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A lawsuit targeted a school district and the State of Florida over restricting access to a book about a penguin family with two fathers.
Recent philosophy-related news*, and a request…
1. Stephen Kershnar (SUNY Fredonia), whose February 2022 discussion of adult-child sex on the Brain in a Vat podcast sparked viral outrage and led to his removal from campus, has “filed a lawsuit this week in U.S. District Court in Buffalo asking the court to declare that Fredonia’s administrators violated his First Amendment rights by removing him from the classroom after the comments he made on a podcast kicked off a social-media firestorm,” according to the Buffalo News. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has filed the lawsuit on his behalf, Kershnar says.
UPDATE: Here is the lawsuit and the motion for injunction (via Stephen Kershnar).
2. The editors of Philosophy, the flagship journal of The Royal Institute of Philosophy, have announced the winners of their 2022 Essay Prize, which was on the topic of emotions. They are: Renee Rushing (Florida State) for her “Fitting Diminishment of Anger: A Permissivist Account” and Michael Cholbi for his “Empathy and Psychopaths’ Inability to Grieve.” Mica Rapstine (Michigan) was named the runner-up for his “Political Rage and the Value of Valuing.” The prize of £2500 will be shared between the winners, and all three essays will be published in the October 2023 issue of the journal.
3. Some philosophers are on the new Twitter alternative, Bluesky. Kelly Truelove has a list of those with over 50 followers here. And yes, you can find me (and Daily Nous) on it.
4. One philosopher is among the new members of The American Philosophical Society, a learned society that aims to “honor and engage leading scholars, scientists, and professionals through elected membership and opportunities for interdisciplinary, intellectual fellowship.” It is John Dupré of the University of Exeter, who specializes in philosophy of science. The complete list of new members is here. Professor Dupré joins just 21 other philosophers that have been elected into the society since 1957 (the society was founded in 1743).
5. I’ve decided that some news items I had been planning to include in these summary posts over the summer should instead get their own posts. These are posts about philosophers’ deaths and faculty moves. Regarding the former, it would be wonderful if individuals volunteered to write up memorial notices for philosophers they knew, or whose work they are familiar with, including at least the kinds of information I tend to include in these posts (see here). Recently, philosophers Henry Allison, Richard W. Miller, and Donald Munro have died. If you are interested in writing up a memorial notice for one of them, please email me. Generally, over the summer, these posts and faculty move notices may take longer to appear than usual.
* Over the summer, many news items will be consolidated in posts like this.
The post Philosophy News Summary (updated) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Universities are preparing for the possible end of race-conscious affirmative action.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.
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Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.
I’m equal parts excited and trepidatious to announce that I’ve started a new publication on Substack called Better Team Habits. As I mentioned in my first post there, the intent is to create a more focused and fresh space for content and conversations about teamwork, leadership, strategy execution, and organizational dynamics.
I’ve long resisted separating team topics and conversations from individual topics and conversations. Since the early days of Productive Flourishing, it’s been a both/and conversation in my mind. Since most people work in teams and many of our readers start as or inevitably end up in leadership and management positions, it’s made the most sense (to me) to keep it as one global conversation.
A few different forces came into play that prompted me to think harder and make the different and harder choice to split the spaces:
I often say “When in doubt, choose the simpler option.”
The far simpler option compared to all that repositioning, shoehorning, rebuilding, and segmenting was to let Productive Flourishing be what it’s become — a site that helps creative types thrive in their individual work and lives by focusing on foundations — and to build another space focused on thriving with and in your team.
In another post, I’ll talk about why I chose Substack over some of the other options, but as soon as I made the decision that this was the next step, I felt a relief I hadn’t felt since 2015. I don’t have to hold back in either space. I can go full-in to my body of work in the team, leadership, and org space on Better Team Habits and I can go full-in to my body of work in personal foundations here.
Better Team Habits is new and doesn’t yet have much content. Between the book, content from here that I’ll revise, and what’s coming up from my fieldwork every day, I have a lot I’m looking forward to sharing. If you like watching things evolve and don’t want to feel like you’re catching up, you can join the journey now.
And, as far as what’s going to change here on PF, expect more resources that will help knowledge workers, creators, and entrepreneurs do their best work. PF has always served the creative class and we’re going to get better at doing that.
It’s too early to tell how it’s all going to work out and whether I’ll wish I had done this a long time ago or if I’ll wish I’d never done it. But I’m most engaged when I’m actually exploring and figuring it out rather than wondering, hedging, and holding back. So it’s time to experiment. And I’ll be sharing what I’m learning along the way here and on Better Team Habits.
