Thoughts on Giorgio Agamben - Requiem per gli studenti (A Requiem for Students) and the Birth of the Hollowed Out Simulated University

Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skilful of lamentation to wailing. . . Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light. (Amos 5:16, 18)

Giogio Agamben has written an exquisite essay on the university in the wake of COVID-19; It is a lamentation, a wailing, a mourning for the darkness that has been called forth from the pandemic.  It is a provocative piece of impudence at a time when such things may be punished by social actors and risk averse institutions. "Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time." (Amos 5:13). Agamben has chosen to speak; it is not clear who is left to listen.  And yet the movement toward the reconstruction of the university as simulacra--the way that it parallels the movement toward the reconception of political space as a complex living analytics better understood through models than in flesh and blood--is worth pondering. The techno-populism that the university has become is likely the best simulation of the transformation of society that one can observe as the moment. What comes after pondering, and after observing in these times, is truly best left to silence.  

The essay, Requiem per gli studenti, follows (first published in Diario della crisi of the Instituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici 22 May 2020) along with my own brief reflections and a crude English translation. 

Call for Papers: 42nd Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America; 25-29 October 2015 Puebla, Mexico

I am happy to pass along a call for papers to what in the past has been a very exciting conference.  This year the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America will be held 25-29 October in Puebla, Mexico. I hope those interested int he subject will consider submitting a proposal.  The 2017 Conference program committee was chaired by a Penn State colleague, Deborah Eicher-Catt. The call for papers (in English and Spanish) follows. 

"Insulting or Defaming Religion" and the University--A Story of Christus Ranae

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)

One of the more interesting trends in the management by universities of the spaces within which discourse and engagement is supposed to occur, are issues revolving around religion.  That management, of course, is always subject to whatever is fashionable among the managerial classes at the university and those they serve.  Yet universities also serve, when it suits, the ideals they are constantly invoking in their efforts to compete effectively in the market for student (as input commodities to generate revenue) and output markets (enterprises willing to hire the commodities produced. In the U.K. many universities appear to have moved the line of management from expression to the protection not just of sensibilities but of the integrity of the belief systems of religious institutions themselves. (See, e.g., here "London South Bank University's Code of Practice for Freedom of Speech, which warns students that one definition of an 'unlawful meeting' is one "at which there is a likelihood that the speaker(s) may… commit blasphemy"").  How might that be approached in the United States (e.g., here and here)?

This post provides a brief discussion that frames the issue and an example of the sort of mundane events that may trigger more profound discussion.

Crafting a Policy for Open Access to Scholarly Publications From the Penn State University Faculty Senate

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2015)

Open access has become an important issue for the dissemination of knowledge.  I have written about the way in which the efforts of the last decade to financially exploit the dissemination of knowledge has produced an increasingly class based system of knowledge dissemination in which the rich or well funded have access to knowledge denied to poorer individuals and institutions.  (E.g., Disseminating Knowledge Broadly--New Offerings From the Digital Commons Network (Jan. 7, 2014), Open Access at Penn State: Scholarsphere (Dec., 14, 2012);   Between Scholar and University--Sharing Knowledge, Protecting Revenue and Control--Is the UCSF Approach Worth Considering (May 28, 2012); Opening Access: Course Proposals Archive at Penn State (June 1, 2012); Digital Humanities From the CIC (Oct. 6, 2012).

Mirroring the age in which we live, and the technology that has changed the way in which knowledge is produced and distributed, we can no longer assume an identity between prestige markets for academics and the populations to which works of scholarship are addressed. Moreover, prestige markets themselves have fragmented--the markets for prestige and advancement within a university may not be the same as markets for prestige  within globally dispersed fields.  And universities have been taking to measure the impacts of such prestige in distinct ways, parsing out rewards accordingly.  Beyond that, and though sometimes it tends to be overlooked in the quest for institutional and personal self interest, their is or ought to be a public duty to the production of scholarship that might call for the broadest possible distribution of works to spread knowledge to those without access to the university or to those business enterprises that make money from publication. 

