Over the summer my friend, fellow historian of education, and former colleague Barbara Shircliffe died while biking in Asheville, North Carolina. I last saw Barbara at the 2019 conference of the History of Education Society, where she was presenting with Deanna Michael and a graduate student. We met while moving into our offices as new assistant professors at the University of South Florida in August 1996, fellow historians of education.1 I was one of dozens of colleagues who benefited from her support in so many ways, from being a friendly ear to a shrewd and quiet observer of human quirks, especially at a public university. I was overjoyed when she met her husband Clint Perigard, and they lived a few miles from us, reliable neighbors and friends. My first semester as a department chair, my wife and Barbara were hospitalized at the same time, my wife from pneumonia and Barbara after she was hit by a van while cycling. For a few days I shuttled in the afternoons between my office, my wife’s hospital bed, and Barbara’s ICU unit, and was grateful when both of them were released.
In April, I wrote about finding peer reviewers in a journal context. This blog post is about a task that seems similar but isn’t: finding external reviewers of scholarship for promotion and tenure purposes. In most American colleges and universities with any research expectations for tenure, part of the process includes asking tenured faculty to write an external review letter assessing the scholarship of the candidate for promotion and/or tenure. Ideally, letter-writers are scholars who can provide an independent judgment (i.e., with no conflicts of interest), and who have both sufficient expertise in the field and understanding of tenure expectations in the U.S. to be able to explain their assessment for review committees and administrators at the candidate’s college or university.
In education, Ron DeSantis and Chris Rufo are the boys who cry woke, the politician and polemicist currently getting the most public attention for hyping the 2020s version of the culture wars.1 Adam Laats is among the many historians who have provided important historical perspective in Made by History (Washington Post) and Slate, among other places. I’m a little less sanguine than Laats that this current culture war wildfire will burn itself out, and even if it does, it is currently harming individual children and chilling the professional judgment of educators — which is one of its primary goals. The cruelty and intimidation are the point.
For the past year, I’ve been an associate editor for two journals, and for one of them, the run of manuscripts has been about 50% greater than one of the co-editors said was likely. So I’ve had to up my game in terms of the main job of associate editors for both journals, organizing the peer review process once a manuscript has been approved by the editorial leadership for peer review (i.e., not a so-called desk rejection, on first read). This blog entry describes my individual process of finding peer reviewers, in an era where the first impression of many journal editors is that manuscript submissions have increased at the same time as review invitations have been declined, especially for so-called ad hoc reviewers, outside the editorial board of a journal.
Yesterday, I presented a poster on this blog series at the Association for Education Finance and Policy, in Denver, and I had a challenge: how does one present a broad-brush historical argument in this format? So I hacked the idea of a poster, which is to present a limited amount of information as an entree to a discussion with people who decide they’re interested in the topic… and created a chart thematically tied to this series, rescaled to show proportionate changes (with the bottom of the chart representing the greatest proportionate loss 2020-2023 from the 2019 baseline), but without labeling the data:
