Arts and Minds
The overdeveloped left hemisphere of my brain tells me one thing. My emerging artistic side tells me another. But before we get to the core of the issue, a little personal history is warranted. During my final decade in the…
Excerpts on Education
The blogosphere is rife with discussion of education, with a particular focus on higher education. In the spirit of beating a dead horse joining the fray, I've dredged up a few excerpts from Letters to a Young Academic, a book…
Illegitimi non carborundum
I love the Socratic aspect of academia, and it’s the part I do best. I supervise nine independent-study projects this semester, with a total of ten students. Most of them have spent a weekend at the mud hut, or soon will. Indeed, I’m just back from the mud hut, where I spent the weekend with one of the students, the poet in resident at the renowned University of Arizona Poetry Center. He called the trip “transformative.” I meet regularly with all the students, probing and pushing until they do more and better work than any of us thought possible. Ditto for the small, hard-working herd of graduate students I advised and mentored during two wonderful decades.