More insidious are current efforts (I know some in professional schools) the object of which is to seek to assert institutional rights to faculty scholarship and then to hijack scholarly production of faculty, in the name of open access.  The effect, of course, is to transfer effective control of scholarly work from faculty to the institution, leaving, of course, the rights of publishers untouched.  Between the effort of publishers (for perfectly reasonable economic reasons) to capture for themselves most of the value of scholarly production, and of the university (for perfectly plausible reasons of controlling the production of its "servants" at least to the extent that the university might satisfy its conscience that all such work are at least hypothetically plausibly connected to employment) to capture for itself the prestige and distribution value of scholarship that remains. (See here).

The Committee on Libraries, Information Systems, and Technology of the Penn State University Faculty Senate, has sought to develop a reasonable middle way, one that maintains the strong bond between scholars and the institutions in which they are resident, publishers rights (and the logic of publication prestige systems), and the control of scholars over their work. The Committee has proposed a "Resolution on Open Access to Scholarly Publications" for consideration by the University Faculty Senate at its April 28, 2015 meeting (April 28, 2015 Senate Agenda (PDF)).  The Resolution seeks to balance the needs for open access and knowledge dissemination, with the needs of publishers, the protection of faculty rights to their work which represents a substantial amount of their working time and efforts. It builds on earlier work of the Committee and ought to be seriously considered as a benign step toward more vigorous access to knowledge for those who the university, and its academics, ought to serve.

The Problem With Data: Faculty Salary Reporting and the Management of Perception

 (Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2015)

Universities, and faculty organizations like the American Association of University Professors and the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), have published variations of faculty salary surveys for some time now.  The AAUP publishes its Annual Report on the Status of the Profession (the 2013-2014 Report may be accessed HERE).  SALT publishes its salary survey (the 2012-2013 Report may be accessed HERE). Universities usually make theirs available in some form their their faculty senates (for Penn State, see SENATE COMMITTEE ON FACULTY BENEFITS 2013-2014 Report on Faculty Salaries (Informational); tables may be accessed HERE). .

These are meant to serve a useful purpose--as an important contribution to informational transparency.  This transparency, in turn is meant to paint a picture of the state of faculty earning that can be used, as an authoritative data set, to further  positions and negotiating strategies,  of university administrators, faculty, legislators and the like.  It is also a valuable mechanism for managing public opinion about the state of the university and the privilege (or lack thereof) of a key university stakeholder.

All of this is well and good, and fair game, in the context of the politics of university administration, public policy development, and the operation of wage labor markets for university faculty labor talent.  Yet, data is a relational as well as an objective measure.  For policymakers, and especially for engagement, the choice of relational elements--the way data is packaged and the choice of data types to place in relationship to each other--will have a profound impact on the way on which the data is read and understood. More importantly, if done with some calculation, the careful presentation of relationships among data (including some excluding others) can be used to manage conclusions as well. This no doubt is usually inadvertent, but perhaps not always so. 

This semiotic insight is both powerful and so deeply embedded in our culture that it tends to go unnoticed.  This post considers how the way in which these relational markers work affect the presentation and utility of faculty salary surveys.    It also suggests the ways in which they might be managed and exploited.

Wellness Wars and High Deductible Plans--A University Obsession With Substantial Consequences Including for Shared Governance

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

The Report of the Penn State University Health Care Task Force has been circulated. The HCTF devoted much space, necessarily, to a critical examination of the University’s Wellness Plan roll out last year (e.g., The New Eugenics--The Private Sector, the University, and Corporate Health and Wellness Initiatives; The Wellness Wars Continue--A Task Force is Constituted and the Institutional Role of the Faculty is Reduced in Function).

But the Report also spotlighted an important element of the University’s benefits strategy that escaped much notice–high deductible benefit plans. This post considers some issues that faculty might examine as they turn from the Wellness Plan to this other strategic move on the benefits front that is a common strategy employed by universities as they seek to deal with the issue of benefit plan cost containment.

As many universities continue to buy ideas from their stables of benefits consultants (the rate and use of which and their benefits compared to their costs remaining substantially well hidden from any form of accountability), one idea has begun to resonate well--high deductible benefits plans.  These plans have much that is desirable in benefits plans--they offer the appearance of coverage and deliver less.

