VIA Sherman Dorn: Lessons of Sullivan’s Reinstatement

Posted: June 27, 2012 | Author: Dave Mazella | Filed under: David Mazella | Leave a comment

We’re going to continue the Sherman Dorn kick this week, by linking to this post about the UVA debacle over the removal and now reinstatement of President Sullivan.

It’s a thoughtful postmortem, with a good discussion of how the UVA debacle was solved locally, through the passion and commitment of alumni, students, and faculty, even if the implications are national.

He writes,

Congratulations to the University of Virginia, which restored some hope to higher education today with the reinstatement of Teresa Sullivan as president. In turn, I hope people will understand how local these events were, despite being interpreted as a synecdoche of higher education . . . .

We’ll see how this plays out in other public universities over the next few years.

VIA Sherman Dorn and Rebecca Onion: Summer Readings

Blogging will be less frequent here over the summer, but I thought it would be helpful for those who do visit to have a summer reading list to mull over. I’m linking to two higher education bloggers who put together from their readers and Twitter followers some of the most popular books on higher ed teaching.

First of all, for first-time teachers (especially TAs), Sherman Dorn at USF assembled this “get in it and drive” list.

These are his top recommendations:

Therese Huston, Teaching What You Don’t Know (Worldcat entry)

Robert Rotenberg, The Art and Craft of College Teaching (2nd edition) (Worldcat entry)

Judith Boettcher & Rita-Marie Conrad, The Online Teaching Survival Guide (Worldcat entry)

Huston is the (Benjamin) Spock of college teaching books in attitude: “Relax. You’ll be okay.” It and Rotenberg were the two books I wish had been around when I had started out as a T.A. in the late 1980s.

Rebecca Onion’s very useful list, assembled from her Twitter followers, has a more history-and-humanities orientation (she is ABD at UT working on a History diss on technology and childhood), but contains a lot of the solid, sane, read-this-and-you-won’t-go-wrong scholarship of experienced teachers/researchers like Ken Bain and Robert Boice.

For my own purposes, I’ve been enjoying this volume by two McGill scholars, Alenoush Saroyan and Cheryl Amundsen, called Rethinking Higher Education: From a Course Design Workshop to a Faculty Development Framework (Stylus, 2004).

Are we missing something? Do you have a favorite you like to reread, or share with your friends and colleagues? Let us know in the comments, and I’ll add.

Have a good summer,