Creating Time and Space for Faculty Reflection, Risk-Taking, and Renewal

From the Tomorrow's Professor Blog, comes this interesting piece originally published in the Summer 2008 issue of The Department Chair: A Resource for Academic Administrators:

Faculty today must stay up to date in their fields and energetic in their classrooms or they cannot provide the quality education that students deserve. However, as faculty duties expand and their personal lives become more complex, it is increasingly difficult for faculty to find the space and time necessary to grow professionally and support their institutional communities. Frequently, faculty are overextended in their personal and professional roles while trying to maintain their stride on the academic treadmill. In this climate, institutions must try to find places within the lives of faculty that enable them to reflect on their work,take risks, and reenergize themselves and their academic careers.

In this article, we share the insights we gained by studying the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Faculty Career Enhancement (FCE) program. The Mellon Foundation sought to promote the development of faculty across the academic lifecycle by providing support to selected institutions to design programs tailored to the distinctive needs of their faculty members.

Risk Management as Numerology?

Doug Gale examines quantitative risk analysis in this article titled The Myth and Reality of Risk, which focuses on IT but obviously has broader connotations:

When we get to the final cost-benefit ratio everything may seem logical, but does it make sense, or is it just numerology?

The traditional view of risk management plots the probability of an event from very low to very high on one axis, say the vertical, and the impact of that event from very low to very high on the horizontal axis. The first priority is to deal with risks in the upper right of the graph, the ones with a combination of high impact and high probability. The ones in the lower left, low impact and low probability, get the lowest priority.

It's all so logical. What can go wrong? As I see it there are three places we can go astray.

The Science of Irrationality: Why We Humans Behave So Strangely

More brain stuff to ponder:

To try to remain aware of our irrationality in situations where we have a strong tendency to act irrationally. This is easier in situations where we have a history of acting irrationally. For instance, since we are all realizing that we’re not saving enough for retirement maybe it is time to take action and force ourselves to behave better. One way to do this is by having money automatically transferred from our checking account into a retirement savings account at the beginning of each month—essentially taking the decision outside of our consideration so that we don’t even give ourselves the opportunity to think about spending money that we know we should save. As a result of putting such plans in action, our behaviors will coincide with our intentions.