By Matt Reed. My friend and occasional partner-in-crime Paula Krebs has a good piece over in the Chronicle about that. With requisite circumspection, she outlines what a colleague of mine calls “hate-pril,” or the month when everyone’s fuses are at their shortest. More...

By Matt Reed. Every so often an idea takes hold in policy circles so quickly that nobody in those circles notices that it’s insane. “Skin in the game” for student loans is one of those ideas. But Massachusetts has come up with a variation that’s actually smart, so I’m hoping it displaces the current version. (And I won’t dwell on pride of authorship for having published a similar idea in 2006). More...

By Matt Reed. Apparently Case Western Reserve University Law School thinks it has found a way to make co-deans work. It appears to be a sort of job-sharing, except that both of them work full-time. More...

By Matt Reed. The institutional setting is different from my own, but I recognize the habit of mind.  A few thoughts, before I ask my wise and worldly readers to suggest what I’ve missed. More...

By Matt Reed. A few days ago the whole family was watching tv together when someone onscreen made a reference to the Cold War. The Girl, 11, asked “how did THAT start?” 
The best I could come up with in the moment was “it’s a long story.” I’m not proud of that. More...

By Matt Reed. Like much of the East Coast, we’ve been hit recently with heavy winds and their attendant damage. On Monday the campus actually lost power for about an hour in the early afternoon as crews worked on repairing a couple of poles near campus that trees had taken down. More...

By Matt Reed. If you haven’t seen Tim Burke’s latest, check it out.
Budgets look different at the Swarthmores of the world than at most community colleges. More...

By Matt Reed. Should your employer be able to search your phone at any time?
Apparently the public colleges in Minnesota are claiming a right to search any device -- even personally owned ones -- that contain any work-related email, texts, or data. More...