The Phytophactor

Things have really changed. There was no stigma to attending a state college.  And certainly no one was in the business of bribing admission...

One is tempted to ask, "Are there any other kind?"  Actually, yes, for which TPP is most grateful for his. But admini-minds at the...

The tattooed professor is new to TPP, but TPP likes this guy, and we likes his teaching manifesto as well. For the first 2/3 of his career...

Success Week. What a great euphemism! Somebody (Asst. dean of students?) will claim this as a great achievement and get rewarded for it. So ...

The whole idea of public higher education, our state-wide systems of community colleges, undergraduate universities, and graduate universiti...

This editorial from the U. Minn. Daily student newspaper really shows the state of student entitlement.  Do professors "owe" stu...

The very latest example of trying to improve a college by running it more like a business is playing out at Mt. St. Mary's college , a n...

TPP must say that he can only remember one time that a student consulted his syllabus, and then it was to practice for a career in contract ...

Mizzou has been in the news and most of it isn't good. TPP spent a couple of years at Mizzou in his early career and worked with some re...

Once you've been around a college or university long enough you learn Adminspeak. For those of you new to this jargon, here's a few ...

One of the good things, a tiny silver lining to a dark cloud, of having no salary or pension that depends upon the state, or not having any ...

Wut happened? Universities are such nice quiet places all summer, and then bam!  Something happens! It's noisy, it's crowded, it...

Quite a few people have been asking TPP how his retirement is going.  In answer: It's going well. You see everyone's big worries are...

It was an exceptionally quiet Monday morning. TPP did not see a single other person while walking to the coffee shoppe. It had been raining ...

The GnOPe in particular wants to destroy the one remarkably good thing the USA ever constructed: a public education system. The cynical ...

A cheerful memo arrived just the other day.  It informed faculty that the Building Service Workers (aka custodians) would no longer empty br...

September has always been a hectically busy month, so much so that it was never much fun, and yet it's a nice month, one that starts wit...

“When I graduate from Duke University with a liberal-arts degree…, I will never have taken a physics class..., I won’t have studied organi...

Student Debt Isn’t the Problem. Colleges Are. We need to make universities responsible for their students’ outcomes. It is egregious...

For some time now, since the news of this first appeared, TPP has been going to write about students requesting "trigger warnings"...