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Fellow Academics Defend Avital Ronell After Harassment Claims | The Atlantic

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While it’s unclear how much demonstrations of support from one’s colleagues determine the outcome for the person accused of misconduct, there have been several examples of powerful men in academia who faced disciplinary action but were allowed to stay on the job. In some cases, male professors managed to skirt punishment altogether for years, even as egregious allegations of sexual harassment mounted.

One factor: Universities are hierarchical. At the apex is the chief executive officer—often a president or chancellor—and under that person are the deans of individual schools within the university; then there are the heads of the school’s often-decentralized academic departments, who typically enjoy immense influence over departmental decisions, from salaries to curriculum.

Less officially, tenured professors hold a great deal of sway, determining their own research and teaching priorities while getting some say over departmental decisions. At the bottom: the untenured academics—hourly wage adjuncts, grant-funded researchers, contracted instructors, and the like.

Source: Fellow Academics Defend Avital Ronell After Harassment Claims – The Atlantic

A New Approach to Developing the Whole Leader | GovExec.com

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Survey after survey of CEOs suggests developing leadership talent is mission critical for future success. Many of those same surveys describe the reality that organizations are falling far short of meeting their needs for leader development.

My experience gained in the trenches over three-decades in the tech sector corroborates Jeffrey Pfeffer’s conclusions. I spent gobs of money on training, coaching, and outside resources, yet in hindsight, I perceive I was complicit in the game of event and check-box development.

It wasn’t evil intent—no conscientious objective professional or executive disagrees with the goal of developing more and more effective leaders—but it was an outcome of poor prioritization and a general lack of whole-person thinking about leader development. And while we sent people to some remarkable training and coaching organizations, those were prestigious checkmarks, not sustaining and whole-person approaches.

Source: A New Approach to Developing the Whole Leader – Promising Practices – Management – GovExec.com

Should We Let English Eat the World?

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Skull Face is radicalized by the notion that the English language is taking over the world and aligning human thought with Anglo-American interests.

A few dominant languages do, indeed, seem to be taking over.

Every two weeks, a language disappears.

By 2100, up to 90 percent of languages might be gone, overtaken by the likes of Spanish, Russian, Mandarin—and English.

A headline last week from The Guardian read: “Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet.”

For even a fraction of that 90 percent of languages to survive, The Guardian suggests, “we’re going to have to start thinking of smaller languages not as endangered species worth saving, but as equals worth learning.”

But try telling that to children in developing countries.

Source: Should We Let English Eat the World?

Universities, chasing the startup economy, reshape urban real estate | Curbed

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Universities have always been anchor institutions, large landowners, and significant economic forces in their cities. But shifts in the economy and academia have left many seeking new financial partners: According to Sharon Haar, a professor of architecture at the University of Michigan and author of The City as Campus, universities’ public funding stream has dried up, the tuition funding stream is tapped out, and they invest an inordinate amount of their own money in research.

“Universities have always made money off the research products of their faculty, that’s not new,” says Haar. “But increasingly, the need to monetize research has come to the fore, in a way that it wasn’t in the past.”

Source: Universities, chasing the startup economy, reshape urban real estate – Curbed

Arne Duncan on ‘How Schools Work’ and How to Fix Them | The Atlantic

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You have to constantly be learning. We have to be very clear about our goals—whether it’s college-going rates or access to pre-K—and then allow a lot of flexibility, a lot of innovation, to achieve those goals. What works best in rural Montana may look a little different from what it is in Anacostia in Washington, D.C., or in California.

If you’re clear about your goals and creating real-time adjustments, you’re learning and getting smarter. You’re never going to anticipate every potential bump in the road, but if you’re nimble and thoughtful and pragmatic—and not dogmatic—you can effect real change.

I don’t only blame politicians—I blame voters. We don’t vote based on education at any level—local, state, Congress, president; we don’t hold anyone accountable for results, voting based on whether a politician is going to help increase access to pre-K, is going to increase high-school graduation rates, and so on. Education should be the ultimate nonpartisan issue.

Source: Arne Duncan on ‘How Schools Work’ and How to Fix Them – The Atlantic

Stop wasting your time on these four popular leadership styles

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If there’s a time-saving trick for getting what you want, most of us will be willing to try it. Unfortunately, a lot of the hacks that are intended to make us better leaders simply waste our time, says Marc Effron.

