By Christopher Davis

LEED Specialist

Trying to green the operations of all of the various buildings on a college campus can be a bit like trying to get all of your family members to go on a healthy diet and exercise program at the same time. It can be a daunting task. They have a range of ages, sizes, shapes and activities; they consume different things in different quantities and their…

SCUP’s first Chapman Prize Report is available for nonmembers to download through May for free, as part of the Call for the 2013 prize, which ends with the month of May. After May 30, the report will continue to be free to SCUP members and nonmembers will…

The Call for the 2013 Perry Chapman Prize is live through May only. Respondents are asked to address the question: How does the physical campus support institutional missions of learning and engagement?…

The metaphorical walls and gates that have defined higher education are falling down.  The literal walls and gates will require some careful rethinking to avoid a similar fate.  For those who view the traditional campus as essential to authentic higher education, this will be a challenging time.  The…

The Call for the 2013 Perry Chapman Prize is live through May only. Respondents are asked to address the question: 

How does the physical campus support

institutional missions of learning and…

Can you think of more? This is from a recent University Business article titled Eight Possible Coursera Monetization Strategies.…

For his dissertation, still in progress, Nathan Miller of Columbia College (MO) looked to senior administrators at large universities. His article is forthcoming in …

Welcome to the League of Ordinary Gentlemen's Higher Education Symposium. The League is a blog site where you can always find engaging and interesting ideas and conversations. The people who write here, like ti write. Putting to good use the concept of "wrapping external content inside a SCUP sandwich" we are going to "read along" and bring you tidbits from this series of post about higher…

Several SCUP staffers attended a 10-hour EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) Spring Focus Session this week titled, Learning and the MOOC*. And we got lucky: Stephen…

At CampusMatters.net, University of Minnesota visiting scholar Michael Haggans blogs about the campus, even as he teaches a related graduate course. He's beginning to add some video to his blog posts. His last two posts, Real…

"The Environment in Higher Education is ‘Really Ripe for Innovation’" is our title for the March 19 Planning interview with John Casteen & Glenn DuBois. We were delighted when SCUP Mid-Atlantic Region volunteer Michelle Allinson of HBC Construction was able to get them both on the phone with us at the same time.…

Which department/school is really funding the institutional overhead? This week in the Mojo we are taking a look at efficient and strategic resource management. According to Vernon Harper, Jr. “Those who choose to lead in this climate will require more than courage to succeed; they will need reliable tools to manage and optimize institutional resources.”



Here’s a summary of Harper’s piece, …

The empty lecture hall is just one sign of redesign in higher education.  Substituting digital formats for large live lectures is the simplest and earliest stage of higher education redesign.  This process of substituting synthetic for real will take several years and there will be many failed…

We've collected some of the most recent reports about the effects of the budgetary sequester on higher education. Do you see warning signs, or actual impact yet at your institution? Do you expect to? Is there a plan?

Kristen Domonell, in …

Note that this author is a plenary speaker for SCUP's North Atlantic Region's 2013 conference in Montreal, May 1–3, Global, Local, or ‘Glocal’: Identity for Higher Education in an International Context.…

Two recent events have brought the paradox of the 21^st century campus into sharp focus for me.  First, I taught one of my courses remotely via Google Hangout.  Second, a seminar class allowed students to have an in-class conversation with a veteran Minnesota campus planner and later to…

"The most effective approach to changing institutional behavior is to develop tools for administrators that make sense to them and assist them in achieving goals they already want to achieve."

This week in the Mojo, Robert Dickeson discusses faculty instruction, research, and service  in his article "Unbundling the Issue of Faculty…

This week in the Mojo we take a closer at benchmarks and performance standards in higher education. There are no "industry norms" in higher education that's why we need reference groups. When we have the right reference groups we can set better benchmarks.

In this week's article "Reference Group Formation Using Nearest Neighbor Method", Gerry McLaughlin, Josetta…

From your vantage point as a professional—in the ivory tower or hovering around it—what does the term "resilience" mean to you right now? Hold that thought. Please keep it unchanged as you read this. In fact, perhaps you could scroll down type that thought in as a comment, then come back and read the whole thing?   :)…

Many worry that traditional higher education is over valued yet also believe that there is something of lasting worth in the shared experiences of campus life.  

This is the paradox of the 21^st century campus:  feeling the need for “campus” while technological…