UGE Budget

Everybody talks about the budget, but nobody does anything about it.

Adapted from Mark Twain.

The legislature delivered a higher education bill a couple of weeks ago, and the University’s budget office delivered a collegiate budget to CLA on May 31. As I described in a blog post last fall, central typically comes up with state O&M or tuition funding to cover our compensation package (2% this year), requires us to “reallocate” (i.e., cut) a certain amount, and then allows us to ask for money back in the form of requests to make investments in various areas. This year CLA’s reallocation was $1.6 million, and our new funding for investment was $150,000. Ouch. That leaves a mark.

2017 C. Eugene Allen Award

Last night (Monday, April 24), our very own Nanette Hanks won the 2017 C. Eugene Allen Award for Innovative International Initiatives at the GPS Global Gala. Nanette has been involved in, and a champion of, learning abroad programs for many years, including teaching a global seminar every other year on the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. Congratulations, Nanette!

Annual Reviews

Long time, no blog posts. First of all, let me apologize for the snow this week. The family minivan has an appointment to get the winter tires removed and the summer tires installed, and the gods of irony will get their due.

Liberal Education III

When we last left our heroes, they were struggling to figure out what liberal education should be at the University of Minnesota. In today’s episode, they update their ideas based on discussion at the third liberal education open forum.

Liberal Education II

The second faculty and staff forum on the future of liberal education requirements at UMNTC was on February 23. My biggest realization while thinking about all that has been said lately about liberal education is that the framing of the discussion as “What do our students need to know?” is not the right starting point. The right starting point “Who do we want our students to be?” I don’t mean who should be admitted, but rather what should our graduates be like? The answer to that question leads us down a path toward our goal rather than simply creating “A Thing To Do.”

Choose your words wisely...

… or at least correctly. A couple weeks ago I wrote a post titled “In our Nation of Immigrants.” I used the word immigrant because in North America, everyone’s ancestors came here from somewhere else. How long your ancestors have been here might be measured in years or decades or centuries or millennia, but we all originally came from somewhere else, and thus I said immigrant.

Liberal Education

We are the College of Liberal Arts, but the University of Minnesota also has Liberal Education requirements for all students. What we call liberal education other institutions call general education or distribution requirements, but whatever you call these requirements, almost all institutions have them. These requirements effectively spell out the kinds of things that an institution believes an educated person should know or understand. Here at the U, these are split into core (disciplinary groupings such as mathematical thinking, literature, history, etc.) and themes (subject matter groupings such as the environment or technology and society).