News

Interviewed by Tiana Tew
SLIS Newtork Alumni Magazine
Spring 2003
Long Version

Twelve years that redefined and energized IU's School of Library and Information Science.

I had a number of long-term objectives. One was to reorganize or restructure the school. You have to understand that 10 years ago, SLIS wasn't just based in Bloomington. It provided courses on 7 campuses around the state, and also in Cincinnati.

At that time, I think there were 14 full-time faculty, who were in effect servicing a total of 8 campuses, and goodness knows how many students dotted around different parts of the state. I believe it was the case that faculty would sometimes fly in one of the university's small aircraft to teach courses in, for example, South Bend. If they weren't flying they were driving. So you might, if you were a professor in SLIS, have to, on a Thursday, drive up to South Bend, overnight, teach a two-, three-, four-hour class on Friday and then drive back. That took quite a chunk of people's time, and as far as I'm aware, not everyone did the same amount of teaching on the regional campuses.

When I started to look more closely at the data, I found, in a couple of cases, that there were students who were graduating with, nominally, an IU SLIS degree who had never had a course taught by a full-time faculty member. That struck me as profoundly anomalous. How can you have a degree when you haven't actually seen any of the tenured or tenure-track professors?

We looked at the economics and we looked at the quality issue. We also had to take into account the accreditability of the program, because when you have a multiplicity of sites there is a very thin spreading of faculty and resources. It was clear to me—though not necessarily to all my colleagues at the time—that this octopus-like structure really didn't make sense pedagogically, qualitatively, or financially. So one of the first things I did was to initiate a program of contraction, closing down SLIS programs on campuses in New Albany, Richmond, and so on. It was done, perhaps, not with as much finesse as it could have been done, it caused a great deal of ill feeling at the time, and some of that ill feeling has persisted. And some of it is very personal.

It took maybe 4 years, but eventually the school was based on 2 campuses—Bloomington and Indianapolis. There were no full-time faculty members based in Indianapolis at that time. The goal was to try to develop a small, but self-sustaining program at Indianapolis, with its own nuclear faculty. A program tailored to the local market and local conditions. After a couple of false starts, I think we've finally achieved that.

At Indianapolis we now have an executive associate dean, who basically runs the program. My approach is almost completely hands-off. I remain symbolically the dean, but it is run and managed on a day-to-day basis by Danny Callison. And there are now 8 faculty members and a large student body. Teaching is concentrated on the Master of Library Science program at Indianapolis; we no longer offer the Master of Information Science there, and there are no doctoral students at Indianapolis. So it's very focused. It's a professional, vocational master's program. Roughly 90 percent of the students there are from the state of Indiana. They are studying to be librarians. It responds to a local need. I have to say that I'm very pleased with the way that it has matured and evolved in the past couple of years.

Bloomington has always been what is called the flagship campus of the university. It is where not all, but the heart of the research enterprise is concentrated. As far as SLIS is concerned, we have to be able to demonstrate that we don't just do research, but we do research that matters and makes an impact on the world, so that we are taken seriously by our academic peers.

At Bloomington, about half of our students come from out of state or out of country, whereas Indianapolis it's much more localized. And that's the way it should be. The good thing is that there is very little intra-market competition. We are not competing for the same students, by and large, and so it is possible to have a positive sum outcome. That is to say that both campuses, both hemispheres of the school, can grow successfully and not to the detriment of the other.

Restructuring was part one. That's taken quite a long time, and we now have a two-campus program that is very robust. We have record, historic I think, enrollments in Bloomington; at the same time we have our highest ever enrollment at Indianapolis. In aggregate the school has more students and a greater credit hour count than ever in its history. So if those sort of leading indicators matter, or are an indication of the school's health, then the school's vital signs are very positive.

One other thing I was keen to do was to increase the level and quality of research activity, and to increase the visibility, the salience, of the research. That's taken time. SLIS has always had a good reputation; it's always had some faculty who've been well known, visible, and widely published, but when I came here there was no research being funded by, for the sake of illustration, the National Science Foundation.

