Showing results by author "Jeffrey Buller" in All Categories

“Sometimes you have to leave home in order to find—or even earn—your way back. Odysseus discovered that. So did Dorothy Gale. Sometimes you get lost. And sometimes you get lost on purpose.” In the summer of 1971, a bored and callow sixteen-year-old boy embarks on a study tour that he hopes will expose him to ”The Comparative Cultures of Europe.” But what he learns instead are the truths you encounter when you’re far from home. From the glittering streets of Madrid and Paris to the ancient sites of Rome and Athens, Bird Without Wings explores the excitement and uncertainty of ...

This book is a highly personalized (and admittedly highly idiosyncratic) guide to a eighteen-day trip to Greece focusing on two things: antiquities and food. If your idea of a vacation in Greece is mostly cruising from island to island, going on long hikes to take in the scenery, and spending hours swimming or lying on the beach, then this book probably isn’t for you. What you’ll find in these pages instead is an extremely detailed account of the art and architecture of Greece, with attention paid primarily to the mainland where so much of ancient Greek history occurred. Each chapter ...

After an annus horribilis—a broken engagement and a career quietly demoted from "a calling" to just a job—a classicist makes a sudden decision to travel to Southeast Asia. Over four weeks in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, he keeps a private ledger of what endures and what he does not: thresholds worn smooth by a million footsteps, temple courtyards at dawn, museum rooms that promise clarity and deliver ambiguity, kindnesses from strangers who have no reason to be kind. From Hanoi and Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, from Luang Prabang to Chiang Mai and Bangkok, the journey becomes a ...

Based on ATLAS' popular workshop, Best Practices in Coaching and Mentoring, this guide provides academic leaders with the tools they need in order to provide effective guidance to faculty members and administrators. Preferring proven techniques to abstract theory, this guide explains what to do (and why) in a wide variety of coaching and mentoring situations. Filled with practical examples and hypothetical case studies based on scenarios in higher education, Best Practices in Coaching and Mentoring coaches you on how to be a better coach and mentors you so that you can be a better mentor. ...

Yesterday’s Tomorrow, the first volume in The Secret Memoirs of Anton Krait, introduces readers to a college professor whose favorite pastime is a complex intellectual game. Drawn into the search for a missing woman, Anton Krait travels to Egypt and finds himself pursued by members of a dangerous religious cult. As Krait and several companions conduct their investigation, they learn the cult is on the verge of an act of terrorism that could result in the loss of millions of lives. Using only his wits, Krait must defeat a formidable enemy in order to save himself and protect the future of ...

Accreditation. Merit salary systems. External rankings. Outcomes assessment. Program reviews. These strategies and many others were developed as ways of improving the quality of higher education. But as Jeffrey L. Buller—the author of such works as The Essential Department Chair, Positive Academic Leadership, and Change Leadership in Higher Education—argues in Reinventing College, they haven’t fulfilled their promise. At best, they’ve resulted in modest improvements that aren’t worth the time and cost they required. At worst, they harmed the quality of higher education by shifting...

Pamplemousse is a collection of poems about the things we hold onto—ticket stubs, half-finished apologies, voicemails we can't quite delete—and the quiet reckonings that shape a life. These poems speak in a voice that is by turns tender, self-aware, and gently ironic. They search for meaning in burned-out streetlamps, late-night emails, broken clocks, and memories that refuse to behave. With nods to the everyday and the existential, Pamplemousse explores love, loss, and the strange dignity of continuing. If you've ever stared into your refrigerator late at night waiting for answers, ...

Based on ATLAS’ popular workshop, Conflict Management for Academic Leaders, this guide explains the difference between constructive and destructive conflict and offers sound advice for how to minimize the harmful effects of destructive conflict. Conflict is inevitable in academic units, but it doesn’t have to be counterproductive. This valuable resource provides six field-tested approaches for dealing with negative forms of conflict and restoring a positive work environment. In addition, like all ATLAS guides, this book is specifically written for the higher education environment and ...

In this sequel to Die, Meistersinger!, the annual opera festival returns to the tiny European duchy of Allemonde, this time accompanied by an airshow at the local university. Billionaire industrialist Hector Seville is in attendance, along with his wife, Barbara, after whom he’s named his latest dirigible. But, when Barbara Seville dies onstage during a performance of Rossini’s Semiramide, the question is raised: Was it suicide, an accident, or … murder? Missing paintings, stolen identities, and a host of other other complications combine to make Chief Inspector D.T. Giovanni’s ...

In this sequel to Yesterday’s Tomorrow, Anton Krait, internationally acclaimed grand master of “The Game,” is plagued by the aftereffects of his adventure in Egypt the year before. Meanwhile, the murderous cult known as “the Vril” has become stronger than ever and has persuaded the public that Krait is a criminal mastermind who is behind a a series of terrorist bombings. With Krait’s intermittent amnesia, he finds himself at a severe disadvantage as he travels around the world, trying to clear his name and forestall yet another global catastrophe.

