The University of Oklahoma Board of Regents met last week and approved a seven-year contract for incoming basketball coach Len Kruger. (They also approved my tenure and promotion to associate professor, along with that of several of my esteemed colleagues in the College of Arts and Sciences here, though there were no salary negotiations associated with that, needless to say. Hello, salary compression!)
Just finished going over the final edits for “Approaching the Anti-Collection” for Library Trends: interesting to think that when I was first researching this, WikiLeaks was on almost no one’s radar. (And by the time my article finally appears, it may not even exist!)
Haven’t updated this for awhile, as during the semester I tend to do my rambling inside Desire2Learn for the benefit of whatever class I’m teaching. (This semester it’s LIS 5033, and that means that I get to ramble a lot, given the scope of the topic: information and the knowledge society!)
But, for anyone interested, I was told back in September that my tenure dossier will be making its way up the hierarchy of the University toward the Provost and the Regents, which means that a majority of my colleagues who are eligible to vote did vote in favor of my bid for tenure. It’s not official til it’s “official,” though.
I ran the Tulsa Run 15K to celebrate anyway: and of course I finished strong.
Like those old ads by Revlon (“What makes a woman unforgettable?”), the criteria seem to vary from discipline to discipline. I’ve heard of a single paper with the right equation being sufficient in some math departments, and probably discovering an important new prion or protein or whatever is sufficient in various fields of science, but I’ve never heard of anyone in the humanities being tenured simply because of a similar striking discovery. And, yet it must happen:
“His interest in the history of printing led him to discover a discrepancy in chapter and line numbers between the 1667 and 1674 editions of Paradise Lost, as cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.” (from keynote speaker Jorge Reina Schement’s brief bio on the ALISE conference website.)
Of course, Dr. Schement has considerably more claim to fame than this one episode. (In fact, I’ve read several of his books on information policy with great pleasure and profit!) But I think this one might well be enough for most schools: though I doubt that I’ll ever get the opportunity to find out!
Heavens, I haven’t been reading enough fiction lately, what with all these teaching and tenure things going on. How could I have missed Stephen Graham Jones’s Demon Theory: a pop culture-ish horror novel with footnotes?!
Must get this immediately: may be able to use the footnotes!
(Oooh, the tenure tentacles must have sunk in very deeply, to have thought of that!)
The thing with submitting to top-tier journals is that one often gets top-tier reviewers. The altitude is pretty thin up here, and I think I might need a little more oxygen, because now I suspect from the comments that my recent reviewers included at least one major figure that I would never have dreamed of asking to critique my work. Interesting.
But it’s easy to hallucinate these things when you’re climbing…
Hmm, the noted theorist Robert Sternberg is coming to OSU as their new provost. That has to be good news for the Edmon Low library: there may be multiple intelligences, but there is only one academic library. Even undergraduates should enjoy Dr. Sternberg: after all, he came up with the triangular theory of love! (Though that’s not quite what they may think….)
Although it’s often said that faculty have little respect for administration (that whole “herding cats” thing in an entry below), I have tremendous admiration for Dr. Gerard Clancy, the physician who is president of the OU-Tulsa campus. Dr. Clancy not only talks the talk, he walks the walk in terms of bringing better health care through community medicine initiatives to the Tulsa area, despite the enormous difficulties inherent in doing so in the state of Oklahoma.
In fact, where is his MacArthur grant, people?
I don’t know whether I’m more pleased or appalled that this came to my attention via a former student’s posting a link to it on Facebook rather than via my colleagues on our faculty listserv.
is something I’ve been saying a lot this semester in the process of helping students “defend” their portfolios of work in the School. It applies to me as well, though, as I prepare my own tenure portfolio.
I’ve been here just over four years (since January of 2006), and the research work that I’ve produced in that time includes:
* The “theory diffusion” model (for JASIST), which led to
* the “practice theories” model (for ISC) and
* the “social life of theories” model (for AERA).
* The “research specialty” model (with Steve Morris, for ARIST)
* The “strategic relevance” model (for ALISE)
* The “anti-collection” model (for LT)
In order to be a “competent” researcher at my school, one must publish at least one piece of peer-reviewed work each year. Although the “journey” towards the development of these conceptual models has not been particularly straightforward (to paraphrase Edgar Box’s saying, all models are wrong, some models are useful, and only a few models are fundable), I am basically quite pleased with “owning” these.
Oh, and I’m a much better teacher than I was in January of 2006!