Today it's very different. A number of my colleagues have secured NSF funding. Quite a few have submitted, and are currently submitting proposals for NSF funding. One of our junior faculty members, Katy Brner, is just about to receive a five-year NSF young career award, which is highly unusual in this field and extremely prestigious.

One of the things that has given me the most satisfaction over the years is the fact that the impact of research by SLIS faculty, using bibliometric indicators, consistently ranks at the top or very close to the top. We may not be the largest school in terms of faculty head-count, number of students, or the portfolio of degrees and courses, but the quality of our research, the quality of our thinking in other words, really is as good as it gets.

One of my goals was to increase the quality and visibility of the research, and the corollary of that was securing external funding from important research funding agencies. You can't do that, of course, unless you have the right kind of faculty. So a third objective was to not simply increase the size of the faculty, but to recruit a more heterogeneous groups of individuals, from quite different disciplinary backgrounds; individuals who could secure positions in departments or schools in their home disciplines, as it were. In other words, they're good enough to be hired in their own fields, but we want to hire them into this school.

Building up an intellectually diverse faculty has been a strategic intention over the years. It's not one of the easiest things to do because in a small-ish group such as SLIS, it creates a sort of Tower of Babel effect. People coming from different disciplines view the world differently. They have different models and notions of what constitutes a research problem, what are acceptable research methods and approaches, what makes good research, and so on. They often use different terminology, and they sometimes can have problems empathizing with, being tolerant, of approaches that are somewhat alien to them.

The up side is that you create a very fertile environment in which insights can emerge, collaboration happens almost spontaneously, and people can draw upon complementary techniques and methods. Providing there's a dash of tolerance in the air, it can create a very stimulating environment in which to work.

On a personal note, I think one of the things I've found most satisfying about this place is that when one has colleagues from such a spectrum of backgrounds you can't but learn something every day. It's a very healthy antidote to monothetic thinking or blinkered thinking, to realize there are other ways of conceptualizing problems, there are other ways of deconstructing issues, there are other ways of defining and interpreting evidence.

It's always invidious to single out a particular colleague, but it would be hard not to mention Rob Kling. He was someone who had tremendous standing, nationally and internationally, in a number of academic fields and whose work was widely known. To have him come to SLIS had a very significant, legitimating effect, not just on the school, but on the discipline. He was the ideal sort of academic colleague—open-minded, stimulating, widely read, productive, keen to mentor and develop others. I think it's fair to say that he had had a very energizing effect on SLIS. It's also true that having somebody like that here made it easier to recruit other top-flight individuals.

[Editor's Note: Friends and colleagues at the IU School of Library and Information Science (SLIS) mourn the loss of Rob Kling, Ph.D., Professor of Information Systems and Information Science and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science. Kling, 58, passed away unexpectedly in the pre-dawn hours of May 15th, 2003. Kling was a brilliant and dedicated scholar whose work and spirit touched many lives. Read more at Dr. Rob Kling Remembered.]

I came here from a business school where I was head of a department of information science. It wasn't a library science program. Information science is my academic home and information science is something much bigger and broader than library science. That's not to say that library science isn't very important. It is an established, well-understood and fairly coherent field of study. But there is much more to the world than that.

I wanted to diversify and extend the curriculum into areas that I felt were being neglected and couldn't easily be packed into an already bulging 36 credit-hour degree program. In the early 1990s, many academic programs around the world were introducing master's degrees in information science, information studies, information management and such like. Were we not to do that, we might just have seemed to be falling behind the curve. Secondly, we would have all our eggs in one basket, albeit an important basket.

