Rick's Blog

#bunyipsbooksbeyond

Use the menu below to explore "All Posts," or delve into selected topics like "Children's Picture Books", and more.

Accountability rarely disappears overnight. It erodes quietly, through exceptions, justifications, and the gradual acceptance of what once would have been unthinkable. And nowhere is this more evident today than in the intersection of public universities, corporate boardrooms, and conditional philanthropy. There was a time when the boundary was clear. A senior academic leader, particularly in a public university, was understood to serve a singular mission: Education. Rese

In 2013, Lieutenant General David Morrison(1) gave one of the most powerful public statements of modern institutional leadership: The standard you walk past is the standard you accept. That line has enduring force because it reaches beyond the immediate context in which it was spoken. It is not only about misconduct. It is about institutional character . It is about what leaders normalize by failing to confront it. And it applies with unsettling precision to the modern univer

Universities have always depended on patrons. In medieval Europe, wealthy families funded colleges and endowed scholarships. In the United States during the nineteenth century, industrialists such as Stanford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie built entire universities through philanthropy. Generosity and education have long been intertwined. But something subtle has changed in recent decades. Philanthropy has increasingly become intertwined not just with support for universities, bu

Philanthropy has become indispensable to modern higher education. Public universities, squeezed by declining state support and rising costs, now depend increasingly on private gifts to fund buildings, scholarships, endowed chairs, institutes, and research initiatives. In that sense, philanthropy is no longer peripheral. It has become central to how many public universities imagine their future. But the more central philanthropy becomes, the more urgent another question become

Philanthropy has long played an important role in higher education. Public universities, especially in an era of declining state support, increasingly rely on private giving to fund buildings, programs, chairs, scholarships, and research. But there is an important distinction that is too often blurred. A gift is one thing. A conditional gift that reaches into governance is something else. A newer form of philanthropy has emerged in which donors seek not merely to support the

There was a time when the dog catcher knew every street. The dog catcher wasn’t just a man with a truck and a looped pole. He was part of the town’s quiet fabric - half warden, half caretaker. The dog catcher knew which gate didn’t quite latch on Maple Street, which old Labrador wandered only on warm afternoons, which child would come running in tears if their terrier didn’t return by dusk. He caught dogs, yes. But more often, he returned them. The measure of his work was not

Some people need mountains. Some need cities. Some need noise and movement. Others need water. Not simply to drink or bathe or cross in a boat, but to see it, to hear it, to feel its presence nearby. Water has a way of steadying a life that is difficult to explain to someone who does not feel the same pull. The Calm of a Water View There is a particular quiet that comes from looking out over water. A lake in the early morning. The slow tide moving through a harbor. A river be

There is something quietly revealing about how a person treats small acts of order. Making the bed. Hanging a jacket rather than dropping it over a chair. Rinsing a cup before placing it in the sink. These are not grand gestures. They are tiny decisions, almost invisible in the moment, but together they form a kind of daily philosophy. Neatness is rarely about perfection. It is about respect. Respect for one’s surroundings, respect for the people one lives with, and, perhaps

Shared governance in an academic institution is a foundational partnership where the faculty, administration, and staff, jointly manage the university's academic and operational missions. As a Professor Emeritus at UC Davis, from the time of my first orientation, I was secure in the knowledge that I was part of a system that prioritized shared governance . Slide from a new faculty orientation Shared Governance at UC Davis Shared governance ensures that faculty hold delegated

Almost everyone who has eaten in an Asian restaurant has faced the small, slightly awkward moment. The waiter sets down the food. There are forks and spoons on the table. No chopsticks. You hesitate. Should I ask for chopsticks? Will I embarrass myself if I can’t use them? Does the waiter assume I can’t? Or worse, does asking for them look like cultural posturing? It is a small moment, but like many small social rituals, it carries layers of meaning. The Perennial Question: “

The person it’s happening to has absolutely no idea. As far as they’re concerned, they just thought something through and reached a conclusion. Phrases such as: Fake news. Witch hunt. Deep state. You don’t say something that many times because you’re making a point. You say it that many times because you’re building a reflex. Mental Emergency Brake Imagine driving along a quiet country road at dusk. The road bends gently through the hills. You are relaxed, attentive, curious

March 6 arrives first there, as it always does. The continent leaning into the new day while the rest of the world is still finishing the last. And so, somewhere back home, it is already my birthday. Seventy-five. A number that lands with a little weight if I say it out loud, and yet feels oddly light when I hold it up against memory. I imagine Australia in the earliest hours of this morning. Not the Australia of postcards, but the real one. The one I still carry in my senses

Travel often teaches us that festivals are more than celebrations. They are windows into the soul of a culture. If you watch closely, they reveal how people think about life, community, faith, and joy. Holi , the famous Indian festival of colors, is one of those moments when India reveals itself most vividly. On the surface, it appears chaotic. Clouds of colored powder drifting through the air, music echoing through narrow streets, strangers laughing as they smear color acros

I recently had a conversation with a retired university administrator about conflicts of interest and conflicts of commitment among senior university leaders. The discussion was about the ethics of a full-time dean of a School of Veterinary Medicine in a public institution belonging to the board of directors of a large pharmaceutical corporation, particularly as the corporation in question is closely aligned with veterinary medicine. It was a serious discussion about confli

I didn’t set out to write a series about naming rights. I don’t wake up thinking about branding strategies or naming rights or capital campaigns. I think about people. About places. About the rooms where I first learned something difficult and wonderful. I think about the smell of disinfectant in the clinics. About the hum of fluorescent lights over the necropsy floor. About coffee at 5 a.m. before morning rounds. About the first patient I saved. And the first one I didn’t. W

By now, we’ve walked around the issue from three sides. In Part 1 , we talked about identity - how names quietly shape who we believe we are. In Part 2 , we followed the money - the real financial pressures pushing schools toward large gifts. In Part 3 , we looked at memory - who gets remembered when a single name rises above thousands of quieter contributions. All this leads to the obvious next question: If naming rights feel uneasy… If they compress collective history int

If Part 1 of this series was about identity, and Part 2 was about money,then this part is about something softer and perhaps more personal: Memory. Because naming rights are not just financial decisions. They are acts of remembering. And every act of remembering is also, inevitably, an act of forgetting. How institutions remember themselves Walk through any veterinary college and you can read its history in the walls. A hallway of class photos. A plaque honoring the first d

In Part 1 of this series, I suggested that naming rights are not really about gratitude. They’re about identity. But identity rarely changes on its own. Identity changes when money changes. If we want to understand why veterinary colleges are beginning to carry the names of individuals, we must talk about something less romantic and far more practical: Who pays the bills? The old model most of us trained in For much of the twentieth century, veterinary education in the Unite

When I look back on my latest trip to India, I realize that what stayed with me most was not any single sight. Not the traffic. Not the towers. Not the monuments. Not even the colors and sounds that travelers always talk about. What stayed with me was the sense of scale . India today feels like a country holding everything at once. It holds ancient systems and new ambitions. It holds extraordinary wealth and deep poverty. It holds biodiversity and urban expansion. It holds

For most of my career, veterinary schools had wonderfully plain names. College of Veterinary Medicine. School of Veterinary Medicine. University of X. Functional. Geographic. Almost anonymous. They sounded less like brands and more like public trusts. That wasn’t accidental. It reflected who we were. Veterinary medicine grew out of agriculture, service, and community need - not prestige, not patronage, and certainly not naming rights. Our colleges belonged to states and pro