The post Launching Better Team Habits on Substack appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
If you didn’t grow up with a kooky, kitschy cookie jar in your kitchen, you likely know someone who did. “Each kitchen should have a cookie jar to reflect the person’s personality,” advises (Mercedes DiRenzo) Bolduc. “It makes them happy.”
The joy of cookie jars, for many, is finding a jar that feels perfectly suited to one’s own personal taste or identity. In this hunt, the world of vintage cookie jars offers near infinite options. In Chicago, pastry chef Mindy Segal remains smitten with a vintage 1940s ceramic cookie jar that she’s had for decades. “I call him Chef,” says Segal, coauthor of the cookbook Cookie Love. “I’ve had him since I was in my 20s and it was my first major purchase into the vintage world. I love him and will never get rid of him. He’s like my guy.” Chef dons a stiff white chef’s hat and he has been dubbed guardian of dog treats. Recently, Segal bought a second cookie jar, which lives in her popular Mindy’s Bakery. “I put pretzels in it and sometimes I put candy in it. I don’t put cookies in it,” she says.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, whose hero is Robert Kennedy, wants to build a multiracial progressive coalition.
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Staff in ITS worked with the Office of General Counsel to plan, build, and test enhancements to the system supporting the annual conflict disclosure compliance for this academic year. These improvements address suggestions stemming from a recent audit and provide functionality found in commercial conflict of interest systems available in the market. For instance, the most important and useful feature was the ability for the form to adjust questions based on the previous question’s response. The new functionality and operational improvements help streamline the process for the community submitting the form, as well as for the form’s administrators.
Business stakeholders and IT staff across the London, Boston, and Oakland campuses collaborated on an upgrade that simplifies guest access to wireless services at all campus locations. Teams extended the access to allow guests up to 30 days of wireless service at a time. Previously, guests were required to create a new access code every day to connect to the campus network. This upgrade significantly eases the burden on guests, as well as their campus hosts, and allows for more effective collaboration and productivity.
Approximately 265 ITS staff members received incident management training over the course of three days and six live sessions in late February, fulfilling an audit requirement and providing staff with additional knowledge, tools, and resources for properly handling, prioritizing, and communicating IT incidents according to institutional processes. Using multiple baseline key performance metrics for comparison, the training is expected to help improve operational efficiencies, reduce the number and length of service disruptions, and increase overall customer satisfaction.
The Office of the Provost and ITS are partnering to develop and launch a new website and companion digital tools to support the new EXP makerspace and reflect the uniqueness and importance of the physical location set to open for fall 2023. The new website, which will be hosted on the university’s modern web hosting service, will be focused on attracting students to use the space while highlighting promotional elements aimed at industry partners. In addition to the website, the university’s enterprise service management tool, ServiceNow, along with related digital tools, will be leveraged to provide users of the makerspace convenient and self-service access to online training to become certified on makerspace tools and reserve those tools and spaces.
As part of an ongoing effort to modernize university website systems and services, the Bachelors-Completion website was recently successfully migrated from Northeastern’s aging on-premises server environment to the institution’s modern, cloud-based enterprise web hosting service. This move helps increase the reliability and security of a highly-visible, revenue-driving website that sees more than one million visitors a year, while also decreasing site loading time by 60%—ultimately creating a better user experience and higher-SEO value. The Bachelors-Completion website joins the more than 500 websites that have been migrated off the university’s legacy web servers, enabling a 54% reduction in on-premises web servers to-date, and helping the university reduce technical debt, risk, and cost.
In collaboration with business units throughout the university, including Public Safety, IT Services is establishing a more robust Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Program. A formalized BCDR Program helps ensure business operational resumption after an outage or disruption, mitigates risk of data loss, and protects the university against reputational damages. This essential program will support the university’s expanded campus footprint and global reach to ensure continuity of critical products, services, and applications when major natural or human-caused disruptive events occur.
Leveraging the Outsystems enterprise platform, IT teams developed and delivered an updated voting form for the Student Government Association’s annual vote. The project team collaborated with SGA representatives to capture business requests and updates, demo the changes, and release the final product so that it is available for fair voting for student government representatives. New functionality added this year include added logic for no confidence voting, so that if only one candidate is standing for election, a no confidence message is displayed at the start of the candidate slates. Logic was also added to disable other voting options when a candidate is written in.
IT teams supported the ongoing expansion of the global campus in Seattle with a complete data communications buildout at 225 Terry Ave., 2nd floor. This work provides state of the art wireless connectivity with increased Wi-Fi speed, four new Global Learning Spaces classrooms, and seven additional breakout spaces. As a result, the infrastructure now supports up to 20 additional students per class and hundreds more personal devices on the wireless network.