What we needed to do was diversify; programmatically, intellectually, it made sense to add a new degree program. Symbolically, it suggested change, forward movement, momentum, growth. It was also an important way of trying to grow the student body, to attract students who would not otherwise have come to this program. And if we were going to recruit a diverse faculty with backgrounds in fields other than library science, then they were going to have to teach something. Information science seemed an appropriately accommodating, elastic construct. The program was created to broaden our portfolio, keep up with leading trends in the field, move into areas of opportunity both for teaching and research, expand the student base, and overall vivify and diversify the school and its curriculum.

I don't think there's a pat solution to the question I offered. It's not a cookie cutter approach. Public intellectuals emerge. Linguistics didn't say "Let's have a Chomsky."

I think the first thing that one has to do is to have a credible academic context. One has to have some sense of disciplinary coherence. One has to be able to ground one's students in theory to ensure that they are familiar with key constructs and are able to think analytically. Students emerge from here with something more than a suite of skills such as classification, cataloging, programming or what have you. Those skills are important, but what matters more in my view, and I think the view of most of my colleagues, is developing a sense of the underlying principles, models, theories, and frameworks, that shape our assumptions and actions, and that we understand how to critically appraise the results of research, to be able to distinguish between what is good and what is trivial, what is bad and what is commendable. Without that kind of intellectual environment I would suggest that is unlikely that a public intellectual would emerge.

Library and information science education seems, on the surface at least, to be fairly sound. If one looks at the numbers, they're bullish in a way that they weren't in the mid-1990s when there was a downturn in the number of students coming into and graduating from the field.

Some of the larger schools are now really quite large places; for example Syracuse, although Syracuse is much more than a library and information science program. In fact, it's not a library and information program at all. It's an information program to use the currently fashionable portmanteau term. We see that at Michigan, with the School of Information. We see it at Washington, with the hubristically named The Information School. We see it at Texas-Austin, which has also just baptized itself the Information School.

Some of these schools are growing significantly in terms their external research income, their core faculty, the number students, and also in terms of the number of programs—graduate and undergraduate—they offer. They really are much more robust programs, and often more significant, more powerful players in their own institutional milieux. And in that sense, it's probably good for the field. It raises the visibility of information. It also raises interesting questions whether you can actually have anything like a coherent field of "information," or if it is too amorphous, too fluid, too evanescent a construct on which to build a field.

Nonetheless, at present, I would have to say that based on the indicators, the field—however ill defined and difficult to delineate—is not unhealthy. It is certainly healthier than it was 5 or 7 years ago. Having said that, it's clear to me that there is a very striking stratification.

There is a small number of schools which, to put it crudely, are good, and in which significant work is done by a fairly select group of individuals. There is a larger population of schools in which a very small number of people have done any work of any real consequence, to put it bluntly.

The field as a whole may be fairly robust, but it is a stratified field. There are only a small number of schools which I would classify as research-intensive, which consistently produce research that appears in leading peer-review fora, is cited, and, to a greater or lesser extent, makes some kind of difference.

I have long had an interest in business strategy and strategic planning. Much of my consulting work over the years has given me the opportunity to be involved with organizations, both for-profit and not-for-profit, in terms of understanding the dynamics of the sectors and markets in which they operate, and competitive forces which shape their development and evolution. I've long had an interest in understanding markets and consumers, and over the years I've developed an interest in military intelligence, the importance of intelligence in statecraft and national security. One sees very marked parallels between some of the principles and practices in those spheres, and in the world of business. Competitor and competitive intelligence have become really quite high profile activities. My interest in information warfare goes back 5 or 6 years. In understanding information threats, understanding defensive information warfare, one of course has to take account of the role of intelligence and counter-intelligence, the significance of effective intelligence management in organizations, whether a nation-state, army or business, or school such as this, in achieving its objectives.

The course I currently teach covers a wide range of issues, understanding structural dynamics in the marketplace, through corporate planning techniques and approaches, through various kinds of intelligence and counter-intelligence analysis and assessment, through to asymmetric warfare and information warfare, tactical and strategic, defensive and offensive. And most recently to understanding the concepts of net-centric warfare and net warfare, the latter particularly in relation to the developing terrorist threats countries such as this face.

I enjoy the academic life, but it is very easy to become cloistered in one's ivory tower. Consulting and field-based research are very useful ways of testing one's assumptions, developing one's experiential base, and learning on the fly. Over the years I have been lucky enough to very often stumble into consulting opportunities or develop relationships with organizations, sometimes commercial sometimes not, that have given me entres to places, discussions, planning exercises, or deliberations that I couldn't otherwise have hoped to come across.

Just before I came to this country I was, again fortuitously, involved in setting up a high-tech online publishing operation in Scotland, which was very state-of-the-art at the time. I was one of three founding directors. Our goal was to sell the company off within a matter of years, having demonstrated its business viability and the viability of the systems and the software that underpinned it.

We sold that company to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in Philadelphia. I made a few pennies from that, but more importantly, I learned a little bit about how difficult it is to set up a business and how difficult it is to win initial anchor contracts. I also learned that you very often have to put your own money on the line when the bank comes along and is looking for collateral for loans. It gave me a great respect for individual entrepreneurs. That's not the only time I've been involved in trying to set up a business, but it's the only one that proved successful.

As a result, I then spent 6 years on the ISI strategic advisory board. That was a very informative period. I learned a great deal about the cut and thrust of business. The composition of the board was interesting; it included at one time two Nobel laureates. The annual strategic planning meetings that we took part in were very intensive, and provided great insight into the business dynamics of the information industry.

A more recent, and quite different, example was working with the U.S. Department of Justice as a consultant and expert witness in the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) case. Unlike the great majority of my colleagues in this field and this country, I was not an opponent of CIPA. From that experience I learned something about the way in which briefs are constructed, the way in which lawyers work, a little bit about courtroom procedures. I had the pleasure, if that's the right word, of appearing before a three-judge panel in Philadelphia, and was pleasantly surprised to see some of my comments quoted in the government briefs submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court. Again, these things happen by chance. I never worked with Justice Department previously, but one of their lawyers had read one of my op-ed pieces in Library Journal.

Another piece of work I've done was with Chemical Abstract Service, which is part of the American Chemical Society. Because of confidentiality I can't say what the work was, but it has to do with new product development. Again, one gets a great sense of the complexity of decision-making in highly competitive business markets.

The most recent piece of consulting I've done was for NATO, to conduct a workshop on information warfare and cyber-terrorism in Portugal. The invited audience of 30 or so included one admiral, one general, three majors, a brace of colonels and various other military and naval officers. Again, these things seem to happen, but each of them forces one to study furiously initially. They broaden one's outlook and they provide raw material that feeds back into one's research and teaching.

Quite often I use such experiences in my classroom teaching. It breathes life into some of the abstractions, and one is able not just to use a textbook case study, but to talk firsthand from experiences in the field.

I remember identifying this field in the mid-'70s as one that had the potential to grow. It's like buying what is called a shell business and then creating something spectacular within that shell. Library science, as Americans amusingly call this field—no other nation uses that oxymoronic term—is such a shell business. There are some very interesting elements in the intellectual history of library science that will have persistent value, and one could see that something, variously called the information society, the computer age, the digital age or the network age, was emerging, and that the field of study, or a patchwork of fields of study, was likely to emerge.

My goal was to find an academic position within this field and to try to create academic programs and research agendas that would take advantage of the emerging information society and help contribute to the collective understanding of these trends and phenomena. It was a field that, although in some sense very old-fashioned, not to mention unfashionable, provided a launch pad for a new field. Growing out of the chrysalis, if you like, of library science, is the butterfly of information studies and information systems, social informatics, and all of the other incarnations that we have seen in recent years.

The field of which I am a child is classical Anglo-American information science. But information science at this school, and other similar schools, is much broader than the discipline whence I came. Whether the label information science accurately or helpfully denotes this field of activity, I don't know, but we will continue to absorb and accommodate new areas of interest.