Leadership fads often start with a legitimate author—someone backed by Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton, for example—and an enticing idea, such as feeling more powerful or authentic, says Effron.

Good leadership techniques involve setting big goals, networking, and excelling through experiences,” says Effron.

Source: Stop wasting your time on these four popular leadership styles

Smart Companies Hire People Who Don’t Believe In Their Mission | GovExec.com

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Hire too few employees who have passion for your mission and motivation will suffer, Adam Grant says.

But hire too many, and “you’ll end up more vulnerable to groupthink and tunnel vision, and more resistant to change. You get evangelists who single-mindedly spread the purpose without questioning the side effects and unintended consequences.”

Source: Smart Companies Hire People Who Don’t Believe In Their Mission – Promising Practices – Management – GovExec.com

Global Entanglements, Not Just Subprime Mortgages, Root of 2008 Financial Crisis | US News

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nullAt one level, the global financial system is significantly more robust. It would be wrong to underestimate the extent of the recapitalization, particularly of American banking.

The big banks that were the big risk factor are more robust than they were then, there’s no doubt. With regard to Europe, the story is less optimistic. The damage has been more long-lasting. This was emphatically a transatlantic crisis. And to that extent, in Europe the damage is still visible in the enormous non-performing loans and the fragility of the balance sheet of a bank like Deutsche Bank, which was once a key player.

But the bigger point to make is that, though America’s banks were recapitalized, there was no structural change.

We are still in a world in which we have massive, ‘too big to fail’ financial entities that, insofar as we have a government willing to regulate them, we have a minute-by-minute, second-by-second, kind of regulatory situation that we’re in. We have not structurally stabilized the financial system.

We have recapitalized and made more robust essentially a very similar system as the one that failed in ’08. Now, that’s not to be underestimated. An event like 2008 is extremely rare, but if you ask whether we’ve changed anything fundamental, the answer is no.

Source: Global Entanglements, Not Just Subprime Mortgages, Root of 2008 Financial Crisis | The Report | US News

Putin’s Russia becomes Trump’s America

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In that world, there is no such thing as truth.

In Putin’s Russia, according to Timothy Snyder, “The ink of political fiction is blood.” Politicians instigate terrorist acts in order to stir up “righteous patriotism.

”Masculinity and the demonization of gays and women becomes “an argument against democracy;”

libel becomes a criminal offense, and the definition of treason is “expanded to include the provision of information to nongovernmental organizations beyond Russia, which made telling the truth over email a high crime.”

Protesters are dealt with violently and then described as “agents of Europe.”

And a war, the annexation of Crimea, is waged and and simultaneously denied.

In Putin’s Russia, writes Snyder, “Factuality was not a constraint.”

As one of their leading communications operatives explains, “You can just say anything. Create realities.”

And the head of Russia Today (RT) said “There is no such thing as objective reporting.”

Putin’s Russia has affected Trump’s America in ways that go beyond their involvement in the 2016 campaign. In Trump’s America, there is no such thing as truth.

The most amazing thing about Trump is the way he holds on to his lies in spite of clear evidence to the contrary.

Source: Putin’s Russia becomes Trump’s America

The idea of ‘a Muslim world’ is both modern and misleading | Aeon Essays

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The idea of an ancient clash between the Muslim World and the Christian World is a dangerous and modern myth.

It relies on fabricated misrepresentations of separate Islamic and Western geopolitical and civilizational unities. Pan-Africanism and Pan-Asianism offer a better context for understanding Pan-Islamism. All three emerged in the late 19th century, at the height of the age of empire, and as counters to Anglo-Saxon supremacy and the white man’s civilizing mission.

Pan-Islamists in the age of empire did not have to convince fellow Muslims about the global unity of their co-religionists. By racializing their Muslim subjects with references to their religious identity, colonizer created the conceptual foundations of modern Muslim unity.

At the time, the British, Dutch, French and Russian empires ruled the majority of the world’s Muslims. Like Pan-Africanists and Pan-Asianists, the first Pan-Islamists were intellectuals who wanted to counter the slights, humiliations and exploitation of Western colonial domination.

Source: The idea of ‘a Muslim world’ is both modern and misleading | Aeon Essays