To be or not to be? Librarians as faculty?

Here at UNLV, Librarians are indeed tenure-track, with similar [albeit discipline-specific] expectations for performance and evaluation in job, service, and scholarship. This isn't true everywhere and this article, "Faculty No Longer," from today's (4/21/11) edition of Inside Higher Ed describes the recent decision by a community college system to change the status of librarians to professional staff in order to save money. This is followed by discussion about why academic librarians are generally considered to be faculty.

AAUP publishes online journal on academic freedom

This appears to be a new open access journal. The inaugural issue of Journal of Academic Freedom can be found here. The rationale (from the journal's web site) is:

"With this issue we introduce a new online project—the AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom. Scholarship on academic freedom—and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining—is typically scattered across a wide range of disciplines. There has been no single journal devoted to the subject. Now there is. It is published by the
organization most responsible for defining academic freedom."

How to talk to an administrator

The short article (Speaking like a hedgehog, hearing like a fox) in May 20th's Inside Higher Education and the linked post to Tenured Radical offer some common sense advice that could be useful in the best of times and certainly in the worst of (budget) times that we are currently experiencing.

If the adjuncts are treated well....

Not surprisingly a new study described in today's Chronicle found that when adjuncts receive benefits, they are more satisfied with their salaries (compared to those paid the same with no benefits) and with their decision to have an academic career. What is more enlightening is the link between adjuncts receiving benefits and the satisfaction reported by full-time faculty at those same institutions.

How Professors Think -- inside the peer review process

Inside Higher Ed (March 4) had a lengthy review of a new book by Michèle Lamont, called How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment. She sat in on considerations of grant and fellowship applications for such organizations as the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Some (hopefully) tantalizing excerpts from the interview/review:

• "The peer review processes she studied involved grants to professors and graduate students, and all the panels involved professors from many disciplines. She writes that, as a result, the findings may suggest similar issues for multi-disciplinary committees on individual campuses -- panels that frequently play a key role in tenure reviews once a candidate has been considered at the departmental level. "
• "One of the key findings was that professors in different disciplines take very different approaches to decision making. The gap between humanities and social sciences scholars is as large as anything C.P. Snow saw between the humanities and the hard sciences."
• "The most common flaw she documents is a pattern of professors applying very personal interests to evaluating the work before them. “People define what is exciting as what speaks to their own personal interest, and their own research,” she said. "

I'll put the book on order...

Defining and Debating 'Double Dipping' in Scholarship

I thought this would be a great article to get a conversation started about faculty scholarship since UNLV's increased focus has raised everyone's attention level. This recent article from Inside Higher Education summarized some national level conversations about what constitutes 'double dipping' and how we should count scholarship efforts.
I'm going to go ahead and stick my neck out just to give us a starting/reaction point and I hope you'll send your comments. I think impact is a key measure for faculty scholarship and so I agree with the opinion of one person quoted who says, basically, that it's ok to provide essentially the same content to two different audiences. If in fact, the point of scholarship is to share knowledge and have an impact on the field, doesn't it make sense to disseminate as widely as possible. As long as one is clear in documenting your work that the same presentation was made to different audiences? For example, I work across disciplines in my collaborations so I might publish or present similar information in a venue targeted to librarians and another targeted to educators or counselors. What do you think about the questions raised in this article?

Trends in faculty & librarian attitudes

Whew! I got a little behind in the run up to the new term. I'll try and get caught up with my postings in the next couple of days.
The new Ithaka Report on the most recent survey results also identifies trends in faculty attitudes "related to online resources, electronic archiving, teaching and learning and related subjects..." In addition to providing a link to the white paper, this Web page also links to several more targeted presentations such as the short powerpoint on "What Characteristics of a Scholarly Journal Are Important to Authors?"