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Articles by Benjamin Rifkin
Redesigning Our Curricula to Foster Career Readiness
Keywords world language education, Russian, curriculum, career, career-readiness, transferable skills, durable skills Abstract Undergraduate majors are not engraved in stone; curricula have been adjusted and changed over the course of the history of higher education and now is the time to change our curricula once again.
Making class participation grades meaningful (opinion)
You have /5 articles left. Sign up for a free account or log in. PixelsEffect/E+/Getty Images I read with interest Anna Broadbent’s essay on the benefits and pitfalls of class participation grades. From my perch as a provost, former dean and former department chair, I find that the grade for class participation is often one of the sources of misunderstanding that leads to grade appeals.
Book Review: Transformative Language Learning and Teaching
Keywords language learning, language teaching, transformative teaching Abstract Leaver, Davidson, and Campbell’s Transformative Language Learning and Teachingis a groundbreaking volume on the theory and practice of transformative teaching in the language learning context.
A Leningrad Underworld: Polina Barskova’s Living Pictures, by Sibelan Forrester
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access. What is the role of the past in our psychic universe? What happens to us if we learn only later about terrible things that took place in our streets, our parks, our own families, revealing dark tunnels beneath everything we thought we understood?
Advice | Why Doctoral Programs Should Require Courses on Pedagogy
Complaints about the lack of attention to teaching in Ph.D. programs are legion — mainly about the perceived disconnect between what we are trained to do in graduate school and what we are expected to do in the college classroom. After years of calls for reform, we wondered, is that disconnect still the case? Plenty of essays, social-media posts, and books like Jonathan Zimmerman’s The Amateur Hour have tackled the lack of formal training that professors receive on teaching.
Advice | Why Doctoral Programs Should Require Courses on Pedagogy
Complaints about the lack of attention to teaching in Ph.D. programs are legion — mainly about the perceived disconnect between what we are trained to do in graduate school and what we are expected to do in the college classroom. After years of calls for reform, we wondered, is that disconnect still the case? Plenty of essays, social-media posts, and books like Jonathan Zimmerman’s The Amateur Hour have tackled the lack of formal training that professors receive on teaching.
Ways to lessen any need to give a student an F (opinion)
In a recent article for Inside Higher Ed, Louis Haas wrote that we as faculty members should “bring the F back fully into our grading scheme … and … assign it more frequently when a student deserves it.” He argues that doing so is the necessary response to students’ actual “refusal—not inability—to simply do the work.” Haas claims that a number of students “willfully” do not do the work. But based on my own experience as an instructor, I take a somewhat different view.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
November 17, 2020 Dear Students: I’m sorry that this message comes to you a day later than planned. What can I say: life happens, even to a dean. Life is happening for you, too, of course, and here we are with only one more week of classes.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
November 9, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well. Thank you to all those who voted, contributed time to campaigns formally or informally, and otherwise engaged in the electoral process. No matter what side of the issues and no matter what candidates you supported, you participated in our democracy. For some of you, this may have been the first time you voted or the first time you voted in a presidential election.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
February 3, 2020 Dear Students: Happy Day After Groundhog Day and Thank you to Puxatawney Phil for not seeing his shadow! May spring weather come soon! Already, I’m feeling that there’s more sunlight in the early mornings and the late afternoons and it lifts my spirits. I hope you are enjoying your classes, time with friends, and opportunities to engage in all that Hofstra has to offer: events, clubs and organizations, and experiences in New York City.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
Please make your voice count. Vote. Sincerely, Your friendly neighborhood dean, BR Congratulations Congratulations to Kimberly Chambers (Music Business ’21) for being chosen for the 2020 Diversify the Stage x Music Forward masterclass! Congratulations to the cast and crew of This Mortal Coil – a one hour film noir adaptation of Hamlet: you are all stars! For those who haven’t seen it yet, you can see the preview at this link.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
October 26, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well. Today is the last Monday in October, which means that our National Election “Season” will come to an end in just over a week. I ask that all of you who are eligible to vote please be sure to do so.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
October 19, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well. The foliage is turning and my internal clock tells me that we should be at the mid-point of the semester, but the fact is that we have only about one month left of classes, due to our early start this year. I’d like to take the opportunity this week to follow up on some thoughts from last week’s message.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
October 12, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well. To that end, if you are a commuting student, please remember that you have to fill out the health screening questionnaire every day you are on campus. Thank you for taking the time to keep us all healthy and safe. For those who celebrated themselves or celebrated with a loved one, I wish you all a Happy National Coming Out Day (which was yesterday).
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
October 5, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well. In a week when we have learned that many prominent people in our national political life have tested positive for Covid-19, I am ever more grateful to you and to all members of our Hofstra community for all your vigilant efforts to keep us safe. As I walk around campus, I see everyone wearing masks.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
September 28, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well. Some of you will read this on Sept. 28, and some of you, like me, are off line on 9-28 in observance of a holiday. By the time you read this, we will both be back from holiday observance and I hope it was a meaningful fast for you. The leaves are beginning to turn, and we have had some days with a chill in the air: fall weather is truly here.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
September 21, 2020 Dear Students: I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and well. This week I’m going to start my weekly message to you with some important information about Covid-19 testing in our community. Hofstra, like other colleges and universities in New York State, is conducting randomized surveillance testing for Covid-19. If you are contacted to be tested, please understand that the test is mandatory, but the time suggested for the test is not mandatory.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
Sept. 14, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well. Usually our fall semester starts right around Labor Day, but due to the public health situation, we started, as you all know, in August, and so the rhythm of our semester is different this year.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
September 8, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you safe and well. I also hope you enjoyed the 3-day weekend and the Labor Day celebrations.
HCLAS Dean Weekly Message
August 31, 2020 Dear Students: I hope that the first week of the semester has gone successfully for you and that you are ready to dive into week 2. As we move forward, I’m sending you all a shout-out of thanks for the great work you’re all doing to keep one another safe. Wearing masks, physical distancing, frequent handwashing: it’s all part of the public health effort we all do to keep our community safe.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
August 24, 2020 Dear Students: Well, here we are: the start of classes for the Fall 2020 semester. For those students who are joining the Pride now, Welcome! Wherever you were last year, whether in high school or attending a different college or taking a gap year or working, you are now part of our community and our community is enriched by having you in it.For those students who are returning to the fall semester, Welcome Back! You, too, are valued members of our community.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
October 21, 2019 Dear Students: I’ve heard that if you want to find meaning, you have to be able to give meaning to others. So, my question to you this week is: what are you doing to give meaning to others? If you have time and space in your life to contribute, think about planning to volunteer through one of the opportunities at the Center for Civic Engagement or through HCLAS and CARECEN, where you can work with immigrants and refugees on English language and citizenship skills.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
October 14, 2019 Dear Students: It’s midterm time: papers, projects, presentations, and exams. I have a simple message for you: You can do this! I encourage you to take some time to map out all your responsibilities and deadlines and schedule the work you need to do to meet those deadlines: reviewing the parameters of the assignment so you are certain what your professors are looking for and how they will evaluate your work – including how the work is to be submitted (hard copy?
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
Dear Students: I hope that everyone enjoyed the break and that all those who celebrated Thanksgiving had a warm and delicious holiday. It’s hard to believe that this semester, which seems to have started just the day before yesterday, is coming to a close. This will be the last weekly message for the semester, so please look carefully at the information about opportunities and events.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
October 9, 2019 Dear Students: For all those observing a holiday today, I wish you a meaningful Yom Kippur fast and a sense of renewal as you begin the new year. I hope that all of you had a fun and productive fall break and that you are ready to re-engage in classes for the second half of the fall 2019 semester. Time moves swiftly, as we see from the leaves that are beginning to change color. Some of you have begun to register for Spring 2020 classes and others will be registering soon.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
November 4, 2019 Dear Students: Tomorrow is election day. If you are eligible to vote here in the New York area and haven’t voted already, please be sure to cast your vote and make your voice heard: #HofstraVotes! Speaking of voting – and our civic duty – we have a couple of events about politics and history listed in the events section below, so please check them out. One of the highlights of the week is most certainly the lecture by Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. James S.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
October 28, 2019 Dear Students: I extend to all those celebrating Diwali, which began yesterday, my best wishes for a beautiful celebration: may your life and the lives of your loved ones be as luminous and magical as the lights on the Diwali lamps! I also note a somber anniversary: yesterday was the one year anniversary of the massacre in the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
November 11, 2019 Dear Students: At Hofstra we think of our students as #WorldChangers. In order to change the world, you have to know the world. There are many ways to improve your knowledge of the world beyond the neighborhood in which you grew up. You can travel great distances to go to college in a place far away from home, and some of you have done that. You can go on study abroad – and some of you have and will do that.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
November 18, 2019 Dear Students: As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, I am particularly mindful of the many things in life for which I’m grateful. And among them: I’m grateful to work here at Hofstra University … with you. HCLAS students are extraordinary: thoughtful, intellectually curious and ambitious, kind, passionate and compassionate, and engaged. Thank YOU for all you do to make everyone at Hofstra proud to be a member of the Pride. I am proud of YOU.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
