I was on a bit of a roll with posting on this blog during the first half of January. I anticipated a pause as I was preparing my paper for the Southern Humanities Conference in San Antonio. The trip went well and the paper was well-received, I think. I had to get back into the swing of things at school, upon my return. THEN things got really bad at Utica University. The Board of Trustees, and the administration, has announced the elimination (they call it "sunsetting") of numerous programs at the school, including philosophy, geology, sociology, anthropology, chemistry and therapeutic recreation. I feel like I have experienced another death in my life. Higher education has been on a downward spiral for decades, and I have always spent a good deal of time and effort, fighting the degradation of academics at the institutions at which I have been on faculty. But, I finally feel like I have lost the battle. It's really quite sad. BUT, perhaps it's liberating as well, for me. I am privileged to be approaching 64 years of age and approaching retirement (I could retire this week, if I wanted to). But my heart breaks for my younger colleagues and for the entire institution of higher education. It's all about the tuition money-grab and job-training (which I don't consider "higher education". I need to extract myself emotionally now, and do the best job I can do as a university professor in my classroom. I will certainly have much more time to devote to collage soon. In the meantime, I will share these two images, that I found while cleaning and organizing my collage stash last night. I LOVE these weird images! That's why collage is DEFINITELY the medium for me. When I am not creating collage, I thoroughly enjoy looking at all of the interesting images!
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