Either wins the race or is tedious and boring. Or both. At 2:15pm I said, OK, I'm going to go through my big stack of stuff for 45 minutes and make a crack in the database of resources I'm compiling. At 3pm I had read about 5 pages of 1 source, having done actual work work instead (don't you love that I prefer work?). Now at 4:15pm I've gone through one source. Well, I guess that's one more than I had gone through before.
The upshot is that I now have some actual, fact-based questions for Thursday's interview. The two important, educational leadership questions I saw emerge as I was reading dealt with 1) academic freedom and the establishment of NDEA Language/Area Studies Centers (the report was careful to state that because the universities needed to provide matching funds, this kept federal hands out of the mix because it was encouraging the growth of activities in which the universities were already interested); and 2) the need for area studies to "root" themselves in the established university structure. Because the programs were/are multidisciplinary, receiving a major or a PhD in a non-departmental program dooms one to failure in the current academic structure. Thus the centers need to align people from various disciplines.
I could spend a year writing about how that may or may not be the case... I won't.. suffice to say that what if we were to shake it up and make a language/area studies program that was a department? What if all departments were multidisciplinary? The real world is multidisciplinary... maybe it would provide a better link to industry, gov't etc for academia.
Anyway. Back to whatever it is I'm doing.
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