An example is human-computer interaction. Ten years ago these were not things that one found in a program like this, and this is not the only program in which you would find them, but it's a good example of how we've broadened our areas of concern. Developing an understanding the interaction between technology, individuals, groups, and society has helped us create a better, more sensitive, more nuanced understanding of the ways in which technology works its way into the fabric of our daily lives, domestically and professionally. The emergence of another ill-defined area such as social informatics has created an opportunity to do research that goes way beyond the kind of thing that we did in the early days.

In a sense, what we do is defined by the interests of our faculty. To be rather flip about it, the field is the summation of the research and teaching interests of the faculty at any school at any given moment. Since SLIS has a very mixed, very diverse faculty, we cover perhaps more areas of intellectual concern than most of our peers. I think it's fair to say that in some cases we are among the first, or are the first school, to take and run with a particular topic, subject or theme, and then we find that it's been picked up elsewhere.

One of the other things that is most satisfying about being at SLIS at IU is that many of the things we have incubated—human-computer interaction, social informatics, some of the work in e-commerce—have been things that are now being more widely acknowledged. In a sense, some of what we do has been the new School of Informatics in microcosm. Rob Kling and I established the Center for Social Informatics just after he came here, and I think we were the first unit of any IU campus to use the word "informatics." We had, as it were, appropriated the language of informatics, long before the idea of having a school of informatics was mooted. We were teaching in the area of HCI long before anyone else, I think it's fair to say.

We're a small unit, but we've been intellectually very fleet-of-foot and very alert to emerging topics and research opportunities in the broadly defined area of information science. I think that's been one of the major strengths and contributions of the school, acting as a sort of intellectual bellwether.

Universities are located in places, cities and towns. But I think universities exist in a much larger sphere. They are beholden to their local communities, but they are also beholden to the global community of scholars. The issues they address are not issues which can be boxed in as local, regional, or national. They transcend many of these parameters.

I have a great distaste for parochialism and provincialism. I have a great antipathy towards ethnocentrism. I think it's terribly important that universities are open to ideas from all sources, ideas of all kinds, and that the purview of scholars and teachers in universities extends well beyond the immediate, the local, the regional or national community, so that we avoid insularity and simplistic, parochial thinking and solutions.

One way of dealing with that is to have a faculty which is diverse, but not in the debased, code-word sense that one hears so often on today's campuses, where diverse is shorthand for African-American and/or Hispanic. Diversity is not co-extensive with skin color. Diversity has to do with outlook, socio-economic background, linguistic background, cultural background, gender, and age.

One of the things that I'm pleased with is the way in which we have managed to internationalize our faculty in this small school. We have a Korean, Japanese, Bangladeshi, English, Irish, American, German—I hope I've not left anyone out. For a small school, that's quite a mix. That ensures that we hear from different perspectives and different worldviews are represented.

Our student body is also quite diverse. Bloomington, despite its bizarre location, is and long has been, thanks to former president Herman B Wells, really quite a cosmopolitan campus and attracts students from almost every nation on earth. So we have a student body which is healthily diverse in terms of the countries from which they come, and we have a faculty which is quite healthily diverse in terms of the countries, and disciplines, from which they come. I think the conditions are set fair to avoid excessive introversion, intellectual inbreeding, parochialism, and ethnocentrism.

The United States, for its great merits and attractions, is a somewhat inward looking country. A great majority of its population, if I'm not mistaken, does not possess a passport and probably has never traveled overseas. Many of its citizens have a somewhat attenuated sense of the world and its many cultures, its many languages and its many ways of viewing the world. I think it is important that our program transcends that kind of narrowness and provincialism.

Many of the issues which we address in SLIS go well beyond the United States, or any specific locality. In my own class, issues of strategic intelligence are today inherently global issues. Intelligence sharing is now a fact of life, not just between historic allies, but between countries that can scarcely speak to one another. The kinds of threats that this country and others face are no longer localized. They are globalized. The threat is embodied in the form of distributed, nihilistic terrorist groups that have global reach, are fluid, robust, resilient, and operating in ways that are almost unprecedented. To deal with this kind of threat you need to have an international perspective.

