March 11, 2011
Posted by gavazzi.1 in Dean's message
Created on March 11, 2011 at 7:50am
And tagged with: Ohio State Mansfield
“Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn." (Joseph Addison)
Hello everyone,
I have to do a little bragging about my scholarship this week. The textbook that I had written while on sabbatical last year – entitled Families with Adolescents: Bridging the Gaps in Theory, Research, and Practice – was released this week by Springer Press. This book was a labor of love, and represents everything that I know about how my field thinks about, conducts research, and intervenes in the lives of parents and teenagers. And judging from the reviews that have been posted on the Springer Press website (www.springer.com/978-1-4419-8245-2), the reactions to date have been very positive!
Because one of my principal responsibilities is boasting about the work of our campus community, please allow my bragging to now be extended to the book publishing efforts of our faculty. And to understand just how impressive these efforts are, you need to know a bit more about the challenges that these authors face. A significant number of our faculty members are connected to “book departments,” which means that their research efforts largely take the form of, well, books. This is different than my own department (Human Development and Family Science), which primarily focuses on journal articles and not books. That’s why I said that my own book was a labor of love, in that books typically do not “count” as much as articles in my department.
For our book department faculty, however, the book is the “be all and end all” of their scholarship. Therefore, these faculty members generally are required to publish a book in order to receive tenure. What is most impressive about these efforts is that they complete the work in the same amount of time as their Columbus campus colleagues, and yet they do this with a larger course load.
Numerous examples of the books that our faculty members have published in recent years can be viewed in the display case in Ovalwood (as well as through our library, of course). Next time you are in the building, take a moment to check out the wide variety of topics and areas of inquiry about which these professors are writing. And who knows, perhaps you might find some time to pick one of these books up! In the meantime, please take the time to enjoy the weekend with family and friends!
Steve Gavazzi