Summer Newsletter

Exceptional Undergraduate Learning

SUMMER 2025

first half of the salary scale, groans under the weight of contracts for people with years of full-time experience teaching elsewhere, commanding a salary near the top of the scale.

With no change in our grant, we need to be prudent with money, and ahead of next year’s recruitment requests, it would be useful to reflect on whether or not we can balance the recruitment of more senior applicants with some good old talent scouting. I hear all the time that committees seek to bring on “the best,” but does that always have to mean the most experienced person willing to apply for an Assistant Professorship? At some point, a budget built around mid-point starting salaries will collapse through demands for top-of-scale pay. I have done everything within my power over these past seven years to land the first- or second-ranked candidate in every competition, no matter the cost. But, increasingly, I worry that I simply will not be able to afford recommended applicants, particularly if we really see our future, exclusively, as a place that recruits people to their second (or third) academic job.

WHAT I’M READING Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J.K. Rowling. Bloomsbury, 1997.

Am I the last person to read J.K. Rowling? Setting myself the goal, this summer, to get to know Harry Potter, I certainly enjoyed this first book in the series. I never studied children’s (or young adult) literature, however this initial volume might be characterized, so I was surprised that a rich fantasy emerges from one breakneck plot twist after another. I wondered at one point if even a (literally) marked wizard deserved a day or a week or a term off from calamity. I am told that the pacing is necessary to engage a young audience. Alas. What exposition is here is delightful, as I ponder the GIC rate at Gringotts, and wonder why no one called the authorities on the Dursleys. Would a Provost ever drink unicorn’s blood?

Shattered , by Hanif Kureishi. Ecco, 2025. In late 2022, Hanif Kureishi, one of my favourite novelists, fainted and toppled from a chair, injuring his spine. This stunning memoir of his first year of rehabilitation is a reflection on his work, a look inside healthcare in Europe, and a frank description of how he lived his life during those twelve months. He comments on many occasions that he has lost all shame, and so I have nothing with which to compare the frankness with which he discusses what must be done for him in his paralysis. For about two decades I would buy whatever he published on the day of its release, but I learned so much more about him and his writing process here. And, of course, bringing his insight to himself as subject, he explains how it feels to have lost so much and sought to recover whatever is possible.