As far as I’m concerned, its real purpose is to protect people like historian Robert Proctor at Stanford from things like the onslaught of Big Tobacco on his research. After all, he coined the term “agnotology” — and now he’s living it.
Anything else is pretty extraneous, after all.
I think the fact that I can come up with a title like this, let alone write a coherent paper about it, probably makes me tenurable. I’m just sayin’.
It kills me that I hadn’t heard of this before now, as I love it! Obviously my “terminal degree” should be revoked until I know more!
Whatever happened to logician James Dickoff, who was at the Yale School of Nursing back in the 1960s, and who translated Antoine Arnauld’s The Art of Thinking: The Port Royal Logic as well as producing some rather radical (heh!) work about “situation-producing” theories being more important than “explanation-producing” ones? I know that his co-author Patricia James eventually retired years later as professor emerita of philosophy at Kent State, but whatever happened to him? I tried the Yale School of Nursing without much success: all they could offer were some of his nursing-related publications, which I already knew about. I often say that good theories can outlive their theorists, but I’m not sure that I meant it like this!
And so starts the first day of my countdown-to-tenure-decision year: 2010!
Reading Bill Crowley’s Spanning the Theory-Practice Divide in Library & Information Science, which has garnered surprisingly few citations in the five years since its publication by Scarecrow (four book reviews were all I could find in Web of Science). His points about the critical importance of theory to faculty careers and the critical lack of importance of theory in library practice are well-taken, his “cultural pragmatism” oriented glossary of terms such as “intellectual predestination” is unusual, and his Levels 1, 2, and 3 of interaction in research on tacit knowledge are about to be very useful to me. I suspect that the chapter on “theory and revelation” may have put some people off (on both sides of this particular “fence”), but, again, since I’m one of the few people that I know of who is fascinated by things like the role of the mandatum in Catholic institutions, this was actually one of my favorite chapters. Crowley is obviously unafraid of taking on both sacred cows and shibboleths: this isn’t his tenure year!
in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Tenure rules!
In our never-ending efforts to showcase student work, the indefatigable Dr. Susan Burke and I have finagled a whole panel for doctoral student research presentations at the ALISE annual meeting in Denver under the banner of “innovative research methods.” We originally were supposed to have only one panel, but had so many great submissions that we made the case for having two separate ones, and have just found out that we get to have both panels, one for current faculty and one for current doctoral students (though all were chosen on the basis of merit from a common pool of submissions.) Not bad for a couple of junior faculty members from a school that doesn’t even have a doctoral program (though in fact we do have some students that really should be in one!)
