By Matt Reed. Thanks to Melina Patterson for highlighting this one. It’s a bill for a semester at the University of Houston in 1975. The total is $152.50. Correcting for inflation, that would be slightly over $700 now. More...

By Matt Reed. Melinda Karp’s article about colleges struggling to move from reform proposals to actual implementation struck a chord with me. I’ve been in the “why don’t they see it?” position enough times to have obsessed about this for a while. More...

By Matt Reed. In college, entirely by accident, I discovered that the laundry room in my dorm made an excellent study space. Something about the white noise of the dryers provided just enough external stimulation to allow my restless self to focus, without getting distracted. I carried that into grad school, where the local laundromat became a favorite study spot. More...

By Matt Reed. Subtraction is a nasty trick. This week I did the math and realized that, a few weeks ago, I passed my ten-year anniversary as a chief academic officer at a community college: seven years at the first, three and counting at the second. Add five years as a dean at another community college before that, and it has been a while. More...

By Matt Reed. I remember raising an eyebrow when I learned that “sophistication” and “sophistry” share a root. They both refer to the Sophists, a school of thought in pre-Socratic Greece who were known for their facility with language. As I learned it, they were sometimes understood to prize the style of a statement over its actual truth; the point of language, for them, was persuasion. More...

By Matt Reed. Years of working in academic administration, and writing about it, have taught me the wisdom of reader-response theory. Statements that seem almost tautological can be interpreted entirely differently, depending on what the listeners or readers bring to the table with them. More...