Managing Perception and Creating Reality Through Data Management--The Battle Over the "Best" Way to Understand MOOCs

I have recently posted about the habits of lazy and perhaps bad management as an impediment to the  development of MOOCs as an important element of university activity (Bad Management and the University Administrator: Giving Up on MOOCs?) and, as well, about the way in which assessment regimes are quickly replacing rule making as a means of governing institutions like universities (and its ill effects on shared governance) (Rulemaking Through the Back Door--Using Assessment Tools to Shape Education).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2014)

These two trends have made an appearance recently in the conceptual battles over the way in which the academy "understands" MOOCs.  Now the academic machinery has appeared to have been put in overdrive as academics begin to deploy strategically chosen premises and the data harvested in the service thereof, to support any number of ways of "definitively" understanding MOOCs.  The stakes are high.  As consensus develops around the "better" way of "understanding" MOOCs, these will be used as the foundation of policy choices by university officials (and the governmental regulators who oversee them) to make policy about the scope and direction of MOOC use within the academy. People love data--they pay less attention to the premises in the service of which it is harvested and deployed to support some conclusion or other.  Both may be altered to strategic good effect.

This is not to mock those efforts or to suggest, necessarily, bad faith, on the part of researchers,  Quite the reverse. It is their good faith that lends these efforts their power, and the willingness to avoid critical engagement--with "data". However, it does suggest both the contingency of these investigations, and the way they are necessarily embedded in the policy  debates around which they are conceived. This post notes one of those efforts,  Ho, Andrew Dean and Reich, Justin and Nesterko, Sergiy O and Seaton, Daniel Thomas and Mullaney, Tommy and Waldo, Jim and Chuang, Isaac, HarvardX and MITx: The First Year of Open Online Courses, Fall 2012-Summer 2013 (January 21, 2014). HarvardX Working Paper Series No. 1. This study is particularly interesting because it explores the effects of changing a core premise of MOOC evaluation, and determines, that changing that premise may have a substantial effect on measuring "value". It starts with an excellent analysis: Jennifer Howard, Completion Rates Aren't the Best Way to Judge MOOCs, Researchers Say, Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 22, 2014.  We can only hope that these reports will contribute to a more nuanced and helpful discussion of consequences--especially about the role of MOOCs in the university and the relationship of faculty to these.

Disseminating Knowledge Broadly--New Offerings From the Digital Commons Network

I have written about the way in which the efforts of the last decade to financially exploit the dissemination of knowledge has produced an increasingly class based system of knowledge dissemination in which the rich or well funded have access to knowledge denied to poorer individuals and institutions.  (E.g.,Open Access at Penn State: Scholarsphere (Dec., 14, 2012);   Between Scholar and University--Sharing Knowledge, Protecting Revenue and Control--Is the UCSF Approach Worth Considering (May 28, 2012); Opening Access: Course Proposals Archive at Penn State (June 1, 2012); Digital Humanities From the CIC (Oct. 6, 2012).

 (Image from Digitial Commons Network)

As a result, academics and academic institutions in developed states, and the wealthy elites in developing states have access to knowledge production denied to poorer individuals and institutions.  Publishers (but generally not the producers of knowledge) profit from this new market regime, and the perpetuation of systems of academic prestige based on publication through these knowledge exploiting and restricting enterprises compounds and deepens the effect, while hiding its financial objectives.Efforts by some publishers to permit the free circulation of older work is to be lauded as a nod in the right direction, but the pricing structures of new knowledge and the unwillingness, especially of certain market dominant publishers to contribute remains troubling.

It is in this environment that efforts like those of the Digitial Commons Network ought to be hailed and supported.  From their website: "The Digital Commons Network brings together free, full-text scholarly articles from hundreds of universities and colleges worldwide. Curated by university librarians and their supporting institutions, the Network includes a growing collection of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work." 

This post includes the latest efforts of that Network to spread knowledge freely. Additions are made frequently HERE. Visit often.

The Faculty Senate and Penn State Administrators Respond to Criticisms of the Penn State Wellness Program With My Analysis of Responses

Today the Penn State University Faculty Senate released the agenda for the first full Senate meeting of the Academic Year (HERE).  

(Pix from Penn State OHR)

As part of the meeting agenda, the University Faculty Senate will facilitate what it calls a "Special Presentation by David Gray, Senior Vice President for Finance and Business/Treasurer, Susan McGarry Basso, Vice President for Human Resources, and Highmark Representatives Take Care of Your Health Initiative" for which 30-40 minutes has been allocated for presentation and discussion (HERE).

