Cornerstone: the newsletter of the College of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 1996

              A Note from the Dean
his is the fifth annual issue of Cornerstone and the first not to have Dean Ross C Murfin pictured on page one. After 14 years at the University of Miami, Ross moved on to become provost and vice president for academic affairs at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It is a position of major responsibility at a fine university. Those of us who know Ross Jnow that SMU made a wise choice. We are excited for him that his talents have been recognized, but we will miss his leadership and friendship.
So the picture you see is mine. I’m Paul Blaney, and I am proud to serve the College as interim dean. I’ve been on the faculty of the University’s Department of Psychology since 1977, serving also as associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences since 1990. As interim dean, my responsibility will be to keep things running smoothly while a national search is conducted and to maintain the College’s commitment to excellence in teaching and scholarship.
Let me share a few facts with you in order to put the College of Arts and Sciences into perspective. The College awards about 800 bachelor’s, 70 master’s, and 50 doctoral degrees annually. It has more than 250 tenured and tenure-eligible faculty (plus another 50 or so full-time lecturers and research
C "acuity) distributed across 16 departments, teach year between 20 and 40 outstanding
young scholars are interviewed for the eight to 12 tenure-eligible faculty positions open that year in the College. It’s a large and complex operation.
When we interview these young scholars, our goal is to recruit the most promising individuals who are available nationally—even internationally—and often we come away from our searches with the sense that we have landed the most outstanding person available in a given field. The real proof comes in the teaching they do—and the scholarship they generate—in the years that follow.
In this vein, a further comment about the photo on this page: Though the person has changed from prior years, the backdrop is the same—the dean’s office in the Ashe Building. In fact, though you can’t really tell from the photo, even the books—many of them—are the same. That’s because it is a tradition for faculty, upon publishing a book, to present the dean with
a copy, which then becomes part of the dean’s library. For the first time, this issue of Cornerstone has included a list of books our faculty have published over the past few years. The quality of these volumes is indicated by the presses that published them.
And the number of books is impressive, especially when you realize that most scholarship in the natural and social sciences is published in journals rather than in book form. A glance at the list will give you a sense of what kind of work is produced by our carefully recruited members of the fac-s ulty. Enjoy this year’s 1 centerfold.
I The College I faces a number of challenges, and one I hope to address this year pertains to E-mail and Internet access. The College has been generally cautious about computer-related investments; while others have regretted not “waiting till the price came down,” we’ve usually been spared such regrets: we’ve waited. But it is Continued on page 2
Interim Dean Paul Blaney