February 18, 2020 Dear Students: I hope you’ve been enjoying the President’s Day Break. For those of you traveling back to campus today, I wish you safe travels. And welcome back, everyone to the next part of the spring semester. Take a deep breath and dive right in. Be sure to come up for air from time to time to reflect on your schedule of work, to be sure you’re getting all the projects done on time and in the quality that reflects your best effort.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
January 27, 2020 Dear Students: Welcome to our new students and welcome back to all our continuing students! I hope that you all had a productive, fun, and energizing winter break and that you’re ready to dive right into an amazing Spring 2020 semester here at Hofstra. There are some really interesting opportunities that are available for you, so please be sure to check out the “Opportunities” section of this message below.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
February 24, 2020 Dear Students: Here we go: it’s the last week of February! Spring is on its way. And with spring weather come spring choices. For seniors who are graduating in May: make a choice now to go visit the Career Center, if you haven’t already, so you are on the best possible path for the day after Commencement and the days after that.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
February 10, 2020 Dear Students: Sometimes people dismiss the study of the arts, humanities, social sciences, or education as not worth the investment of time because they believe that people who study these disciplines don’t make a lot of money. I’m taking this opportunity to tell you that this is simply not true. Individuals who earn a degree in the arts, humanities, social sciences, or education go on to career trajectories that are as fulfilling as they are remunerative.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
March 2, 2020 Dear Students: With the beginning of March, we are entering the season of midterms. Some of you might have midterms this week or next week, so I thought I’d share some ideas with you about how to prepare for the exams, papers, and projects that are coming due before or right after spring break.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
Dear Students: With the decision last night to cancel face-to-face classes this week, we have a two week period with no classes (including this week and spring break). Let’s hope that these two weeks are a time in which the virus will recede and throughout the country we’ll be able to reclaim presence in our communities.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
August 17, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well. For those of you who don’t know me: My name is Benjamin Rifkin and I am dean of Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (HCLAS). I ask students to call me Dean Rifkin or Dr. Rifkin. With all that’s going on in the world these days, the liberal arts and sciences remain important and relevant.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
April 6, 2020 Dear Students: I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy; I hope those who are ill will have a full and speedy recovery. We have now completed two weeks of classes in the new online world of social distancing. I hope you have all found a new equilibrium in which to participate meaningfully both in your classes and in other social contexts, including any student clubs or organizations that you belong to. This coming week many of us will be observing a religious holiday.
HCLAS Dean’s Weekly Message
March 23, 2020 Dear Students: I begin this message to you with the hope that you and your family and all your friends and loved ones are well and safe in the context of our global health crisis. As President Rabinowitz wrote to all the members of the Hofstra community, we are most certainly dealing with unprecedented challenges. Over the course of the past two weeks HCLAS faculty have been working hard to prepare for the shift to online instruction.
Hofstra University, New York
April 20, 2020 Dear Students: I hope you and your loved ones are safe and well. Of course, this continues to be an extremely challenging time for the world, for our country, for our communities, and for our Hofstra community.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
April 13, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well.
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
Dear Students: I hope all of you and your families are well and safe. This past weekend was to be opening weekend for Hofstra Drama’s production of Tennessee Williams’s 1948 play Summer and Smoke. The students in the cast auditioned at the end of the fall 2019 semester and the cast and crew had been hard at work preparing for the production until the cancellation of classes the week before spring break.
Hofstra University, New York
April 27, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well. The world is certainly a strange place, but then, what have we got to compare it to?
HCLAS Dean's Weekly Message
May 4, 2020 Dear Students: I hope this message finds you and your loved ones safe and well. Here we are: the final week of classes this semester and my final weekly message to you for Spring 2020. As you look back, may you see that you have demonstrated resilience in the face of the many challenges of this extraordinary year.
The University of Wisconsin System's proposal to cut programs that confer few degrees is wrongheaded (opinion)
As a former faculty member at the University of Wisconsin Madison who collaborated in a systemwide initiative in that state, I find a proposal from the university system to monitor degree program “productivity” and eliminate programs that confer few degrees just plain wrong on many counts. Pursuing such actions in Wisconsin -- and other states, if they follow suit -- would have numerous deleterious effects. If adopted, the proposal would: Reduce revenue and increase expenses.
Opinion: Don’t water down teacher training
A proposal recently approved by a committee of the State University of New York Board of Trustees will allow publicly funded charter schools to hire teacher candidates with only 40 hours of student teaching experience in the SUNY-authorized charter schools, and that will likely spread to other charter schools. The alternative certification is designed to address the challenge faced by charter schools to find and hire certified teachers.
Vesalius and the Body Metaphor
City streets, a winepress, pulleys, spinning tops, a ray fish, curdled milk: just a few of the many images used by 16th century anatomist Andreas Vesalius to explain the workings of the human body in his seminal work De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Marri Lynn explores. Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Portrait of Vesalius featured in De Humani Corporis Fabrica — Source.
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