As part of that Special Presentation, Mr. Grey and Ms Basso will present a version of their responses to a carefully crafted set of questions sent to both several weeks ago by the Senate leadership. This post  includes both the questions forwarded and the written responses of Mr. Grey and Ms. Basso. I invite you to read and assess thew value of both the questions posed and the answers given both in terms of their relevance to the concerns of faculty, their value in exposing the failures of shared governance and the mistakes in the conception and roll out of the wellness program, if any. An analysis of the answers given follows.

A Better Approach to Faculty Centered Discussion of Technology Enhanced Education

Cash strapped universities, including many in the CIC, have used their claims of desperation to do two things: first they have increasingly ceded authority over education programs and methods to their Finance Vice Presidents.  Then they have tended to make decisions, driven my the need to generate cash, which they then impose on their institutions with only the barest formal appearance of faculty and staff engagement. Though they tend to fool themselves  into believing that all is well, this sort of ham and high handed approach to programmatic innovation will tend to erode faculty buy in, promote the move to contract faculty (much more docile and cheaper) and ultimately produce a crisis of reputation.

Top tier public institutions appear to be adopting a different approach, one that other public and publicly assisted institutions, increasingly managing from behind the high walls of their academic Versailles, might do well to consider.  This post reports on the way in which the University of Texas has chosen to approach the issue of technology enhanced education.

"Pigs Get Fat; Hogs Get Slaughtered"--On Strategies for Getting Money Out of MOOCs

The idiom, "Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered"  reminds us that being too greedy can ruin even the best laid plans or ambitions.  And so it appears to be the case with university administration and MOOCs.  

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

Like children with little sense of control--and no accountability to anyone with the sense to remind officials with far too much unconstrained power of the dangers of obsessive behavior translated into policies affecting the university, University administrations have been falling all over themselves to squeeze money out of MOOCs.  This post considers some of the ways in which universities may slaughter MOOCs and one example of the way in which administrators will change the landscape of MOOC development that will impede rather than facilitate its development as the price of a short term search for money. A pity but when the finance side of the house grows far too influential, academic quality assumes an entirely different character. 

Engaged Scholarship--De-Centering Faculty From Research and Teaching in a Relentless March Toward a Training Model for Middle Tier Universities?

The financial crises of the first two decades of the 21st century has forced innovation on universities.  Forced to compete for decreasing numbers of students less able to afford increasing costs of traditional education and more likely to encounter university education instrumentally a factor in strategic entry into labor markets, universities have proceeded with profound changes the effects of which will not be apparent to most for years to come.  (A great student perspective on the crisis of university education may be accessed here).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

Most of these changes have been well veiled by a combination of well developed rhetoric of passivity ("we can only respond to the market" rhetoric, whose falsity is only augmented by the profound effect on markets that responses produce especially by the largest university players) and by restructuring that increasingly re characterizes most important aspects of university operations as administrative and financial and thus beyond the reach of the traditional governance mechanics of academic governance. These changes have found ready acceptance and the culture of university governance has been affected so that faculty, trustees, administrators and students have begun to understand the university as cultural object in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

At middle tier universities the changes have been evidenced in a  number of ways.  One of the most interesting is what has been euphemistically pushed by senior administrators as "pedagogical efficacy" (see here). In the form of a movement toward "engaged scholarship" some aspects of this drive involve the active complicity of well placed faculty.  The ways in which influential faculty have rushed to rework their academic cultures to more comfortably conform within new markets driven operational cultures at universities provides a useful basis for understanding the nature and direction of changes to the "business" of the academy. In the process of being "helpful", these faculty efforts that mean to change the culture of the academic enterprise, may transform the nature of the academic enterprise, from an autonomous production model driven by its own objectives to one that becomes a secondary element of wage labor markets and the enterprises that drive them. This essay considers whether recent movements to compel academic conformity to so-called "engaged scholarship" might provide a good example of the profound and perhaps profoundly disturbing example of faculty complicity in movements from education to training models, models in which the academic enterprise may lose its autonomy and thus transformed, more explicitly serve other masters. 

Do MOOC Faculty Have a Responsibility For How Courses are Used?

I have been looking at the way that massive open online courses (MOOCs) have begun to affect the control relationships between faculty and administration over the control of course construction and program development.  (See, e.g., Debating MOOCs: Shared Governance, Quality Control, Outsourcing, and Control of Curriculum at Harvard, Duke, American, San Jose State; MOOCs at Penn State; An Update).

