Fox, The Washington Post or The New York Time, we had everyone claiming [...]

I have refrained from writing or speaking about the events at Penn State because I needed time to process what we might learn from such a tragedy. When the events were unfolding a bunch of reporters called me for a quick quote and I declined saying anything in large part because there was too much [...]

Andrew Rosen has penned Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy which in some respects is a typical text that talks about the need for new kinds of postsecondary institutions. It’s a breezy easy-to-read book and for those who are not in higher ed there’s nothing wrong with reading it to learn about the changes [...]

My last blog of the year was a quick summary of “the year in review.” In the short review I touched on topics that had been of concern to me, but neglected to mention anything having to do with issues beyond the border of the United States. My chum, Cliff Adelman, posted this on Facebook: [...]

I ended my last blog in December with “a year in review” a day or two before I flew to Malaysia for a conference. I want to catch up on that conference in my next post, but suffice it to say, it was one heckuva long trip there and back, but worth it. We had [...]