Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Peyton Place North... 

Yesterday I mentioned a situation that in a perverse way made me feel better about the situation in the US. Here's one at the University of North Dakota that makes me feel better about SCSU.

Believe me, this story has everything. Student walkouts, faculty discord, restraining orders that keep a department from teaching, divorce, deaths under suspicious circumstances....if it were one of those lurid novels it would be a real page turner.

It's easy to write this off as just academic sillyness, but having worked in the real world I can attest that it happens there as well. Did I tell you about the time a colleague's wife came into work and shot him? (I'll skip to the end...he survived and they were still married the last I heard).

But the paragraph above really ignores the real victims of what is going on. I think the article does a good job of illustrating the problems a situation like this causes for students. You would think that professors could act professionally enough to minimize the effects of their personal problems on the primary reasons they are employed...the students. Unfortunately, we have lots of examples that tell us this isn't so...both here at SCSU and, apparently, at UND.

h/t pm by way of kb

jw

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