More Than Just a Good I.D.E.A.

There's a lot of talk going on in the political sphere about equity and diversity initiatives, and there's a lot of work going on in both educational and corporate settings around diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. This post is less about the talk (although I hope it might inform it in a useful way), and more about the work. To begin with, let's operate under the assumption that everyone working in this area is approaching it with the best of intentions (even when their organizational motivation is profit), and that the biggest issues that arise in this work are actually results of bungling the implementation. With all of that in mind, I want you to consider the possibility that the biggest issue starts with the fact that we keep putting the letters in the wrong order.

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A Virtual Hug

You can’t replace a hug with a virtual hug. And yet, when you can’t have a hug a virtual hug can mean everything.

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A Response to a Pro-Trump Quoran

I was on Quora when I came across one of those typical political threads about Donald Trump. I posted the first part of this response there (regarding name calling...OP was upset that someone had called Donald Trump a clown in the reponse), but the last thing I wanted to do was muddy the clarity of that issue by addressing the other issues raised by OP in their response (lies told by people who aren't Trump, especially Schiff). So, here's my full post because I'd like to have it handy for reference if needed.

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The Purposes of Post-Secondary Education

In my previous blog post on systems of stress I traversed a fair amount of my professional and personal experiences from 2017. I also got into some contentious political topics, especially in relation to higher ed. A casual read of that post might lead you to conclude that I have a fairly narrow belief about the purpose of post-secondary education, and that I’m dismissive of vocational outcomes in higher ed. Nothing could be further from the truth. This post aims to provide a bit of clarification, because this is in truth a complicated topic.

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Systems of Stress

This is a post about individuals and conflict behaviors, but more than that it’s about systems and how they elicit those behaviors. This post gets pretty personal at times, but the intent is not to air my or anyone else’s dirty laundry. The aim instead is to draw on experiences during an extremely difficult time in my life that also became entwined with professional failure, but to look beyond those individual stresses and failures at the bigger picture, and to say something (hopefully useful) about how individuals respond to pressures well outside of their control. Caveat emptor, this post is also very long.

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