Comparing California, Texas Higher Ed

Updated: 9:53 p.m., June 24, 2008 (see below)

A former mentor and colleague pointed me to these faculty productivity rankings by the Chronicle for Higher Education.

The same former mentor also talked about how Texas (population 23,507,783) higher education compares to California (population 36,457,549) higher education. That is, how do the two most populous states stack up?

As an imperfect measure of university quality, let's look at the institutions listed by the Chronicle. How many public programs are nationally ranked in terms of top faculty productivity? There is a problem of apples and oranges, as Texas has separate listings for medical schools, and California does not. In the interest of fairness, I will include all Texas public institutions including the medical schools.

Texas
University of Texas, Austin -- 28
Texas A&M University -- 14
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston -- 6
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas -- 3
Texas Tech University -- 3
University of Houston -- 2
University of Texas Medical Branch -- 2
Sam Houston State University -- 1
Texas A&M, Kingsville -- 1
University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth -- 1
UTEP -- 1
(Private school Rice has 6 ranked programs)

That gives Texas a grand total of 62 ranked programs at public universities including medical schools. How does California stack up? With 50% more population, California should have about 93 ranked programs if the two states are equal.

California
University of California, Berkeley -- 59
UCLA -- 41
University of California, Davis -- 21
University of California, San Diego -- 19
University of California, San Francisco -- 16
University of California, Santa Barbara -- 11
University of California, Irvine -- 8
University of California, Riverside -- 6
San Diego State University -- 5
University of California, Santa Cruz -- 1

It turns out that California has 187 ranked programs -- more than three times the state of Texas. Fifty percent greater population translates into 300 percent more ranked programs.

The top two Texas programs have 42 ranked programs. The top two California programs have 100. The top two Texas programs have 96,236 students, according to Wikipedia. The two top California institutions have just 71,564 students, also thanks to Wikipedia. More than double the ranked programs spread among 14,000 fewer students.

I make no inferences here, but rather I leave them to you, the reader. In terms of objective productivity, my California compatriots far outpace me and my Texas colleagues.

(Meant to be humorous) It brings to mind the current California Dairy Board advertising campaign: "Great milk comes from happy cows. Happy cows come from California."

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Update: This page is getting a good deal of traffic from a blog by the Texas Faculty Association. Although I am all for a good crusade, this was not the crusade that I had intended. The quip about California cows was meant to be a throwaway at the end. Instead it can quite logically be read as me saying Texas faculty are unhappy.

This may be the case; however, it is at best a hypothesis. There is clearly a cause for the disparity outlined in these data, but it assuredly boils down to something more complex than faculty satisfaction. I have zero data concerning the relative happiness of the respective faculties.

With the current economy and the price of oil, one could make a not-so-bold prediction that Texas universities will soon make up much ground on their California counterparts. Texas' budget future looks far more rosy than that of California. When you combine Texas' oil and gas revenues with how long California took to come out of the last recession, it's a great time to be in Texas.

As a resident of Texas -- and a faculty member in Texas -- I found these data to be interesting. However, I did not intend to slight the state of Texas. Trust me. I live here, and I know better.

It is worth understanding why this disparity exists. But a throwaway quip should not be interpreted for my estimate of the answer. It remains an empirical question.

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* Population estimates for 2006 courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau here and here.

Great Advice on Publishing Academic Books

I love when I read clever things, and Rachel Toor's article on the relationship between dissertations and academic publishing was especially insightful. The piece was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Last summer, I was asked to lunch by an acquaintance from another university, an assistant professor whose tenure clock was running down. She wanted some advice about publishing.

She explained that she had a year to get her dissertation turned into a book. Or else. Being an assistant professor had taken more time and energy than she had expected and now here she sat, with a year to get a book written, accepted, and into production at a good press.

You Are Not How Much You Make

There's somethin' wrong with the world today
I don't know what it is
Something's wrong with our eyes

We're seeing things in a different way
And God knows it ain't His
It sure ain't no surprise

We're livin' on the edge

- Aerosmith, Living on the Edge

The New York Times has an interesting story on the status of traditional professions, such as medicine and law. If you read between the lines, however, the story is more interesting.

You're more than your job. But take a moment to read the subtexts of status and money. These are powerful themes that have entered the public consciousness, and we seldom stop to question them.

