My previous post was a Gen Z success story. This post is a warning to exercise some skepticism about Gen Z success stories! In this post, I share my reflections on a typical college marketing and communication practice, bragging about graduates’ successes. There are a lot of ways to view the bragging: natural pride, inspiration […]
Teaching
Crossed Wires
The curtain is closing on the spring semester of my twenty-seventh year of teaching. Twenty-seven years is an entire generation. My first students, Fuqua MBAs in the Class of 2000, were my age.* My current students, Colorado undergrads in the class of 2027, are 36 years younger. People ask me, “is this generation of students […]
Was He Hitting On You?
In case you don’t have time to read the whole post, the answer is no. Most of the readers of this blog are people I know personally. So if you are reading this, you are probably already aware that I started a new job in May. I am still at Leeds, the business school at […]
What I Should Have Said
In my previous post, I told the story of an exchange I had with a churlish telemarketer. I wonder if I was an unknowing character in a scene of retribution: “Next time, I [churlish telemarketer] am going to tell the person s/he is an asshole!” That thought makes me reflect on answers not given. Monday […]
“Today, I Made A College Student Cry”
I am not the “I” in the title of this post. Rather, the title comes from the first sentence of a Facebook post by a staff member at my school. The post moves me and makes me think, and I want to share it with you. Here is her post, and my responses to her, […]
Next Semester
Starting in January, I will be teaching a required course for our sophomore undergraduates. I have 85 students registered for my section. If any Spring ’20 students are reading this, let me know you are out there! I don’t recall having much of an interest in my professors outside of the classroom in my undergraduate […]
Arrivederci Professor Forni
There was an obituary in The Wall Street Journal for one Professor Pier Massimo Forni, “a poet and scholar of Italian literature.” I found this guy to be an interesting choice for coverage in a newspaper focused on business. Usually the obituaries in the WSJ are about people who influenced the economy. So how did […]
No Joking Matter: Feynman on Research (Feynman Part 2)
This post is the second in a series of reflections on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a collection of vignettes by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. In the previous post, I had my dander up about Professor Feynman’s ogling of the co-eds. I can see that his creepiness was a distraction—for him and for me—from […]
Chair Evaluation of Teaching (vs. SET)
It’s my third annual evaluation season as chair. I’ve progressed, or at least improved my attitude, since the first year. Our school has a reasonable system in place for the annual evaluation of research, one that addresses a big pain point—consistency across disciplines. But that system is not the focus of this post. (If you […]