The Missing Professor

Fresh out of graduate school and desperate to pay off her student loans, Nicole Adams joins the faculty at Higher State U, a small university with a dubious past located in the middle of the Midwest. On her second day of classes as a new assistant professor of philosophy, still flustered and disoriented, Nicole is plunged into a campus-wide mystery. Someone has ransacked the office she shares with the ill-tempered R. Reynolds Raskin, the department's senior professor, and he has since disappeared. Two weeks later, with Raskin still missing, Nicole receives a threatening phone call . . .Read one way, this is an entertaining parody of an academic mystery and a humorous take on academic life. Turning the book upside down reveals another purpose. Each chapter is constructed as an informal case study/discussion story, as is made manifest by a series of discussion questions intended for faculty development, new faculty orientation, and conversations among faculty, administrators, and academic staff. As the mystery unfolds, each chapter finds Nicole encountering challenging situations—such as, the first day of class, student incivility, teaching evaluations, peer observation, academic assessment, the scholarship of teaching and learning, faculty and student rights and responsibilities, core curricula, and tenure standards. This little book can be read and used both ways: as pure entertainment and as a series of informal case studies, spiced with humor, to help break down academic barriers and promote spirited discussions

Fresh out of graduate school and desperate to pay off her student loans, Nicole Adams joins the faculty at Higher State U, a small university with a dubious past located in the middle of the Midwest. On her second day of classes as a new assistant professor of philosophy, still flustered and disoriented, Nicole is plunged into a campus-wide mystery. Someone has ransacked the office she shares with the ill-tempered R. Reynolds Raskin, the department's senior professor, and he has since disappeared. Two weeks later, with Raskin still missing, Nicole receives a threatening phone call . . .Read one way, this is an entertaining parody of an academic mystery and a humorous take on academic life. Turning the book upside down reveals another purpose. Each chapter is constructed as an informal case study/discussion story, as is made manifest by a series of discussion questions intended for faculty development, new faculty orientation, and conversations among faculty, administrators, and academic staff. As the mystery unfolds, each chapter finds Nicole encountering challenging situations such as, the first day of class, student incivility, teaching evaluations, peer observation, academic assessment, the scholarship of teaching and learning, faculty and student rights and responsibilities, core curricula, and tenure standards. This little book can be read and used both ways: as pure entertainment and as a series of informal case studies, spiced with humor, to help break down academic barriers and promote spirited discussions"

“[A] gripping, and at times unsettling, history of . . . the Zeytun Gospels, a lavishly illuminated Armenian book that miraculously survived centuries of war.” —The Wall Street Journal In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist, Toros Roslin. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the holy manuscript had followed the waves of displaced people exterminated during the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the confusion and brutality of the First World War, it was cleaved in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty. This is the biography of a manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural heritage. Its tale mirrors the story of its scattered community as Armenians have struggled to redefine themselves after genocide and in the absence of a homeland. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh follows in the manuscript’s footsteps through seven centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom. Reconstructing the path of the pages, Watenpaugh uncovers the rich tapestry of an extraordinary artwork and the people touched by it. At once a story of genocide and survival, of unimaginable loss and resilience, The Missing Pages captures the human costs of war and persuasively makes the case for a human right to art. “A well-told tale of the history of the Armenian people [and] a wondrous and terrifically engrossing journey of this sacred religious object and priceless work of art.”—Michael Bazyler, author of Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts

Coplin uses his 50+ years of undergraduate teaching experience to present a series of roles, strategies and tactics to help professors prepare undergraduates for life after college. Through his courses and a highly successful undergraduate program, which he designed in the 1970s and still leads, Policy Studies, he has developed ways to increase student engagement and prepare them for careers and citizenship. He has students and alumni that number in the thousands over two generations who attribute their success to Coplin’s approach to teaching. You can check out his website, where more than 96 unsolicited testimonials from successful alumni who are now doing well and doing good are listed. This book is a self-help manual so that undergraduate professors in all fields can test out his suggestions ideas for themselves. College professors will be much happier because their actions will meet the needs of their students and society.

Despite flecks of the victim's blood and what looked like part of an eyebrow, one could make out the letters etched in an artistic, painstaking script that formed the killer's message:Hippocrite"Great. A perp who can't spell," said Jarvis."So you think it's a student?"Professor Roland Norris has been murdered in the early morning hours on the grounds of Välkommen University, and the discovery of the crime sets the scene for Thomas Jones' new campus mystery. As two more murders rattle the university, St. Paul detectives LeRon Jarvis and Robert Phan increasingly focus on the victims' connections to Jack Ramble, professor of literature and chair of the department.Are the crimes motivated by academic rivalries or the university's finances? A frantic golf cart chase down the 10th fairway of the East Oaks Country Club finally reveals all...As with Thomas Jones' previous academic mystery, The Missing Professor, this book is a parody of the mystery genre and campus life, but with a serious purpose. In 26 entertaining and succinct chapters, the story line raises such issues as the nature of today's college students, faculty roles and responsibilities, mid-career concerns, the purpose of liberal education, racial diversity, micro-aggression, inclusive teaching, technology and learning, politics and the classroom, active learning, the role of sports in higher education, and academic freedom, to name but a few.This book will enliven, and ensure spirited discussion at any orientation, workshop, or faculty development activity.