An initiative is underway to automate the request process and provisioning of high-performance computing (HPC) resources for classroom use, which benefits around 1,000 students each year who need to use HPC resources as a part of their coursework. The provisioning of user access, groups, and storage are all being automated. At the same time, the request form is being updated, with the help of a Canvas integration recently developed by ITS, to further improve and simplify the experience for professors, instructors, and teaching faculty requesting resources. Additionally, HPC usage is being standardized and compute environments are being tailored for courses.
According to demographic data collected in recognition of March as Women’s History Month, women employees in ITS account for over 32% of the division’s full-time workforce. This percentage is up from 25% in 2018 and is above the IT industry average of 26%, as reported by Gartner, the respected business and technology research firm. This trend in ITS aligns with Northeastern’s commitment to building a diverse and inclusive university community, and is part of ITS’ ongoing efforts to amplify voices and initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion as best practice.
In a joint effort between IT Services and Human Resources, the Employee Hub was formally introduced to Northeastern employees on Monday, March 27 as the new digital home base for faculty and staff. An expansion of the Student Hub that launched in 2020, the Employee Hub provides quicker, easier access to many of the productivity tools and other resources that employees need to navigate day-to-day university and work life most effectively. Daily site visits to the Employee Hub, which replaces and builds upon the myNortheastern employee portal that will retire as of June 1, 2023, were up three times in the days immediately following the announcement.
The completion of all pre-requisite upgrades in Banner marked a significant milestone in the project to migrate Student Financial Services off of the current financial aid system, Powerfaids. This milestone puts the university one step closer to the expected transition to Banner Financial Aid starting with the incoming class of students this fall 2023. This work will result in a more stable and integrated platform for this critical university function, which awards approximately $1B in financial aid each year.
Most daily stand-up meetings make whatever they’re trying to solve worse as a result of eating up team time and focus.
First, let’s look at real meeting math. The daily stand-up isn’t just the 15-30 minutes of the stand-up — when we talk about meetings, we also need to include the prep, post, and slack time. That stand-up meeting eats up at least one hour of teammate time — so if you have five teammates, that’s at least 5 hours of team time.
Five hours of team time per day per week adds up; given that the average knowledge worker makes ~$30 per hour, that’s $3,000 per month in wages for just this meeting, for five people.
Should you still decide to do daily stand-ups, despite knowing this, here’s what not to do:
Here’s what TO do:
As I write in Team Habits, most bad or counterproductive meetings are a result of other poor team habits. If your team’s habits around decision-making, prioritization, and collaboration aren’t working, you’ll end up having a lot of crutch meetings to address those issues.
But crutch meetings cost your team’s most precious resources: their time and their attention.
This means that often, the best way to fix bad meeting culture isn’t just to work on improving meetings, and adding new ones. It’s by starting with the root issue with your team habits, that is, working on decision-making, planning, communication, so that the endless unproductive meetings won’t need to keep happening.
I’ll turn it over to you: if you’re doing daily stand-ups, what are the root challenges or (bad) team habits that are creating the need for the daily stand-ups?
The post Does Your Team Really Need a Daily Stand-Up Meeting? appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
A few days before the Review’s new Spring issue went to print, the poet Rita Dove called me from her Charlottesville home to set a few facts straight. She and her husband, the German novelist Fred Viebahn, are night owls—emails from Dove often land around 9 A.M., just before bedtime—and they had just spent several long nights poring over her interview, which was conducted by Kevin Young and which spans Dove’s childhood in Akron, Ohio, where her father was the first Black chemist at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company; her adventures with the German language; her experience as poet laureate of the United States, between 1993 and 1995; and her love of ballroom dancing and of sewing, during which she might “find the solution for an enjambment” halfway through stitching a seam. Working their way through the conversation, she and Viebahn had confirmed or emended the kinds of small but crucial details that are also the material of Dove’s poems: the number of siblings in her father’s family, the color of the book that inspired the poem “Parsley,” the name of the German lettering in which her childhood copy of Friedrich Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke was printed (not Sütterlin, it transpired, but Fraktur). We talked through her corrections, and then Dove produced a final fact that caught me by surprise. Two decades ago, she said, she had been preparing to be interviewed for The Paris Review by George Plimpton. He’d called to set a date for their first conversation, and the next day, she said, came the shocking news that he had died.
