Our chief librarian has told UTC faculty to have "Courage to Change." This
has a nice, twelve-step program ring to it. It is probably needed for those
of us addicted to books and journals. With time and group counseling, we
can overcome our addiction to print materials, one book at a time:

"Hi, I'm Richard, and I bought books. I even bought books I never read. I
just had to have books. No matter how many books I owned, I wanted one more
for the road. I even thought books were my friends!"

"I realized I had a big problem when a student came into my book-filled
office and asked, with the innocence of the young, 'Have you read all these
books?'"

I look forward to the time when I can walk proudly into a library or
bookstore and not take a single book off the shelf, a recovered bookoholic.
My weekly BA (Bookoholics Anonymous)meetings have been a great help during
this traumatic transition to the non-print life.

Remember that Napoleon mustered his sullen troops before their ill-fated
invasion of Russia in 1812 with similar Brave New Words: "Just do it!" Yet
like Enron CEOs (Dare to Be Great), Napoleon and his officers made it back
to warm quarters, but not the troops left freezing in the snow. It is not
fun to be left behind, as a starving soldier or a struggling university
with distorted priorities and eroded academic values.

UTC is being left behind as we are asked to become academic samurai, with
"courage" to commit institutional seppuku (hara-kiri), spilling out the
guts of the university, our library print resources. Sure, there are a lot
of new paradigms out there, but when we hear that so many know so little
about what will be the real future of information systems, just sitting and
waiting may not be as obtuse as it seems.

Maybe I am stupid, but I thought the Lupton funds last year for the library
were to buy time as the faculty, through its appointed Library Committee,
would considered the difficult options we face. Wrong. Turns out this
committee only decides on the "enhancement" grants that allow some faculty
to buy a few more books to fill the huge gaps in their fields of instruction.

I am stupid about math too, because I thought a reduction from 2,876 (or
2,200) serials in print format to "around" 1,000 was a cut in magnitude of
at least one-half. I was told differently. Stupid me.

Remember that the great hopes and expectations that accompanied the advent
of radio, television, videotapes, and all other technologies that were
supposed to revolutionize education did not exactly pan out. Samuel Johnson
in the 18th century said, "Lectures were once useful, but now, when all can
read and books are so numerous, lectures are unnecessary." Sound familiar,
even without Power Point?

However, at UTC lectures are still the only way the academic community can
learn of important new ideas. I have been amazed at the number of times I
wanted to read books by invited speakers either before or after their talk,
only to find we do not have copies on hand. This is probably a stupid idea,
but maybe the Speakers and Special Events Committee should consider putting
a little of their funds into buying books for the library by the noted
speakers they invite to campus.

For example, Professor Ellington, sponsored by the Sun Trust Chair, will be
giving an interesting talk December 3 at Patten House on T.R. Reid's book,
Confucius Lives Next Door (1999). Of course UTC does not own this title,
but as    any good student might suspect, it is available at the
Chattanooga-Hamilton County Library (952.04Rei). This is often the case.

Electronic access to full text serials sounds wonderful, but is it stupid
to ask if escalating costs will force us to pull the plug on those too? On
my department's list of "journals" the most expensive by far is a web site,
costing $6,400, or 80 times more expensive than the printed journal of
record in my own field, The Journal of Asian Studies, which, by the way,
has had only incremental price increases. And I do not find it among the
"full text" titles in InfoTracOneFile on the library site.

Technology may be the answer, but shouldn't we ask what is the question?
Nope. It would be stupid to ask faculty to think about spending priorities
around here when someone already has the answer. After all, the UT system
has a new President, bless his heart, who pulls down the second highest
systems salary in America (Michigan is first).

Derek Box, President Emeritus of Harvard, in the November 22 issue of The
Chronicle of Higher Education (B20) thinks that "lavish compensation can
undermine the effectiveness of leadership on a campus," but surely not at
UTC, where we will soon have a second well-paid coach. Roll out the
Lexuses! Let us not forget that good undergraduate libraries do not win
ball games.

Would it be stupid to question what our peer institutions are doing with
serials? I don't mean the shifting salary peer group list that includes
Gritsville State and other obscure schools that are hard to find on a map.
I'm thinking of that other list we use when we want to brag about UTC: the
ten other public universities that offer a master's program cited in U.S.
News and World Report.

How many print serials do these schools maintain? Using the excellent
resources of the web, this can't be difficult to learn.

If they have greater library resources, then maybe we should call U.S. News
and World Report and just admit that we just can't afford to be in the top
eleven any more. And if they have about 1,000 print titles in their stacks,
then by golly we should be proud to be counted among them. Another case of
doing more with less.

Come to think of it, that could be a fine sound bite to define our mission:

                           UTC:
                   "Doing More with Less,
                 Except for Important Sports"

But that trite slogan has been used for decades, so permit me to be
constructive and suggest a  fresh approach and a clear, honest mission
statement:

                   "Dare to be Stupid!"

Richard Rice
Stupidities of the Past Department