Here's my favorite quotation:

Many young associates, she added, spent their lunch hours making lavish purchases on NeimanMarcus.com, just to remind themselves that what they did counted for something.

This is simply brilliant, and it captures everything in a nutshell. You're an attorney, and all this work counts for something because you can shop at Neiman Marcus. Brilliant!

Thinking About the Choices We Make

I don't know what's wrong with me lately. Something's different.

I cannot quite put my finger on it, but in a nutshell, I am increasingly fascinated with the human condition -- our journey through life.

Maybe it has been a long time coming. I can remember a few similar times in my life. I remember writing stories about a particularly skilled physical education teacher in Las Cruces. Make all of the "gym teacher" jokes that you want, but this guy connected with kids in a way that was inspiring. It made me reevaluate my own choices.

Lately I am interested in the choices that people make. How do you decide to live your life?

All of this funnels into an ongoing referendum on how I choose to live my life, which impacts my family directly, of course.

I care about the values that I am teaching my children. I worry whether I am teaching them the right things. What is important?

It's difficult to balance one's own life with one's children's lives. Take, for example, income.

I am pretty sure -- although I have never tested it -- that I could get a job tomorrow doing market research for a pretty hefty increase in salary. But that job would mean moving somewhere I don't want to live. I'd have to work more hours, and I'd have a longer commute. But my kids would have more opportunities. They could go to a private school. I'm the product of a private school, and trust me, the education is better.

Life is not -- or at least it should not be -- about material things, I think. And I love my job in academia. Being a professor is the best job in America. I have great graduate students, and I really enjoy most of our undergraduate students. So life is good. I am happy.

Most of my friends are not professors. So I learn a lot through the decisions that they make. Most of my friends are not corporate types. They, by and large, choose time over money. They take unique paths to pay the bills while providing ample time to pursue the aspects of humanity that make them smile.

This is not to say that they do not question some of their own decisions. They, too, wonder about the trade off between career and a life. I enjoy hearing what they say. I enjoy hearing about their reasons.

How do we strike a balance between financing our existence and charting the kind of life that we want?

We all do it differently, of course. But perhaps these common struggles represent what it means to be human.

Many of my current questions are due to Spinoza. The excommunicated philosopher.

I wonder whether he was happy. He lived modestly. He financed his existence by making eye glasses. Although I cannot be sure, I can imagine that this would not have been his preference. He rented a room from a family. Spinoza was in no way wealthy. And breathing all of that glass dust from ground lenses may well have contributed to his early death.

Yet he had many visitors who sought his opinion on the human condition. Some of his work was published anonymously, and some of it was published posthumously. But it persists. His ideas persist.

While in Las Cruces, N.M., last weekend I picked up a volume of Spinoza's writings at a used bookstore. Although I have not had time to fully read the work, I did thumb through the Ethics. I was impressed with the insight that is still relevant 400 years later.

Spinoza lived a modest life, but he still affects people four centuries later. Somehow that seems especially profound to me lately. It accords well with my value of time and family over money and career.

No one on their deathbed says, "I wish I spent more time at the office," I often say. I don't know who coined the phrase.

Put another way, there is nothing that I fear more than a Willy Loman life. Perhaps it is a product of growing up in the 1980s. Perhaps it is a product of watching a bunch of my private school friends have shell shock after Black Monday in 1987. Perhaps (likely) I'm just strange.

But it fascinates me how people come around to the decisions that they do.

I like to think that I make a difference in a few students' lives. And I like to think that perhaps something I write will somehow affect the field. And somehow that seems to avoid my fear of traveling salesmanship.

It is a blessing to be surrounded by interesting people. I wish everyone were as lucky.

Day 5: What I Learned at an Ad Agency

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- I spent one week in an advertising agency.

I watched. I listened. I interviewed people from different job areas. I talked to creatives. I talked to brand strategists. I talked to account executives.

They were all great. I have a lot to tell students.

"When people ask about this experience, what are you going to tell them?" asked agency head Jack Buchanan.

That is a difficult question.

Mostly, I am going to tell them that it so very important to be happy where you work.

Jobs are jobs. We all get that. We go because we get paid. Although some days are exceptions, even great jobs are not our hobbies. If we were not getting paid, we would be somewhere else.

