Author: glscott

The semester is ending.   The year is ending. Here’s to the passing of the old semester and the old year. Here’s to the coming of a new semester and a new year. Here’s to the work we do, the students we help, the lives we change, the friends and colleagues with whom we work. Celebrate! …

Do you know who our students are?  Not who our students were a decade ago, but who our students are today. If you look at the registration summary for Fall 2019 (dated 11/4/2019), you will see that our credit headcount is 41,232 students.  Of that, 11,682 students were new to ACC:  a 4.1% increase over…

While a modern Thanksgiving often turns on football, family, and food, it is also a time to be grateful.  So this month’s edition of A Day in the Life is about gratitude. I am grateful for good people doing good work at ACC.  Today I met with Grant Potts and Estrella Barrera, who have led…

On Friday, November 22, Austin Community College was designated as a 2019 Star Award recipient for our work around open educational resources (OER), and in particular for our efforts to create Z-degrees (zero textbook cost degrees) that help our students stretch their financial resources.  Z-classes and Z-degrees mean that our students’ finances can go farther…

I am four months into my Aspen Fellowship, and about to leave for the second convening of the 2019-2020 cohort.  The Aspen Institute offers robust, rigorous, and challenging professional development for community college professionals who want to be transformational leaders.  It is an honor to be part of the current cohort, full of passionate, dedicated,…

What is it like to be a pinball?  I think I know – because I often describe my AVP days as “pinballing”.  I go from one thing to another to another, back to the first and then over to a fourth thing.  I zig and zag and zig again.  And  sometimes (but not often) I…

When I travel, I take pictures – lots of pictures.  I take pictures of buildings and signs and lampposts and steeples and arches and flowers and a perfect espresso and quotes carved on cornerstones. And I have my desktop preferences set to rotate through my thousands of travel pictures, one at a time, so that…

Football in Texas, like politics, is a contact sport.  Love it or loathe it, the sport involves the physical impact that one player (a defensive tackle, for instance) can have on another (the running back, for instance). While football is all about physical force and impact, what we do in our work  at ACC is…

When I was in college I worked in a public library.  I have always loved libraries – every time I return to my hometown I drive by the old public library where I worked and I remember not only my work there, but the summer book clubs and story hours that I participated in growing…

It is, perhaps, a bit of folly to write about clear writing – what if I’m not clear?  Nonetheless, I can’t resist this brief New York Times article that highlights the power of clarity in the written word.  The written word, in this case, is the whistleblower’s complaint that is now dominating the Twitterverse (and every…