Remarks at Faculty Bookplate Ceremony
October 31, 2007
The faculty bookplate ceremony is near the top of the list of favorite traditions I have encountered here at the University of Tennessee. Every year faculty members who have been promoted to associate professor or full professor, or who have received tenure at either of those ranks, are asked to select a book in which they will then have their name commemorated with a special bookplate recognizing their academic achievement. I am uncertain of the length of this tradition, but it is a wonderful event for the campus, and I am honored that it is associated with the Office of the Provost.
As a new faculty member last year, I had the honor of selecting a book that was among my favorites. I chose the Complete Poems of Heinrich Heine, and last year I had a rather easy time making a brief presentation at the ceremony, since I was able to talk mostly about my book and its author, both of which are far more interesting than the musings of a university administrator.
This year we have approximately seventy faculty members who are eligible to participate in the bookplate ceremony. They come from all disciplines across the campus, and they exhibit a tremendous variety in their intellectual pursuits. Not all of them are present today, and not everyone who was eligible selected a volume for a bookplate. But I did count over sixty books that will be the site of commemoration of faculty this year; a very high percentage of those who could participate, obviously did participate.
I congratulate all of you on your achievement, whether it be a promotion or the receipt of tenure or both. You have earned your place among the permanent faculty at the University of Tennessee, and because of this ceremony you can be assured that your name will be remembered or, at the very least, encountered for generations to come.
So what interests do our current faculty members have? Which volumes have they felt deserved to be coupled with them through the years? Where do their interests and passions lie?
Some books that were chosen immediately identify the disciplinary direction of the faculty member who selected them. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in two volumes, seems likely to have been the selection of someone from our English Department. Neutron Diffraction will probably not be found on the night tables or book shelves of anyone besides a member of our Materials Science and Engineering Department. You can probably guess that the Manual of Equine Anaesthesia and Analgesia was the choice of a faculty member in the Large Animal Clinical Sciences in our Veterinary School, and that the book entitled Hearing Aids was the favorite volume of a faculty member from Audiology and Speech Pathology. Finally, the tome on Proton-Emitting Nuclei, which appears to be the conference proceedings of a meeting at Oak Ridge National Laboratory could be likeable to or, indeed, readable by, only someone in Physics and Astronomy. The sole question we might have about this choice, if we were a librarian, is whether we are referring to the collection of papers from 1999 or from 2003, neither of which, of course, made it to the New York Times best-seller list.
Other faculty members, however, were more mysterious in their selections. They apparently eschewed their own areas of disciplinary expertise to select something of a more general or inspirational nature. Thus we have a professor of veterinary medicine, who also happens to join us as our Vice Chancellor for Research, selecting Paul Rogat Loeb’s Soul of a Citizen. A faculty member in our School of Information Sciences chose Kahil Gibran’s early anthology of short stories, The Broken Wings, which might be associated more with lyricism and philosophy than information. It’s nice to know that someone from our Animal Science Department was attracted to more than handbooks about the creatures around us and chose The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living by the Dalai Lama. And a faculty member of mathematics was not about to settle for a book filled with equations and theorems; he wants his bookplate instead in Ravi Zacharias’s Deliver Us from Evil. Of course there might be furtive connections between these titles and the fields of the respective faculty members who chose them. But I think they would have to tell us about these connections themselves.
Finally, there were a few books on the list that attracted my attention regardless of whether I understood the match between title and discipline. I noted that a new associate professor from Biosystems Engineering and Soil Science had selected Einstein: His Life and His Universe, a recent and acclaimed biography of this great scientist, which is accessible to a general readership. Someone tenured as an associate professor in the library chose The Cat Behavior Answer Book, appealing to me as someone whose household contains four feline creatures, one more inscrutable than the next. The book entitled simply Chaperones would have been intriguing had I not noticed it was the choice of a professor of Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology and dealt with cellular protein homeostasis, not with who would be overseeing my daughters at their junior proms. But who could really resist the bookplate selection coming from a faculty member in art, entitled The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. This intriguing volume is especially appealing to someone in central administration – since I fancy that its theme is at the very heart of our endeavors, fortunately or unfortunately.
No matter what book you have chosen to carry your bookplate, however, I want to extend to you again my congratulations for your accomplishment and my best wishes for a continued successful career as a faculty member on the Knoxville campus. We are delighted that so many of you could join us today for this ceremony, and that wittingly or unwittingly you have revealed to us something of yourself in your bookplate selection.
Posted: November 2, 2007