Given that, work should still be a happy, fun place most of the time. Within the advertising world, most people are familiar with the stereotype of people working in the creative department. This is where you find lava lamps, beads hanging on doorways, and lots of interesting sounding books on anything but advertising.

We expect that of the creative types. They're different. They need to free their brains.

This is true at Buchanan&associates, but it is true for everyone who works there. One whole part of the agency is devoted to loosening up the thoughts.

My favorite is the beanbag toss, known as "cornhole" in Ohio. Above you can seen brand strategist and former communication and cognition lab member Tim Laubacher throw toward the opposite goal.

There are jigsaw puzzles. Hundreds of interesting books. More stuff than I even had time to look at.

And there is no time clock. There is no one jotting down when you come and go. Although there are no hallways to walk, there is still no one walking them to take attendance.

So if you need to walk down by the river to get an idea, so be it. Even if you're an account executive and not a copywriter.

As my department chair, Dr. Don Jugenheimer, often says, every job in advertising is creative.

If you river walk too much, you won't get your work done, and I assume that there would be problems. There was no evidence of that. With freedom comes responsibility, it seems.

There will be more insights that filter out from this experience over coming days and weeks. But this seems most important: leadership and motivation and crucial.

You can assemble great people, but you also need to foster an environment that makes them feel like great people. If you can do that, you will rarely be disappointed by the outcome.



I wish that every story had a poignant end. I suppose that this one did, too. But there was a detour along the way.

I woke up Sunday morning in a hotel in Springfield, Mo. A quick flip of the Weather Channel brought up a picture similar to this one, courtesy of NewsOK.com.

Tropical Storm Erin was sitting over Oklahoma, exactly where I had to drive to get home. Winds were in excess of 80 mph, and Oklahoma City was looking at a day-long tornado watch.

Not exactly my idea of fun driving. So it took a 120-mile detour up through Kansas to avoid the beast. Thirteen and a half hours after leaving Springfield -- and more than two hours behind schedule -- we finally arrived home.

Much like there is no crying in baseball, there should be no hurricanes in Oklahoma unless the University of Miami is visiting!

Day 4: How to Build an Agency

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- I spent much of the day Thursday talking with members of the creative staff at Buchanan&associates. This directly relates to the mission of my trip since I teach copy writing and creative strategy at Texas Tech.

We did talk a lot about creativity. I wanted to know what they thought that students should have.

Their responses surprised and impressed me.

More than skills, more than software, they talked about fit. They wanted the personality to fit.

If the new person can get along, the employees here largely felt that creative skills could be improved. It was more important to be a good person than to have a great portfolio.

Being creative was more about a walk along the river than some natural ability.

Oh, and get an internship. Several people who work here started as interns.

I finished the day with a couple of books. One was Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko. It has an interesting quotation:

The CEO of a major publishing house was concerned about the lack of creativity among his editorial and marketing staffs. He hired a group of high-priced psychologists to find out what differentiated the creative employees from the others.

After studying the staff for one year, the psychologists discovered only one difference between the two groups: The creative people believed they were creative and the less creative people believed they were not (p. 7).

It's an interesting idea. It ignores the possibility of a third variable: I believe that I'm creative because I am.

The focus on people here is impressive. If you work in advertising, you should want to work here. Really. If you run an advertising agency, you should want it to run the way that things run here.

The focus is on the people. This elicits a much greater attachment among the employees.

In many ways, this place reminds me of the family agency where I grew up. My dad always tried to do the right thing for the people who worked there. He tried to do the right thing for the clients.

He was an ethical advertiser, believe it or not. It seems to me that this place is full of ethical advertisers. They like what they do, or they seem to.

At the end of the day, these are the kinds of people with whom I'd like to hang out. And that seems like a pretty smart way to run a company.

Day 3: Taking Time to Think

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Few people would argue against stepping out of your daily grind from time-to-time.

Yet fewer people actually do so.

Gaining a new perspective motivated my trip to spend a week at Buchanan&associates, an advertising agency in a Columbus suburb.

By midweek the trip already paid for itself. My mind percolates with new thoughts, and my enthusiasm for my job skyrockets.

That said, the benefit of this trip increased exponentially at lunch Wednesday.

Several of us sat around a table at the Burgundy Room contrasting academic and industry research and contemplating future connections between the two. We talked about differences between the time pressures facing academic and those facing professionals.

