Snow Days
I wasn’t certain that there would be a newsletter this week. We had intermittent power yesterday, but full power today. And sometimes we have connections to the internet and sometimes we don’t. We’ll see what happens. I grew up in Oklahoma City and we had real snow then. Not often, but I do have a memory of…
Read MoreTime, Money, Space
Finding time. Taking time. Losing time. Wasting time. And that’s just a short list, isn’t it? It’s interesting to think about all of the ways we talk about time. We talk much the same way about money and space, don’t we? It’s no surprise that these may be the most precious resource on a college campus.…
Read MoreConversations That Matter
My first year at SMU was Andrea’s senior year. (Not her real name.) She was a leader on campus and in student government meaning we had a number of conversations over the year we were both on the SMU campus. Once she graduated, she went to graduate school in education and later to Washington, D.C.…
Read MorePublic and Private Leadership
On Monday, Seth Godin’s blog caught my attention. He was writing about famous conductors. What we see is an hour or two of them standing on stage “wear(ing) expensive clothes, mak(ing) dramatic gestures and receiving(ing) ovations.” We see the public version of leadership. But Godin follows that with a list of actions and behaviors that we…
Read MorePracticing Nonviolence
It’s no surprise that on Monday my social media feed was filled with quotes by Martin Luther King, Jr. as well as reminders that it’s one thing to post quotes, but it’s another to attempt to live out his teachings. Like many people, I struggle with the practical applications of practicing nonviolence. At the macrolevel,…
Read MoreAccepting Responsibility
“Yes, I was throwing eggs, but I didn’t throw THAT egg.” said the graduate student who had been joyously riding around in a car with his friend lobbing eggs at cars and passersby. “That egg” was the one that had attracted the attention of a campus police officer. The student was convinced that he didn’t deserve a…
Read MoreThe Fun of Beginning
My maternal grandmother taught me embroidery when I was ten or so and along the way, I’ve added needlepoint and knitting to my set of handicraft skills. This means that most of the time I have one or more projects in progress, whether or not I’m actively working on them. And year after year, project…
Read MoreTitle Waves
As you might imagine, I debated for a bit before I decided to wade into the topic of titles today. If you’ve been on social media the past few days or the op-ed section of many newspapers you know there has been, well, let’s call it a discussion, about the use of the title ‘doctor’…
Read MoreTwo Contradictory Ideas
As I began thinking about this week’s newsletter, I thought about a conversation I had recently with a client. Her college needed her to grow her program, but they were at capacity for classroom space. And of course, one had to wonder why this was urgent because who knew when they would be in the…
Read MorePlease, Tell Me a Story
In 2005, Jossey-Bass published a book titled Living the Questions: Essays Inspired by the Work and Life of Parker J. Palmer. Regular readers of this newsletter know I’m a fan of Parker’s work and I’ve had the opportunity to meet him personally so I’m also a fan of him as a person. This particular book…
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