We live in a world that is wired together thanks to the World Wide Web and the Internet. Issues of pornography, hate speech, and so forth are no longer localized. These are complex, transnational, juridical, political, and cultural concerns. We can no longer talk about things like privacy and censorship in isolation. We are no longer cocooned. There has been a literal and figurative explosion that has opened up this country and connected it to the rest of the world in a way that dramatically different from even a few years ago.

Ideas know no boundaries. Ideas bypass frontiers. Ideas cannot be stopped. We deal with the construction of knowledge, the transfer of knowledge. We deal with the codification of knowledge. We deal with the sharing of ideas. That knowledge and those ideas operate in the global sphere. We cannot pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist and we cannot pretend that the issues that concern us, and our views and outlooks and approaches to those issues are the only ways to look at the world. To go back to the example of digital pornography in libraries, whatever one's views (and they're very contrary in this country, very polarized) we have to remember that other countries and cultures have different ways of looking at some of these issues.

It behooves us to be aware, not just of the rules of the game, not just of the statutes and legislation that exist in this country, but to be mindful of legislation, values, practices, norms, professional expectations in other countries and cultures. I think we do a pretty good job of opening up those blinkers in SLIS in the classroom, in our teaching and in our writing.

It may seem like stating the obvious but it really isn't, we also have a faculty that is very, very widely traveled. That constant traveling—it's not junketing—exposes us to the problems of the real world. I've worked in and visited a number of third, nay, fourth and fifth world countries, and it is always an eye-opener. One comes back to Bloomington realizing just how incredibly blessed we are and how privileged we are in terms of the scale and the quality of the resources. If you can't be a productive scholar in Bloomington, you can't be a productive scholar anywhere.

One sees first-hand the kind of tribulations and travails that our peers and our professional colleagues in other countries face. I sometimes think that we need a good shaking up here, because we often become engrossed in the most trivial of issues and become excessively worked up about matters that really don't count for much. There's an old saying that the personal animus and the in-fighting of academia are so intense because the stakes are so small. One of the things that traveling outside of our cocooned civilization does is remind us of the wisdom of that adage.

There are at least two parts to what I do in terms of writing. I have a serious research agenda, and I produce a considerable amount of scholarly work. Over the years I have also produced a different kind of material which is for professional consumption. It's designed to provoke discussion. It's designed to goad and to challenge smugness, inconsistency, hypocrisy. I would suggest that there's a distinction between robust writing and insulting prose.

My response is always, if you don't like what I say, engage and debate the issues, not the individual. All too often, not just in this country, what strikes me is the ease with which people bypass debate and go simply to ad hominem invective. I've got a fairly thick skin and over the years you become somewhat inured to this, but the issue remains analytically intriguing.

Why do individuals respond in such a personal fashion? What is the raw nerve that's been touched? Why don't they produce counter-argument? Why don't they demonstrate flaws in one's reasoning? Why don't they show that one's argument is misguided? Why don't they adduce countervailing evidence? Why don't they challenge statistics? Why don't they challenge one's opinions? Some do. And some do it with panache, and sometimes with wit. But all too often I'm struck by the snideness, and personal dismissiveness, rather than the strength and quality of the logic and argument that is used.

Within Libraryland—a term, by the way, that I was not, regrettably, the first to use, but use, as many people coming from my part of the world do, somewhat tongue-in-cheek—I think this is part of the problem. Some of this really is journalism, not scholarship. British journalism, in the main, is more direct, more laconic, more cynical. It's more provocative than its American equivalent, I suspect. One could say in that case, "Cronin, why don't you change your style?" My response simply is that there is no good reason to do that. If you don't like what I write, undermine the arguments. Demonstrate that what I say doesn't make sense.