And then agency head Jack Buchanan said that the benefit of academia is having time to think.

As simple as it sounds, it stopped me in my tracks. I'm not taking enough time to think.

My name will be on five journal publications and another edited book chapter during calendar year 2007. For a communication scholar, this is a great year. I'm proud of this year.

But what was the price? If you're always sitting at the computer pounding out a manuscript, you are thinking. But you're not thinking about the big picture. You're being a practical scholar but not really living up to potential.

During my master's program at Kansas State, Tom Grimes talked about the business of ideas.

And ideas drive me.

And somewhere along the way, I lost sight of that just a little bit.

I still spend a lot of time thinking, don't get me wrong. But my thinking has edged ever-so-slightly toward the model of Henry Ford.

Being a research professor is, hopefully, about thinking entirely new thoughts. That's harder to do when you're too closely focused on the next publication to go out the door. You know, something about the forest and trees.

So I am indebted to Mr. Buchanan for unintentionally reminding me that I was taking the best part of my job for granted.

I've got to run now. It's time to think.

Looking Back on 2 Years with a Ph.D.

Two years ago this week, I defended my doctoral dissertation in telecommunications (technically mass communications) and cognitive science at Indiana University.

As with so many things in the past, this "two year" figure is mind-blowing for the fact that it both seems far more than and far less than two years ago.

So much has happened since then. We moved to Columbus, Ohio, and spent a year at The Ohio State University. Then for reasons that are largely family oriented, we moved to Lubbock, Texas, where I spent the past year at Texas Tech University.

I built a psychophysiology lab at both places, and I trained graduate students to work in each place. In so many ways, that must have taken more than two years.

At the same time, June 2005 could be yesterday. I can remember holing away at the education library at Indiana to proofread yet one more draft of the dissertation before handing it over to my advisor, Annie Lang.

All this time my kids are two years older and my hair is two years, well, less dark brown.

Two years. Seven hundred and thirty days.

One third of the "tenure track" has passed by. We accomplished a lot, but we could have done more. That's how I always feel. There's always the one additional data set that we did not get collected or the one additional manuscript that we did not get out the door.

We'll keep trying. I'll keep you posted on the progress. In a week or so, this interminable summer class will be finished, and the research will begin in earnest. Look for some cool figures here in the near future.

Coach Donovan, I Understand Leaving Angst

When I am at work, decisions come easily. Working on deadline at the New Mexico State student newspaper, someone would shout a question. The answers always came easily. The same was true running the sports department at the Las Cruces Sun-News. And to a large extent, it's true in the lab today.

Personal decisions, however, are another matter.

Plenty of people are vilifying University of Florida/Orlando Magic/? coach Billy Donovan because of his waffling on the NBA job.

To quickly catch you up, Donovan turned down powerhouse Kentucky to stay with the Gators earlier in 2007. That alone won Donovan a place in my heart. But less than two months later, the winner of the last two NCAA championships bolted for the NBA and a $5 million+ annual salary.

He seemed excited.

Then it came time to say goodbye. Not so easy.

Donovan changed his mind. He wanted to stay at Florida. However, he actually inked the Magic deal (unlike his Florida contract upgrade). So now Donovan dances for a release.

I've heard some pretty harsh words for Donovan. You won't hear them from me. Such decisions tear me apart.

Just about a year ago, I left Ohio State for Texas Tech (read here). In many ways, this was an easy decision driven by family considerations. However, in many other ways, this was a gut wrenching decision.

My kids had to move schools ... but they'd be closer to their grandparents. There was one Ph.D. student willing to move to Tech, but there was another very talented incoming Ph.D. student staying behind. Here we have the opportunity to build a Ph.D. program, but building is hard work.

It's been about 56 weeks since I was offered the job here. And I'm pretty sure that there has not been a single week go by where I did not wonder -- at least for a moment -- whether I made the correct decision. More often than not, the answer has been "yes." But the vote has been far from unanimous.

And that's not a property of Ohio State or Texas Tech. Instead, it's about the fact that there are many great things about each place. Choosing either place meant leaving a lot of great things on the table. And as I am sure is the case with the Orlando Magic and the Florida Gators, the great things are not the same at each place.

Thus one is left to decide which great things matter the most.

