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Week in Review: The Post-Thanksgiving Sprint

Erin Hennessy

Welcome back to the Week in Review! Here’s hoping you’re still feeling refreshed from the long Thanksgiving weekend. Though, if you’re anything like the TVP Comms team, you’re probably already totally absorbed in the mad dash to the end of the year.
If you’ve been running hard all week, too, take a minute to sit down, breathe deep, and catch up on this week’s higher ed news.
What’s new this week:
Grinnell College Prof. Dan Sinykin published a piece on Salon that reminded us all that Trump supporters aren’t monolithic—instead, they are motivated by a wide range of concerns and issues.
In the November/December issue of the Association of Governing Board’s Trusteeship magazine, Drake University Board of Trustees Chair Larry Zimpleman and Trustee David Miles wrote about how to achieve success in a presidential transition.
On the Inside Higher Ed Call to Action blog this week, our own Kristine Maloney wrote about the movement toward clearer, more concise academic writing, while Eric Sickler shared his prescription for fixing what ails higher education marketing.
What we’ve been talking about:
Bobby Mathews reminds us that our first priority in communications should be—must be—honesty.
What we’ve been reading:
Bobby Mathews
It’s been fascinating to see university students across the country rise up to make their voices heard when it comes to diversity on campuses, but there are larger issues at play. Even amid promises to hire more minority faculty and administrators, universities must make tangible steps to address a national racial climate that’s icy at best.
Kristine Maloney
If you were dismayed by recently published statistics that the majority of articles published in the humanities (98%) and social sciences (75%) are never cited, I have good news for you. In his column in the Los Angeles Times this weekend, Michael Hiltzik challenged the validity of the claims and concluded they aren’t true. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know what the actual numbers are, but he does trace how the error was made and quickly spread via social media. His piece is a good reminder of how quickly misinformation can reach the public, and the importance of questioning data points that seem off base.
Erin Hennessy
This New Yorker story about a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church who eventually turned away from the organization, in part because of Twitter, has been everywhere in the past few weeks, and for good reason—it’s a fascinating look at hate, love, and technology in our modern world.
Follow us on Twitter!
Here’s a look at what we were tweeting this week:
https://twitter.com/bwmathews/status/672460615135424512


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