Dear Colleagues:

Here is my complete commentary, I hope my computer will cooperate this time. After completing five years at UTC, I figured out that UTC does not have a medium for professionally marketing its faculty and staff. Also, UTC does not build and encourage inter-disciplinary faculty collaboration in research and publications. That is, UTC faculty members hardly know the areas of specialty and academic interests of their colleagues in other departments or disciplines. That is sad.

The situation is as described above, because UTC has no institutional Newsletter with which to inform its faculty and staff, the City, County, and State professional organizations of the research, publications, and other activities of its faculty and staff. Very often, the city, county, or a state department or a professional organization may be looking for a professor, with specialty in a certain field to consult for a problem or   guidance on an issue. If an academic institution announces the publications and activities of its faculty and staff in a Newsletter, it becomes very handy for the city, county, and state agencies and organizations to know who to contact or consult at the institution. That is a part of how a college serves the community where it is situated. 

UTC should be publishing a bi-weekly or monthly Newsletter and distribute it to Hamilton County Association of Social Workers, Hamilton Historic Society, Hamilton County Bar Association, Tennessee Bar Association, Office of the District Attorney, State Attorney General’s Office, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation,  Local FBI Office, City Department of Business Science and Technology, City Local History and Genealogy, Hamilton County Teachers Association, Hamilton County Nurses Association, Hamilton County Clinical Psychology Association, UTC Alumni Association, Hamilton County Commissioners Office, Hamilton County Board of Education, Tennessee Board of Regents, Tennessee Board of Higher Education, Chattanooga Police Department, Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office, African-American Chambers of Commerce, Hamilton County Chambers of Commerce, etc.

What happens is that an announcement in a university Newsletter may be extracted by other organizations and publish it in their own Newsletter.  In this way, a professor who publishes constantly in a certain area of his/her expertise becomes known to various professional boards or committees within the city, county, state, and even outside the state and other world bodies including NGOs. That is one of the ways “out of state” institutions and the United Nations Agencies find professors to consult in specific areas of societal problems.

State Liberal Arts Colleges demand scholarly publications before granting promotion and tenure. UTC has been operating as a private liberal arts college for a long time. Persons with, virtually, no publications have been granted tenure at UTC. In the academia, granting tenure and promotion without scholarly publications is tantamount to destruction of the faculty member, because whenever he/she feels that his/her teaching at the institution has become counter-productive and he/she wants to find a teaching position at another university, he/she might not get it, as teaching positions nowadays have become intensively competitive. If your vitae does not have high quality publications, you are not going anywhere.

I owe a lot to the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Brockport, where a Department Chairman, with a Ph.D. from Yale University, retired in Spring 2000 as an Associate Professor after 29 years of service at the University, because he did not publish a book of original nature to qualify for a promotion to Full Professor. Another Associate Professor, with two books of original nature in many classrooms all over the country, was denied promotion to Full Professor, because he had not chaired a college-wide committee. SUNY Handbook is given to all newly employed at the orientation, and it is explicit with the institution’s expectations on a faculty member. However, SUNY Brockport  provides some of  the tools for your research including contributions from UUP (faculty union).

UTC needs to provide faculty with tools for scholarly endeavors. In fact, not providing faculty enough money for research and present papers at professional conferences is destruction of faculty ingenuity. Present administrators of UTC are not responsible for the above failures. It is partly an age long weakness of UTC changing Vice President for Academic Affairs like changing underwear, and partly due to nonchalant attitude towards scholarship of administrators who the led UTC after the eclipse of the University’s private status.

UTC has many highly talented faculty, but they are like very good tools nobody knows how to use. The present administration can change the past errors in dealing with faculty.
We need some healthy academic exchange not in-fighting.

Thank you and God Bless.

Obi N. I. Ebbe
Professor 

  



Obi N. I. Ebbe, Ph.D.
Professor 
Sociology, Dept. 2102
UT @ Chattanooga
615 McCallie Avenue
Chattanooga, TN 37403
423.425.4437 (Office)
423.425.2251 (Fax)
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