My decision was a difficult one. And I had spent only a year at Ohio State. Although I made some great relationships -- which were very difficult to leave behind -- I had hardly won two national championships with another finals appearance over the past 11 years.

Leaving "home" always should be difficult. It's still easy for me to recall how I felt when my dad and I drove the moving truck out of Las Cruces on the way to Albuquerque in November 1998. Sure, my career was expanding. But I left a lot of good things behind in Las Cruces.

And I have not forgotten those good things almost nine years later.

My guess is that Donovan realized that he never would have forgotten those good things in Gainesville.

And I, for one, get it.

Career Began in Northern California

Ten years ago this month I was assigned to The Modesto (Calif.) Bee as a copy editing intern. It's a great newspaper. And I loved it there.

My assignment to Modesto came as a quirk. Having gone to school at New Mexico State, the decisions committee at the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund slated me for the Tucson Citizen.

I still remember the phone call clearly (but probably not as well as I think). Dr. Bill Tillinghast called to offer me the job. I trembled with excitement as I heard the news. I wanted that internship more than anything I ever wanted in life.

Dr. Tillinghast explained that I would attend the center for editing excellence at San Jose State for two weeks (read about a related memory) before heading back to Tucson.

I'm still not sure what came over me. I told Dr. Tillinghast that I might never leave the Bay Area once they got me out there.

He paused.

"We have an opening in Modesto, " he said.

"Where is Modesto?" I asked.

"About 90 miles east of San Francisco," he said.

"I'll take it," I said, pumping my fist in the air.

Life took a left turn in that moment. My love affair with the Bay Area only grew. In 1997, the goal of living in the Bay Area nearly consumed me.

So off I went.

Things went well. My dad drove out with me. We visited San Francisco together. It was amazing.

Dad flew home. I went through boot camp with Dow Jones (the greatest educational experience of my life), and I moved to my apartment in Modesto. My wife, Emily, joined me in Modesto after her summer class.

I had an interview with the Contra Costa Times, an east Bay paper. Life was awesome.

My wife became pregnant about that time. Although I had finished my degree at NMSU, she had a year left. There was no way that I was going to be apart from my first born. Life took another left turn.

So I picked up the phone. I called Harold Cousland at the Las Cruces Sun-News. I asked Harold for a job. Ten weeks before I competed with his paper as the editor of the NMSU student newspaper, the Round Up. That day I wanted a job.

Luckily Harold had a job for me.

So on August 31, 1997, I loaded all of my belongings into my white Pontiac Sunbird, and I headed south on Highway 99.

I left Northern California in the rear-view mirror that day, and I have not been back since.

In the interim, a decade went by. I tired of journalism's long hours and low pay. I wound up with a Ph.D. and three daughters.

In two more days, I'll fly into San Francisco again. In many ways, it will be as if the decade never passed by.

Evolving Roles of Weblogs in Academia

Here's a great discussion about the role of Weblogs in academic careers. Fascinating stuff, people.

The publishers have their grips on us for today. The taxpayers pay for their content and then pay dearly to have the same content in the library.

It will end. Not today. Perhaps not even soon. But eventually peer review will take on a new form. And then perhaps the reader will be the gatekeeper.

If you don't see the following link in the above post, read this outline of what the future of publishing might resemble.

What to Be When You Grow Up

I'm not sure what I'm going to be when I grow up. For today, I am an assistant professor. It's a great job, so who knows.

I've never known what I want to be when I grow up. Most of my students don't either. And that's OK, I tell them.

When I arrived in Las Cruces, N.M., in summer 1994, I was a political science major. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with that. But I had liked the political science classes I had taken at a community college in Phoenix (Paradise Valley Community College).

I already had given up on medicine once I discovered that I do not like being around sick people. So that was out.

Political science did not feel right. So I would stare at the NMSU undergraduate catalog. I would go through all of the majors. I would start over. I would chuckle at "soil science" almost every time.

As much as it is not like me, I would actually pause on wildlife science and ponder becoming a park ranger. It was a phase. I used to want to move to Montana or some other Big Sky state. It was a reaction to living in crowded, sprawled Phoenix for two years.

Anyway, I usually would pause on journalism and mass communications. I'm from a media family, and it was in my blood, it seemed. Then I would look at average starting salaries based upon major. And then I would get depressed.

