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Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Report From ASU Faculty



Here is a bit of intelligence collected from ASU. More will follow via subsequent postings as information becomes available:

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Which are the weak UT departments?

Anonymous said...

Very interesting letter!

Despite the hype, the process described in the letter is not new at UT: where is the Industrial Engineering Department and Program?

Anyone remember a guy by the name of Vic Kapoor?

In the early to mid-90's, he combined the department with Mechanical Engineering which then starved the program into death! Today, there are no tenured or tenure track Industrial Engineering Professors remaining at the University of Toledo. (We do have one young Lecturer who was a graduate of that program and is the last vestige of its legacy.)

And this was done without regard to the fact that Industrial Engineering was one of the most popular departments with local employers. Companies like SSOE, a major Toledo enterprise was built with graduates from the Industrial Engineering Program.

Anonymous said...

Wait some people don't like it? The whole plan is flawed! Unless everyone agrees, we shouldn't move forward.

Anonymous said...

If you read the book "The Relevant University: Making Community and Economic Engagement Matter" by LLoayd A Jacobs and Eva Klein, The University Press {I did not know we had one!}, 2010, you quickly find that their undersstanding of knowledge is flawed. It seems that knowledge has to result in implementation in order to be knowledge by their definition.

In additon, you also find that the authors can not distinguish between The meta-definitions of engagement (Human Capital, Innovation Systems and a Knowledge Community) and health care as a discipline of knowledge at a university. I would suppose that they would claim that Education, Engineering, Law, Business, the Arts and the Sciences are not "transdisciplinary domains" whereas Helth Care singulary is by their statements on page 31.

Since this was meant to be a short comment and it is now not, I will reserve more comments about this book for future comments. I would recommend that the moderators of this bog set up a separate thread for commentary and critique of this volume.

Anonymous said...

Tom Barden is editor of the University Press. How would you not know that?

Anonymous said...

Nope. UT does not have a university press.

A university press is a non-profit enterprise that publishes peer reviewed scholarly monographs that are judged as worthy according to merit. If a university commits its scarce resources to founding and sustaining a university press, its academic reputation among faculty-friendly academic institutions nationwide soars.

Dr. Barden oversees a quality boutique press that operates on a shoestring budget provided by the UT Urban Affairs Center:

http://uac.utoledo.edu/
News/blade-6-19-05.htm

His operation could become a University Press eventually. I hope it does; perhaps when UT creates an Honors College on the main campus? I don’t foresee this happening. This present UT Administration demonstrates in its Directions strategic planning document that it lacks vision and courage to invest its resources in such a major academic non-profit enterprise.

Meanwhile, UT is satisfied to own and operate a sufficient number of printing presses to propagandize the masses, or can just contract out big, glossy, four-color yet vacuous vanity press jobs like the Klein/Jacobs albatross.