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

The issue of MOOCs raises a more interesting issue--the effects of MOOCs on more sharply drawing the hierarchical structures among universities.  One of the consequences of thisvertical ordering of universities is the potential that MOOCs could be used to substitute the faculty of higher reputed schools for those of universities of lower reputation; or as the Philosophy Department faculty at San José State put it in "an open letter, the philosophy professors warned that such collaboration could mark beginning of a long-term effort to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”" (Steve Kolowich, "MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility for How Courses Are Used," Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2013). 

It is clear that issue of the use of MOOCs to displace faculty raises important ethical and operational issues for administrations at all universities--both exporting and importing institutions.  But it also raises the related issue: "Are professors who develop and teach MOOCs responsible for how those MOOCs are used?" (Steve Kolowich, "MOOC Professors Claim No Responsibility, supra.)

This post suggests emerging views.

Growth Rates in Adminstrative Versus Faculty Position--A View From the Operational Level

I have been speaking to the issue that many people refer to as "administrative bloat."

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

Administrative Bloat by Deans and Other Unit Administrators--An Overlooked but Important Source of Direct Attack on Shared Governance;

Administrative Bloat and Managing Faculty-Administrative Conflict; Address of J. Paul Robinson, Chair of the Purdue University Faculty Senate;

Faculty Senate to Consider Issues of Administrative Bloat at Penn State in Wake in of Similar Action at Other Universities;

Statement of Senate Chair Made at the December 4, 2012 Penn State University Faculty Senate Meeting--Is the Senate Fatally Ineffective?;

Upcoming Forensic on Fixed Term Faculty Policy at Penn State;

Informal Report: Faculty Senate meets for final meeting of 2012;

During this year our University Planning Committee has been looking at the issue of administrative hiring and its relationship to faculty hiring.  This post presents their preliminary findings.  I hope it can add to the discussion about the relationship between administrative and faculty hiring hiring, including its effects on the move toward changing the hiring mix between contract and tenured packages.  Administrative choices in firing may well produce "facts" that appear to make inevitable faculty hiring choices that might neither be inevitable or factual.

Official Minutes of the Senate Council Meeting of January 15 2013

The University Faculty Senate Council met on January 15, 2013.  The official minutes are produced below.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2013)

A couple of points are worth emphasizing, principally because they are well buried in the official minutes.  The first touches on my remarks about the role of the Senate Council.  For some time now I have become increasingly concerned about the legitimacy of a Senate structure in which much of the basic decisions  at the highest level are taken without review by a small group of up to five people (Chair, Chair Elect, Immediate Past Chair (sometimes) and the Executive Director), one of whom is neither elected nor accountable directly to the representative body of the Senate.  The process is neither as transparent as it could be nor is it an inclusive as it ought to be.  It furthers the isolation of the leadership group and produces the remoteness and disconnection that was, in large part, an object of severe criticism in the Freeh Group report when considering a similar tendency among senior administrators before November 2011. One way to reduce the potential for and the appearance of an anti-democratic  process is to more intensely involve the Senate Council in the sort of work now routinely undertaken by the smaller group.  It ought to function more like the Penn State President's Council than as a body that is either viewed as an impediment to action or as something that must be managed to a coerced conformity to realities dictated from--views held in the past. I have done what I can to engage the Senate Council more often and more deeply, but I think structural reform is also necessary. It is my hope that the Senate Self Study Committee will take this opinion seriously and seek to restructure our organization to hard wire a more engaged and involved Senate Council.

The second touches on the report expected form the Senate Board of Trustees Committee headed by John Nichols. The work of that Committee in the view of our Board of Trustees has morphed from a tangential consideration of the relationship between the Senate and the Board of Trustees to something like a Senate report and recommendations on Board restructuring.  The confidence of our Board on this Committee is gratefully acknowledged and appreciated.  We hope the Report is taken seriously.  But we also expect that the Report will constitute only one part of what may be a more comprehensive Senate report to the Board of Trustees.  It is possible that once circulated, the Senate may wish to add commentary or recommendations; it is likely that I will in my capacity as Chair. My focus will be on the form of board monitoring of university activities and the autonomous role of the Senate in the fulfillment of that duty.  It is to be hoped that the Board considers all of these as it moves forward.