I wandered into Milton Hall one day and met Dr. J. Sean McCleneghan, who was just then stepping down as department head. We spent a bit of time talking majors that day. Knowing how many credits I already had accumulated, "Dr. Mac" explained the benefits of staying a political science major. We talked about a minor in journalism.

But as with most things, I was "all in."

It's getting close to 13 years later. Mass communications has given me an amazing ride. I've covered Oscar De La Hoya and the Dallas Cowboys. I covered a university president, athletics director, and a head basketball coach all being forced out.

I covered a Republican presidential candidate, Bob Dole. I coordinated coverage of a Democratic presidential candidate, Bill Clinton. I met Dole several years later after I coordinated public relations efforts for a lecture he gave at Kansas State University.

I took pictures and asked questions of Garth Brooks at a news conference. I've seen a photograph I took go out on the AP wire and appear on Headline News. I co-hosted a radio talk show, where we interviewed then-governor Gary Johnson and then-mayor Reuben Smith.

Mostly, however, I have worked with a damned great group of people. And more than anything, these relationships are what I cherish.

This week I have spent getting back in touch with some of these people. It's been great. The group of fools with whom I put out a newspaper have gone onto some pretty amazing things. Four have either made it through or are about to finish law school. One has an M.B.A. and is a vice president of a company. They work on both coasts. A bunch live in Chicago.

Several are married. Some are expecting children. It's been cool to catch up with them.

And somehow my career has ended up here. And I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. And I hope that I never do. As long as I meet some equally cool people along the way.

Huggins: If Only Everyone Worked with Passion

Update (April 6, 2007): Bob Huggins is a traitor coward, and I hope he burns in the hell that is West Virginia.

My favorite quotation of the week came from Kansas State University men's basketball coach Bob Huggins:

“Wouldn’t this be a better world if everyone came to work with as much passion as I put into my job?” he asked during an interview with Kansas City Star columnist Joe Posnanski.

Well said, coach.

Sundays in the Lab

To really succeed in an academic career, you begin working when everyone else goes home. To climb above the average, you do everything that you are supposed to do, and then you roll up your sleeves and get to work.

This often means working on the weekend. This weekend was no different.

The best part is the company that you keep on the weekend. It's inspiring to be among to motivated.

It's great to see this effort among graduate students. It means they "get it."

I remember many Sunday afternoons on the 6th floor of Eigenmann Hall. The hardest workers were always there.

If you're a graduate student studying mass communications -- or you are thinking of becoming one -- let me offer a word of advice. There's a lot to do during the day. Likely you'll be taking classes and writing more literature reviews than you dreamed possible.

You're probably financing your graduate education by working as a teaching assistant or research assistant. That takes up a lot of time -- sometimes more than the 20 hours for which you are paid.

And you need to have a life on top of all of that.

Many weeks it will seem impossible just to get it all done.

But you cannot stop there.

When all is said and done, you will be judged almost exclusively on what you did above and beyond what is required.

And Sunday afternoons are a good time to do this.

As a professor -- and as a graduate student trying to encourage new graduate students -- it is an interesting position in which to be. You have no real leverage to motivate graduate students to always do more. As a junior scholar you are not likely to have grant funds. You have only advice to give. You say, "this is the way it should be done." And you hope they listen.

And the good ones always do.

So this afternoon, Nikki, Wendy, Wes, and I were in the lab trying to get an experiment ready to go.

Tomorrow morning there will be classes to teach, office hours to hold, and phones to answer. Today was the day to try to brush up on electrode placement, pretest MediaLab experiments, and debug VPM code.

Tomorrow night should mark the final pretest. That is, unless, I get to use the "Murphy's law" label on tomorrow's post.

Role of Weblogs in Academic Careers

Some incidents occurred today that made me think: Is this Weblog really a good idea?

More than a year ago, my colleague Dr. Robert Potter pondered about whether Weblogs might jeopardize a career. He talked about a Chicago Tribune article (the link is expired, the archives cost money, and the piece is not on Lexis-Nexis) titled, "Did blogging doom prof's shot at tenure?"

As I have discussed before, there is a constant tension over what to include. I know that if I am a complete industry wonk, I will lose readership. Our field is great, but it's not fascinating every day. So I post stupid pictures from my trip to Mexico.

