Check this out. I snapped this shot at the Cannes Film Festival a few days ago. It’s the classic red carpet shot, the men in black tie (required dress for the red carpet), the ushers at attention like foot soldiers, trying not to stare too closely at all the frocks, the Talent at the top of the stairs, posing for all the world. The stars here are all headliners in a violent Western directed by John Hillcoat (The Road) called Lawless. If you know your pop culture you can spot Guy Pierce, John Hardy, Dane Dehaan, Jason Clarke, Nick Cave, Hillcoat, and Shia LaBeouf. And, oh yeah, there’s Mia Wasikowska and Jessica Chastain—Mia in purple and Jessica in, er, something diaphanous. between Hillcoat and LaBeouf.

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A couple of weeks ago, New Yorker editor Ben Greenman (@bengreenman) launched a Twitter-based game he calls “Questioningly.” It’s a fun time-filler for multi-taskers who need to stop juggling all the balls for a few minutes to gain composure and a normal heart rate.  Greenman poses a suitable tweet question every week and activates a conversation. This week’s is “Which Beatle did you think of most recently and why?”  I like the game’s first question best so far: What word should be eliminated from the English language? The list quickly gained momentum and before you could say “impactful“(sorry) Greenman’s thousand or so followers had come up with some hilarious proposals.

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This week the university announced plans to shut down its Division of Lifelong Learning at the end of August. The rationale is clear: the unit just can’t sustain itself. It’s hemorrhaging too many dollars. Unsustainability is the catchword. Lifelong learning, or LLL as it is commonly identified, grew out of the earlier designation of “continuing education” – an it-is-never-too-late-to-learn philosophy of education. It is meant to cater to those who have either never been to university or those whose university days are long behind them, but who want to acquire knowledge in a structured and informed environment. It’s all about learning as an evolutionary, not a terminal, exercise. One wouldn’t want to argue with that commonplace or with the whole lifelong learning paradigm. The question for me is this: is the university the best place for lifelong learning programs? Well, yes and no: yes, for the most part, but perhaps with focused content and a new delivery model.

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Now is the season of student discontent. Every day brings more violence and rage in Quebec, as students continue to protest the government’s fee hike on the streets of Montreal. The issue has clearly escalated from general anger against the (modest) tuition increase to a much wider Occupy the Man sort of movement, with echoes of éclater le bourgeoisie heard all around. I have no idea where this Quebec Spring is going to end up but it’s serious and powerfully disruptive. When I was in Montreal a few weeks ago I saw hundreds of student demonstrators on the street below our hotel, calmly marching to somewhere. A colleague of mine exclaimed that it was fabulous—just like the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. I don’t know, I had an uneasy feeling about it all. That calm has since been replaced by something darker and determined, for sure. Perhaps the end of the winter semester will lead to some dissipation of protest energy, although there are no signs of slowing down yet. Government is playing chicken; the students feel roasted.

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This postcard comes from Halifax where I am attending the annual meeting of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS). I have blogged about NAGS before. It’s a cozy club. We just finished Day One of panels and meals, the US and the Canadian deans having exchanged ideas, political stories, and travel tips. Halifax isn’t necessarily looking at her best mid-April, and the wind off the harbor water is cold enough to produce hat head, but for the American visitors the city holds an exotic appeal. I get that. There are steel-grey frigates in the harbor and maple leaves on our flags, and although we share the same sea with the deans from New Jersey or Massachusetts, it’s definitely different here.

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If your article falls in a forest of print journals does anyone read it? Oh sure, it exists as an entry on your cv, but that might no longer be good enough as a measure of your scholarly impact. Today, if no one is reading your work, to some it doesn’t exist at all.

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Maybe I’m just getting old and conservative but I am having a really hard time sympathizing with the student protests in the province of Quebec. Every time I think that I also keep in mind that I probably would have joined them out on the streets, blocking traffic and irritating the hell out of hard-working citizens if I were their age. I grew up in Montreal, went to McGill, and spent a fair amount of time marching and occupying the Vietnam War era. I was in very good company. It felt good to be part of a huge mass of peers, having our emerging identities shaped by waves of solidarity and a strong sense of purpose. It wasn’t very difficult to catch the wave, to join up with the leaders of the protests movements, skipping classes in order to stop a war—or acknowledge the French fact in Quebec.  It felt unequivocally like the right and proper thing to be doing. And when you are young there’s nothing more satisfying than transgression, especially when there’s safety in numbers. Joining thousands of your peers is a lot less brave than facing down a tank in the middle of Tiananmen Square all by yourself.

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Lecture Fail? We’re all talking about it—that is, ringing out the old (the traditional one-professor lecture) to make way for the new (reliance on technology). The Chronicle of Higher Education has been doing some neat stuff around this. Earlier in the year they established a challenge to readers to defend or bash the traditional lecture format. Not surprisingly, the responses have inclined in favour of the new. It’s really well worth a visit to the Chronicle site to watch some of accumulating videos submitted by students and profs alike, each gazing into his/her webcam to respond to the question. http://bit.ly/xVHvB6

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