Category: From the dean

Two things happen in the run-up to Spring Break. Generally, we don’t speak of the two things, and we give people that “I’m in the dark” look when people do speak of the two things. But I’m going to break with centuries of Spring Break tradition and bring the two things out into the open. Continue reading “Spring break is in the air”

By now, we all know that we have to certify attendance for our classes at the beginning of each semester. And by now, many of us have gotten those irritating nag-emails about following through — even though we just got a confirmation email saying we certified! A pretty significant subset of those who have received one of those nags has insisted — rightly — that the attendance certification was done on time and blamed getting tagged with the “you didn’t follow through” message on technology — wrongly, it turns out. Continue reading “Yes, I did certify my attendance!”

Announcing the next dean’s walkabout: Round Rock Campus!

I’ll be on campus Wednesday, February 21, from 12:00 to 2:00 PM, based in Raha and Vanessa’s office (FOLA, in RRC 1204.14). Come by for a chat, or better still, show me around your favorite part of campus. See you there!

Citizen: An American Lyric is an-award winning, cross-genre book and is selected for Austin Community College’s Big Read programming for Spring 2018. The New Yorker describes the work: “The poet Claudia Rankine’s new volume, her fifth, is “Citizen: An American Lyric” (Graywolf), a book-length poem about race and the imagination. Rankine has called it an attempt to “pull the lyric back into its realities.” Those realities include the acts of everyday racism—remarks, glances, implied judgments—that flourish in an environment where more explicit acts of discrimination have been outlawed. ‘Citizen,’ which has been short-listed for the National Book Award, suggests that a contemporary “American lyric” is a weave of artfully juxtaposed intensities, a quarrel within form about form.”