Last month I shared with you all the story of two awful things which happened this summer: my father’s death and my wife having a heart attack. People responded with a lot of concern and care, which helped things here immensely. I’m very grateful. Now I’d like to update you…

My question for today is: Why are so many webinars so bad? I’ve been thinking and working on this question since the 1990s (he typed, wiping a furrowed brow and gazing at grey hairs). I remember working with facilitators, technologists, and fellow professors then as we sought to make live…

How might the richest American colleges and universities develop in the future? I’ve been looking at this small yet superinfluential slice of higher education for a while. For example, since 2018 I’ve been trying to forecast when the most expensive campus will crack six figures for its annual cost of…

One of the great questions of our time is: shall we continue to grow? I’m referring to our civilization and its massive, complex footprint, which we can measure in many ways. Will we keep growing our economy, making more goods, services, and money? Will we keep growing our total population…

Posted on August 31, 2023 by Bryan Alexander How might academia respond to the climate crisis? One way is for colleges and universities to teach more content and classes on the topic. This is a path individual faculty who are passionate about global warming can follow, to the extent they…

Today I’m holding the first class for my Georgetown University Learning, Design, and Technology future of higher education class. It’s one I created from scratch and am enormously fond of. I’ve taught it several times, and am keeping the majority of the syllabus this time. Yet I’m also adding some…

One well-known risk of working on climate change is depression. The topic presents so many terrible futures that dwelling in it can be mentally brutal. In response to this grim issue, people have been offering hopeful ways of thinking about global warming. One of them became a design movement which…

Yesterday I wrote about two Canadian campuses endangered by fires. Climate change played some role in intensifying those conflagrations. Today I offer a related story. This post will be relatively brief, as I’m with my wife, back in a hospital again. Let me note a group of American colleges and…

How might academics respond to the unfolding climate crisis? Today I’d like to share two developments which can help us think through that question. The first comes from Canada, where two campuses (so far) have been under evacuation orders due to out of control fires. The University of British Columbia…