This spring rings in the magazine’s seventieth anniversary, and twenty years since the loss of its visionary longtime editor. To mark the occasion, issue no. 243 has a cover created for the Review by Peter Doig—inspired, he told us, by a birthday card he made for his son Locker—and includes not two but three Writers at Work interviews: with Dove, with the American short story writer and novelist Mary Gaitskill, and with Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature. In many ways, though, this issue is consistent with the others in our long history, featuring the best prose, poetry, and art that we could muster, by writers and artists you’ve heard of and some you haven’t. You’ll find prose by Marie NDiaye, Elisa Gonzalez, Rivers Solomon, Daniel Mason, and Elaine Feeney; poems by Nam Le and D. S. Marriott; and artworks including a portfolio by Tabboo!, featuring paintings inspired by words he associates with the magazine (including “high falutin,” “bon vivant,” and “wreaking havoc”). We are grateful to everyone who has appeared in our pages, and to all the people who have shepherded the Review over the past seven decades, so that this one can land in your mailbox as the season turns.
“At first, I was just in disbelief,” Veronica Gonzalez, a doctoral student at the University of California-Irvine, recalled in an interview. “Then I was incensed.”
How much time do you spend each week working through the important, deep, and future-building work? How much time could have been spent on the significant, strategic change work that often gets lost — either in routines or in the swirl of urgent items that seem to appear out of nowhere?
Take a minute to look back at your schedule over the last few weeks if you really want to get a clear picture.
Chances are you’ve been caught up in a strategic-routine-urgent logjam.
If you’re seeing this play out on your schedule, consider the compound effect of this playing out across your team – those four to eight people you spend 80% of your working time with.
When you look at teamwork, you’ll find that collaboration mostly falls into one of three buckets:
Strategic work: work that is longer term and catalytic for an important objective or issue
Routine work: tasks that pop up regularly, such as weekly reports
Urgent work: time-sensitive and important tasks
We can’t control the urgent things that come up, and hopefully the routines we have in place are set up to support those moments when they arise. Where things tend to get slippery though is how we spend the time we have (or think we have) for that important, future-building strategic work.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the “father of flow,” once wrote about how, if you look at your schedule from two weeks ago, unless you make specific, instrumental changes during your week, your schedule two weeks from now is probably going to look the same.
We have this myth in our brains that two weeks from now is wide open. That we don’t have to worry about it now because in the future we’ll have the time.
Except… it’s not really that open, not when you think about it.
At the team level, you’re rolling in routine stuff, things you know are just gonna happen, but they still take up time to do. And there’s probably going to be something that’s urgent, right?
And that’s not even counting meetings, which usually fall into the routine bucket, but require urgency every so often.
So how much time do you actually have for the future building work? Time to:
When I’m consulting on strategic planning with a client, one of the first things I’ll come in and say is, “What’s our actual capacity for change here?”
I’m not talking about the emotional capacity, which is also important, but what is the actual capacity on schedules?
This is where the disconnect often comes in on teams. Managers and leaders expect a lot more of the strategic future building work to happen. That’s natural — we (hopefully) take pride in our roles and company vision, aiming to elevate what we stand for, and push our boundaries beyond the limits of success.
However, most managers and leaders don’t have a firm grasp of how the routine tasks and the urgent stuff dominates the team structure.
If the routine tasks and urgent work items are taking up 110% of people’s time, we have to do something different.
We can’t just assume that we’re going to put more units of stuff in a bag that’s already overfilled.
I was recently talking to a CEO who was frustrated that an important project didn’t seem to be getting the attention it deserved. I pointed out that prioritizing the project meant there is work that will need to live on someone’s schedule.
Which led me to ask “Is there any room for this to go on their schedule?”
And followed by:
Are there enough focus blocks to move this strategic work forward?
And if not, what are we gonna do about that?
This is where on the individual side, the five projects rule is super helpful. It’s the sort of thing that it’s really a gauge for what you can fit in and what your capacity really equals out to be. Projects have to move out before new ones can be moved in.
And at a team level, it’s especially important for managers and leaders, but it’s really all of us at a certain point. You have to honor that you’re not going to get everything done, and that something either has to be dropped or pushed forward in an imperfect state.
Understanding your capacity for change starts with understanding how much room in your (your team’s) schedule there is to take on strategic work. If it’s just filled with urgent and recurring work, take a look at all the routine tasks and projects and ask yourself the following:
From here, you’ll be able to build in space for strategic thinking that will expand you, your company, your team and more, to the next level of success — without compromising the essence of what makes you flow.
Team Habits is coming this August and now available for pre-order at your favorite bookseller. And if you’re curious about identifying your team’s strength areas, growth areas, and challenge areas, take our Team Habits Quiz, a free, customized report to help you understand how your team works best together and how together your team does its best work.
The post Change Work Is Strategic Work appeared first on Productive Flourishing.
Stephen and Rae Ann Gruver said the funds from the verdict over their son’s death would help support the mission of the Max Gruver Foundation, an organization committed to ending hazing on college campuses.
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