Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison has officially launched her campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nomination against incumbent Rick Perry. Given the general disarray of the statewide Democratic Party, this one may be for all the marbles.

þ: Texas native-in-exile Steven Taylor.

Revisiting a theme from a few weeks ago, Dr. Crazy at Reassigned Time ponders the merits of office hours, concluding thusly:

I say that we need to take another look at “office hours.” What do they mean? What are they supposed to achieve? If we are achieving those goals outside of a clearly stated four hours on the syllabus, that doesn’t mean that those efforts should be ignored.

Another serendipitous event—the arrival of a page of boilerplate “policies” to stick in my syllabi, much different from the boilerplate “policies” that I was told to insert last year and modified (apparently) without any input from the faculty—has also helped clarify some of my thinking about office hours.

I strongly believe (and this has been reinforced by discussions with colleagues) that many of said policies, including office hours, exist largely as a punishment for the perceived misbehavior of certain faculty members past and present. Rather than the dean or provost taking said faculty aside and saying “cut it out and behave like a professional adult,” the preferred solution is instead to impose a policy on everyone regardless of their past miscreant behavior, knowing full-well that the miscreants will just misbehave (albeit within the new, arbitrary rules) in the future anyway.