Over the years I've been struck by the inconsistency of positions adopted by people in this field, both professionals and professorial peers. I'm intrigued by what I call the A and not-A situation. People all too often argue a position and then adopt a logically incompatible position without being aware of the inconsistency.

The reason I agreed to take part in the CIPA case was, in my view, the demonstrable inconsistency and hypocrisy, nay, illogicality of the positions taken by the American Library Association on issues such as the censorship and access to pornography in libraries. A great majority of American libraries, as far as I can tell in looking at survey work, do not want pornography uninhibitedly and freely available in libraries. Yet the professional association is resistant to any kind of control, intervention, curtailing, filtering, blocking. The views of the professional body and the view of the membership are orthogonal. In looking closely at many of the statements and position papers that the ALA produces, I'm at times struck by the seeming inconsistency of the positions and the inconsistency of their view vis--vis the membership.

I also have an aversion to political correctness and the kind of positions that too many of my colleagues in academia too readily and uncritically adopt—positions which are very often constitutionally unacceptable. I find it odd that people who have been granted tenure, which protects academic freedom and freedom of expression, are the very people who are keenest to impose speech codes and other forms of artificial constraints. It's not just that they're unconstitutional and artificial; it's that they are inherently idiotic. They are at times Monty Python-ish in their formulation and enactment. That these po-faced post-modernists can't see the idiocy of their ways I find delightfully infuriating.

I'm something of a pragmatist. I think if you need, as I've said somewhere in writing, a 300 plus page manual to tell you what intellectual freedom is, you've got a problem. Anyone with half a wit, anyone with one iota of common sense, knows that there are certain boundaries in social and communal life. You do not give the keys to a Lamborghini to a 15-year-old. You don't allow a 16-year-old to drink alcohol. Why would we allow 10-year-olds or 16-year-olds to look at, not just soft pornography, but obscene materials in a public space. This is not a definition of freedom; it's a definition of lunacy in action. It's a violation of common sense.

Societies work, in part, because we have certain common views. Things that are common sensical are things that most of us believe in. Common sense is constitutive of the social order. We don't always agree, but most of us know, most of the time, that certain things simply don't make sense and you don't do them. Why do we so high-mindedly, so po-facedly, make pornography widely and easily available to minors in tax-payer supported institutions called public libraries? No other nation on earth, to the best of my knowledge, does.

I have a long-term research agenda and I also have a number of projects ongoing. I have almost finished a sequel to Pulp Friction, which will be called Jeremiad Jottings. It will no doubt provoke an assassination attempt or something similar. After that I may move on to other forms of writing and leave cage-rattling to others. I intend to carry on and do more research, writing, and teaching. Beyond that, I'm not really sure what fate will throw up.

It is kind of a wrench in one sense, because for the last 18 or so years I have been an administrator and basically, in a sense, running the operation. While I loathe much of the pettiness and bureaucracy, it is quite fun to be able to have your hand fairly firmly on the tiller. It is fun to know that no one gets hired in the school unless you approve of them. In that sense, you can actually shape the genetic character, the tone of the place, for better or worse. If it works, you can try to garner the kudos. If it doesn't quite work out, then of course you have to accept responsibility for not getting things right.

Most of the things I originally wanted to do here I've now done. I think it's fair to say that the emergence of the School of Informatics, which was not something one could have envisaged 8 or 10 years ago, has significantly changed the dynamics on this campus, and will have an effect—benign, malign, who knows—on the future and possible evolution of SLIS. It is a somewhat uncertain time. I don't mean that negatively. It's really very difficult to know what SLIS might look like 5 years hence. It's time for somebody else, though, to put his or her hand on the tiller.

See Related SLIS News stories:
Cronin's Honors
Pulp Friction Reviewed: Cronin's Book Collection
Cronin's Colleagues Speak Out
Duck l'Orangerie
Indiana University SLIS Dean Announces Resignation

Posted May 28, 2003