Perspective on Tenure for I.U. Librarians: How Do We Define and Support Tenure at I.U.?
In a 2011 Indiana University Libraries Faculty Council (IULFC) ballot, librarians voted that promotion and tenure procedures will become campus-specific. Some campuses are in the process of developing procedures and some already have them. No matter how our final procedures will vary campus to campus, we share the bond of academic status and tenure for librarians, and, especially now, we need to think about what these principles mean to us individually and as a faculty. Although our shared criteria for promotion and tenure remain as stated in the Indiana University Faculty Handbook, even those may change as the result of our in-depth review of the tenure process.
Starting the Write Way: Comparing Two Library Scholarly Development Programs
How many faculty librarians have uttered the plaint, “I don’t know how to start getting published!” or similar laments about the publish-or-perish obligation? Because scholarship among academic librarians is a serious and often daunting issue, much time and energy are spent worrying about it. At institutions that require scholarly activity for tenure or for contract renewal, demands for scholarship can be problematic for junior faculty-librarians. Tenure demands are a major stressor for new academic librarians, but meeting tenure requirements is generally not addressed in library school.1 Because of this gap in library school education, it becomes the responsibility of the tenure-granting institution to meet these needs. Additionally, librarians who move from institutions that do not focus on scholarship to ones that do may feel uncomfortable with this type of writing. The differences between papers written in graduate school and writing for tenure can be intimidating; although the differences should make it easier, they often make the process more, not less, daunting.2
Unity Identity Text Self
Abstract Understanding the receptivity of literature, how one work admits many readers, begins with an analogy: unity is to text as identity is to self. Unity here means the way all a text’s features can be related through one central theme. Identity describes a person’s sameness within different behaviors as variations on one identity theme (Lichtenstein). To find unity or identity, however, the interpreter himself plays a behavioral variation on his identity theme. In interpreting, his identity re-creates itself as he shapes the text to match his characteristic defenses, fantasies, and coherences. Thus, what a poet says about fictional, political, or scientific texts expresses the same identity theme as the poems he writes. To understand reading, criticism, and any knowing or making in symbols, then, we need to let go the Cartesian craving for objectivity and accept the themes in ourselves with which we construe the world—including literary works.