When the president and dean of a small private college conspire to assign all the “faculty troublemakers” to a new unit and then dissolve the unit, their plan unexpectedly backfires. The resulting “Department of Eminent Scholars” manages to recruit just enough students to remain viable, and the academic year begins. As the semester unfolds, the students in the new department begin to sense that all is not what it seems in Chudwell Hall, the site of their unusual program, and a decades-long mystery starts to unravel.

In Sobremesa, Jeffrey L. Buller lingers in the unhurried space after the obvious ending—the quiet hour when conversation outlasts the meal. These poems move between wry observation and tender confession: a grocery cart with its own agenda, a houseplant’s silent judgment, the ache of a voice overheard in a supermarket aisle. Buller’s gift is noticing: the way a lamp keeps vigil for tomorrow’s forgiveness, how a receipt can itemize modest hopes, why some jokes echo at three a.m. With humor that never denies heart, and intimacy that never slips into sentimentality, Sobremesa invites ...

When a celebrated tenor dies onstage during a performance of Un Ballo in Maschera, Chief Inspector D.T. Giovanni is thrust into a case as complex—and as theatrical—as the opera itself. Allemonde's summer opera festival, held each year in a tiny European duchy, is no stranger to backstage drama. But this time, the drama has spilled into the spotlight. With the main stage closed off as a crime scene, a rogue impresario improvises an outdoor venue overnight, and the show must go on … whether or not a murderer is still waiting in the wings. As Giovanni digs deeper, he uncovers a tangle of...

In this prequel to Die, Meistersinger! and The Barbara Seville, we learn new details about how Detective D.T. Giovanni met and married Zerlina Zeporella before rising to become the chief inspector of the Allemonde Grand-Ducal Police. It’s 2017, and a rash of car thefts throughout Europe is threatening the cancelation of the Great Allemonde Autoshow and Race, a new initiative that happens to overlap with the duchy’s annual opera festival. As one mystery arises after another, Giovanni will need every bit of his deductive skill if he is to unravel the baffling secret of the … Car Men

Tragedy comes to Allemonde when a bride dies only moments after she’s married. Is it suicide or is it, as her groom insists, murder? Either way, this tragedy strikes the Allemonde Grand Ducal Police all the harder since both bride and groom are closely linked to the department. As the local opera theatre mounts its spring production of Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, deaths continue to occur in the duchy, and Chief Inspector D.T. Giovanni must overcome his own grief in order to lead the investigation. Twists, turns, and several surprise appearances make the Case of the Battered ...

Shocking deaths and equally shocking reappearances abound in the latest case challenging the Grand Duchy of Allemonde’s chief inspector, D.T. Giovanni. The grand duke decides that, in the aftermath of the global pandemic, what the world needs is a festival consisting exclusively of comic operas, operettas, and Broadway musicals. Meanwhile, a circus comes to town in an effort to bring even greater merriment to the duchy. But, despite these innovations, the festival nearly comes to a crashing halt when, once again, murders begin to intrude on the gaiety. Hired assassins, an international ...

When international politics cause a group of Russian basses to arrive in Allemonde just in time for the annual opera festival, the singers’ intense competition quickly gets out of hand. But after one of the Russians disappears and another is killed in a bizarre accident, Chief Inspector D.T. Giovanni concludes that at least one murderer is terrorizing the duchy and must be caught. Meanwhile, his relationship with Annalisa Canali is becoming strained when she wonders why the chief inspector won’t make their new status public. The whole messy business has become, quite clearly, a mystery ...

When a tenor is murdered only days before the annual opera festival is scheduled to begin in the tiny European duchy of Allemonde, it’s up to Chief Inspector D.T. Giovanni to find the culprit. Unfortunately for Giovanni, everyone he meets seems to have a motive and no one thinks he’s up to the challenge. The result is an adventure that’s full of so many twists and turns it proves to be a mystery on an operatic scale.

To help promote tourism, the Grand Duchy of Allemonde begins offering a winter opera program in addition to its long-established summer festival. But when a young girl is murdered, and Wilfred Beck, the opera theatre’s set designer, is repeatedly threatened, it’s up to Chief Inspector D.T. Giovanni and his team to discover who’s causing the mayhem. A bewildering array of suspects, a fierce debate over gender identity, and not one, but two secret societies combine to make Giovanni’s latest challenge a mystery on an operatic scale.

In this controversial new work, Jeffrey L. Buller, the author of Positive Academic Leadership and Change Leadership in Higher Education, argues that nearly every initiative undertaken to improve higher education in the last fifty years—merit pay systems, student course evaluations, faculty evaluation, outcomes assessment, program review, external college rankings, strategic planning, and the like—has actually had the opposite effect. In addition, he argues that current approaches to accreditation have failed, “administrative bloat” is not the leading cause of tuition increases at ...