More importantly, I talk about the good times (here and here). And mostly my professional life is really good. But it's not always good. So I talk about the bad times, too (here and here). I also criticize the field (here and here). And therein lies the danger.

I teach advertising. I grew up in an advertising agency. My parents still run an advertising agency, and I was there last week helping out in a very small way. But I am trained as a journalist. I bleed ink. I get excited by the smell of a printing press. And I profoundly believe in the Fourth Estate.

And that means balance. I have to tell both sides. Whatever this Weblog is worth, it is worth nothing to me if it's just some public relations organ. It is what it says it is: Communication, Cognition, and Arbitrary Thoughts. Rob Potter introduces his Weblog saying he will, "also likely comment on what life is like for a professor who teaches undergrads in Electronic Media Programming Strategies, Advertising, and Media Management."

I believe in that. I believe in public science -- and I talk about my work here -- but I also talk about my life. Some people who read this are my Ph.D. buddies who will be going through these same trenches in a matter of months. They might learn something and avoid a mistake if I give a complete picture. Heck, you might be some completely arbitrary person trying to decide whether graduate school is for you. And this is where I think the truth matters. The whole truth.

But I might want to be a department head, a dean, or even the president of a university some day. And perhaps complete honesty is not the best policy. I would argue the other side, but I saw my friend and former NMSU president J. Michael Orenduff fired for supporting free speech.

It's too late for me, really. I wrote an opinion column for two years at the NMSU student newspaper, the Round Up. And I said some incredibly stupid things (hey, I was young once). And although my columns are not online, they exist on microfilm and in the Round Up morgue (and I have copies). If anyone wants to crucify me for my ideas, ammunition exists. Yet only these thoughts can be found on Google.

So it comes down to this: I believe in the First Amendment. I believe in ideas. I believe in the right to be wrong. And I really, really believe the right to update your theories in the face of new data (we call it science).

Sure, someday down the line, something I've said here might cost me a job or a promotion. But that's probably not a job I wanted anyway. I'm a real person ... complete with faults (just ask my wife). If someone hires me, they're hiring the whole person. If I pick up a life of crime, I understand that they might want to rethink my employment. But if someone does not want me around because I admitted that some days just suck, then I probably do not want to be around.

This goes beyond a self-centered rant. I believe that Weblogs are still defining themselves. I believe that it is an open question about how much personal information belongs here. And I think I'm right that the entire Weblog medium calls for more than pure wonk content.

Nonetheless, it's author beware.

Career Shifting to West Texas

I firmly believe that there are a handful of moments that define one's life. I have written about defining moments here before.

This spring marked another important defining moment. I have an excellent rapport with my school's director, Carroll Glynn, and she has given me every possible resource to succeed as an academic. However, since I moved to Columbus, I have realized how difficult it is to be 1,700 miles from one's family. This is especially true when one's parents begin to have health problems.

So I started looking at job opportunities in the Southwest. One program really stood out: the new College of Mass Communications at Texas Tech University. They appear to have an ideal blueprint on how to build a program.

Within the past two years, the program has become a stand-alone college, and it has developed a Ph.D. program. More importantly -- to me -- is that Tech has an extremely impressive, collegial faculty. Their growth has led to an infusion of young talent, and it is a very exciting place to be. But it is a fun place to be.

I had a great time in Lubbock during my interview, and I am lucky to have been offered a position in the soon-to-be department of advertising. I will have a great dean, a well respected department head, and wonderful colleagues. It is an ideal situation for a young scholar.

More importantly, it is going to be fun to recruit people to West Texas. It may sound like the end of the Earth to some folks, but it's a great place to study mass communications. Lubbock is a city of about a quarter million, and the major markets of Dallas and Houston are a short flight away. With the faculty in place at Tech, I believe our Ph.D. students quickly will be welcomed as faculty members at the "old guard" programs.

It is difficult to leave OSU, with its own blend of excitement and growth. However, the chance to be a 5 1/2 hour car ride from home and just one hour from the New Mexico border was just too much of a pull. Kids who grow up in New Mexico don't call it "The Land of Entrapment" for nothing.

Finally, this move completes my retracing of coach Bob Knight's steps. He earned his degree and played college ball at OSU (I'm here), won three national titles at Indiana (my Ph.D. graduation ceremony was just under those championship banners), and he now coaches at Tech (is it too early to order season tickets?).