May 14, 2013 Dear President Barchi, I so regret that I was not able to meet you personally during your visit to the Newark campus of Rutgers, and I do hope you will allow the MFA Program to host you next fall at our 43 Bleeker Street townhouse, whose walls are adorned with Barry Moser woodcuts of writers ranging from Charles Dickens to Wole Soyinka. We invite you to attend one of our Writers At Newark Reading Series events, and stay for...
I am still worried by the final paragraph of your letter, including your request that we drop all discussions of the process by which this office was conceived, established, and staffed;
The unsung strength of Rutgers is its humanities programs.
An open letter from my colleague Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel. Dear Colleagues: Some of you know that I had an exchange with the President in the last faculty forum held in New Brunswick on April 24. When I complained about the lack of venues to send input about the Strategic Planning, he said I had his personal email and that I could send him a message with my comments. This morning I sent him my message, an essay with some notes about the...
Was it really just two years ago that everyone hooked into the Rutgers Emergency Alert System (upwards of 40,000 students, faculty, and staff) received this terrifying text message, three times in succession, in the early morning hours of April 16th, 2011: As I’ve written about elsewhere, this text was anything but an “early warning.” Around midnight, the first of three shootings occurred on or near the university’s...
Did you catch that news conference Friday? The one following the firing of RU men’s basketball coach Mike Rice and the resignations of RU Athletic Direction Tim Pernetti, RU interim chief counsel John Wolf, and Jimmy Martelli, assistant basketball coach? Kind of a big deal ’round these parts. It began quite oddly. There’s President Barchi, who just days earlier had issued a statement that he and Tim Pernetti, RU’s...
Why use Twitter? I get asked this frequently when I’m on the road, meeting with teachers and administrators. On first blush, it seems like a ridiculous waste of time. “Micro-blogging,” a term coined to describe the process of posting in 140 character blasts, invites ridicule: I know, because I made fun of the process for two years before I thought it might be more productive for me to understand its appeal. The Dumb...
In the previous lesson, I outlined the good, the dumb, and the riskier aspects of using Twitter. The risk, you’ll recall, arises once you shift from being someone who follows other tweeters to being someone who tweets. In this lesson, I want to continue the discussion of tweeting as part of the process of self-curating. To begin, imagine that you’ve just finished writing something that you think others would benefit from...
My last post presented a case study of how print news reports on plagiarism in the university. In this post, I want to reverse the poles: a student paper publishes a letter to the editor; the letter is picked up by an online scandal aggregator and turned into a news story. And the story jumps from site to site, makes its way to MSNBC and from there jumps the Atlantic and appears in the Daily Mail. What can we learn about 21st century writing...
It’s early December, end of the fall 2011 semester. What’s above the fold in the paper version of the Sunday edition of New Jersey’s biggest paper, The Star Ledger? Herman Cain suspending his presidential campaign? In-depth coverage of the case against now disgraced former governor Jon Corzine and now former CEO of MF Global? A Rutgers student’s effort to clear her name of plagiarism? Plagiarism, of course. The...