Open Access at Penn State: Scholarsphere

I have been thinking about open access issues at universities.  E.g.,  Between Scholar and University--Sharing Knowledge, Protecting Revenue and Control--Is the UCSF Approach Worth Considering (May 28, 2012); Opening Access: Course Proposals Archive at Penn State (June 1, 2012); Digital Humanities From the CIC (Oct. 6, 2012).

 (Pix from http://www.psu.edu/)

I was pleased to note that Penn State has been moving to embrace open access. 

"ScholarSphere is a secure repository service enabling the Penn State community to share its research and scholarly work with a worldwide audience. Faculty, staff, and students can use ScholarSphere to collect their work in one location and create a durable and citeable record of their papers, presentations, publications, data sets, or other scholarly creations. Through this service, Penn State researchers can also comply with grant-funding-agency requirements for sharing and managing research data. " (Penn State, What is Scholarsphere))

Set our below is a draft of an Informational Report recently repared by our Penn State University Facult Senate Committee on Libraries, Information Systems and Technology discussing Penn State's Scholarsphere. Please cionsider sending comments and suggestions.  In any case I  hope our community takes advantage of the opportunity and provides the sort of feedback necessary to make it better.

Digital Humanities From the CIC

The CIC was pleased recently to announce the report by the CIC Digital Humanities Committee that is the product of the first CIC Digital Humanities Summit, held at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in April 2012. The paper is said to reflect the consensus reached by the sixty faculty, librarians, and administrators attending that there are significant shared requirements necessary to foster thriving Digital Humanities communities, and a common belief in the importance of interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and open access and open source models.

Read More HERE.

And Now for Something Completely Different: The University of Akron's Adhoc Post-Tenure Under-Appreciated Band Composition: "Bored of Trustees"

Penn State and the University of Virginia have been at the center of movements producing changes in the relationships between Board of Trustees and senior administration.  In the case of the University of Virginia, the changes were ignited internally; in Penn State's case the changes were forced from outside. These are serious matters that will re shape post secondary education for a generation.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2012)

Now comes the University of Akron's Adhoc Post-Tenure Under Appreciated Band (Steve Aby, Joseph LaRose, and David Witt) to remind us that even the most important subject can be observed from a variety of perspectives, some of them providing a momentary smile in the middle of the serious business of governance.  And so, without more ado I invite you to listen to the mp3 recording of their song, "Bored of Trustees" which may be accessed below.

A More Engaged and Transparent Board of Trustees at Penn State

Karen Peetz, the Chair of the Penn State Board of Trustees has just released a letter to alumni.

(Board of Trustees Chair Karen Peetz; Image from Penn State Live)

The letter, which is reproduced below, is worth reading.  It provides an indication of the emergence of a new governance culture on the Board of Trustees, one that should be translated into the operations of the university as an institution, including not just the highest levels of Penn State's administration (where substantial progress is being made) but more importantly at the operational level--chancellors and deans, where progress varies wildly from substantial to none--and  University Faculty Senate, where a similar approach is needed. But the letter also provides some clues about the Board's sense of the challenges that lie ahead, and the importance of each.  

In the coming months, I hope this sort of engagement becomes more interactive.  I look forward to the Board's assessment of the alumni opinion survey (more on that in a later post).  I also welcome greater board involvement in the strategic planning process and in helping shape, improve, and protect, the reputation and operation of the university. An educational institution ought to respect its past and its traditions, but it ought as well to avoid becoming nothing more than a shrine to the past bundled in a collection of endlessly repeated rituals offered as a substitute for forward movement. This university is poised to become a global leader in a world quite different in its expectations of leading educational institutions (and its institutional stakeholders) from that in which most of us were acculturated and some of us are more comfortable. There is much to be done to make this happen. This is part of a good start.  

Opening Access: Course Proposals Archive at Penn State

I have started writing about open access recently (Between Scholar and University--Sharing Knowledge, Protecting Revenue and Control--Is the UCSF Approach Worth Considering, May 28, 2012).  Now comes news of an important step forward, in the form of access to the archive of course proposals at Penn State.

(Pix (c) Larry Catá Backer 2012)

The project was a number of years in the making and would not have been possible without the collaboration of the libraries, the Faculty Senate and critically the financial support and encouragement of the Provost.