Tenure-Track Diary
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March 20, 1998: Election results are in for subgroup leader. I won, seven to four. Telegrams are arriving from Washington, London, Moscow, Beijing, and Cincinnati.
March 23, 1998: Phil took a look at our prospectus over the weekend and gave us several comments. One was that publishers like to look at proposals that are double-spaced.
March 26, 1998: One of the nice things about working at a university that is growing is that some nice new buildings are going up on campus. One construction project is an addition to Mackinac Hall, which is where my department is located. This new section is being added right outside my office windows, and I have had a ringside seat for the construction. About two months ago, they put up some walls and there hasn’t been sunlight in here since.
The next big part of this project occurs next month, right at the end of finals week, when they are evicting about ten of us from our offices in order to "blow out some walls", put in some new wiring, and get the new section of the building connected to the old section. So, a month from now, I will become a gypsy professor. I will be sharing an office with one of my colleagues during May, but most of my books and files will be in boxes in storage somewhere. I have to start thinking about which projects I was going to work on in May, and maybe bring some of that material home soon. Bleah.
March 27, 1998: Today, we received this e-mail from the Associate Editor for Mathematics at Wiley: "Dear Drs Aboufadel and Schlicker, Thank you for sending the additional material for your book Discovering Wavelets. The chapters will be sent to our advisors, and with their approval the material will be sent for extensive review. We will be in touch within 6 to 8 weeks – please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions."
April 6, 1998: I received the following memo today from the Division Personnel Committee. "The Science and Mathematics Division met on March 16, 1998 and considered your application for tenure and promotion. The committee voted in favor of granting both tenure and promotion." Great! That leaves the Dean and the Board of Control.
April 15, 1998: Yesterday I received a copy of the recommendation from the Chair to the Dean concerning my salary for next year. As you may recall, we have changed the process this year so that input into this recommendation from individuals in the department is minimized. I received quite a favorable report, with my teaching rated "very good", my professional activity listed as "very good +", and my service to the department and the university described as "outstanding for an assistant professor", the highest possible. This last item, and recent department events, has got me to thinking about where I am going with my career.
My election as subgroup leader has established me as a leader in this department, but what does that mean? First and foremost, I think that it is important for me to take the initiative when others might not. The trouble with taking the initiative, though, and with being in a leadership role, is that you invite criticism. At least the criticism tells you when you’ve hit a nerve.
The first example deals with our 100-level courses (Intermediate Algebra, College Algebra, and Trigonometry). We have a problem in this area, that many other schools also face, in that there is always the danger that these courses become "stepchildren" that no one cares about. Before I arrived, this situation was addressed by creating two "subgroups" of faculty – Math A and Math B – with the Math A faculty being responsible for the 100-level courses (and courses numbered 096 and 097) and the Math B faculty for the mathematics courses beginning with Calculus. Over time, it has been expressed by some that the Math B faculty should take more than a passing interest in the Math A courses. Recently, I’ve been advocating that a goal should be that Math B faculty teach two Math A courses per year. It has been asked of me, though, if this is precipitating a "takeover" of Math A by Math B. Whatever.
The second example deals with mentoring our new hires. As subgroup leader-elect, I recently took the initiative to put together a program that would team a new faculty member with two "veterans" in a weekly meeting, starting this August. I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for me to push for the new math education and statistics faculty to be included in this, as there are four subgroups in our department with four subgroup leaders, and you are never sure when you are stepping on someone’s toes and when you are not (see previous example). Nevertheless, I shared my idea with the other subgroup leaders, and they seemed rather unmoved by the whole thing, so I decided to just focus on our two new hires in "mathematics" (as opposed to "statistics" or "mathematics education"). My mistake was letting the whole department know about this, since now I’ve been criticized for reinforcing divisions in the department.
Having got that off of my chest, these examples might be good reasons to eliminate our current subgroup structure, as some people have suggested. In writing about it, and in reflecting on my evaluation, I wonder if I am getting too involved in the "service" part of my job, or if this is inevitable for me.
April 17, 1998: I’m feeling better today about the mentoring issue. The subgroup leaders met yesterday, and we decided that each subgroup was going to try a different mentoring program next year. Then, next March, we would compare notes. Since it is so important to get new faculty plugged in to the department and all its little quirks, I’m really glad that we are doing what we need to do in this area.
Steve is starting to wonder when we are going to hear from publishers about our book. I’ve stopped trying to predict this sort of thing, but over the past week, we’ve put together a web site to describe the activities we have undergraduates doing with wavelets, and to promote our book. We’ve got a link on the Mathematics Awareness Week web site, since the theme this year is "Mathematics and Imaging", and wavelets are definitely used in imaging. I’ve got a counter on the web page, and we have already had 34 hits this week (although I don’t know if that is real people or search engine robots). Once we get 100,000 hits (ha ha ha), then we can tell prospective publishers of the clear interest in our work. There is a link to the "Discovering Wavelets" web site on our department home page.
A scaling function from the study of wavelets.
April 24, 1998: I had meant to write more today about how my courses were this semester and about wavelets, but it is clearly time for me to pack up my office. They have already taken my telephone, and they want my computer next. No, don’t pull out that cord …
April 29, 1998: Well, after a few crazy days, I am now temporarily in another office until some point in June. The destruction that has occurred near my old office is amazing. It started at 7AM Monday morning, as they broke windows and ripped out the walls. I got a look at my new office today – still under construction – and I will have a big window facing east for my plants.
The semester is over here, and I turned my grades in. Two of the classes went pretty well, while the third was just "O.K." I taught a special topics course this semester called "The Enigma Machine", which focused on cryptography, particularly during World War II. I only had twelve students, including many of the best upperclassmen (I should say women) in our program. I taught a section of "Communicating in Mathematics" again this semester, the course where we teach our sophomores how to write proofs. The focus of that course was the "portfolio project", where each student put together a folder of ten well-done proofs. The students were allowed to submit proposed proofs during the semester that I would critique, and I only officially graded what they turned in at the end. It think this assignment was valuable for most students, although a few didn’t seem to get much out of it.
My third class was a section of trigonometry. I thought the course got off to a good start, and I had my students working hard. Then, after the first exam, where the average grade was 84%, many of them decided to take the rest of the semester off, so to speak. I guess they thought it wouldn’t get any more difficult. Of thirty students, about half had lower final grades than midterm grades, while a quarter improved from midterm. Maybe I can blame it on El Niño.
April 30, 1998: We continue to wait to hear from publishers about our manuscript on wavelets. We have three publishers looking at it currently. Steve noticed on the AMS web site that they have a new book series that our book might be appropriate for. From the web site: "The AMS is pleased to announce a new series of undergraduate studies in mathematics. By emphasizing original topics and approaches, the series aims to broaden students' mathematical experiences. We hope the books will spark undergraduates' appreciation for research mathematics by introducing them to interesting topics of modern mathematics that are accessible to undergraduates." I’ve sent in e-mail to find out if they are accepting manuscript proposals.
Meanwhile, I've been working on a World Wide Web site dedicated to Discovering Wavelets. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been contacting search engines and internet directories like Yahoo and the Mathematics Archives to get links to our site. I’ve also learned how to put a counter on the site, and as of today, we already have 100 hits to the main page. (Of course, about 25 of those have been me or Steve, but who’s counting?) I have this crazy idea that if we get enough hits on the page, we could impress a publisher.
Last week, Steve and I went up to Central Michigan University to talk about wavelets. Tomorrow we are going to Western Michigan University. On the way to Central, Steve’s car almost broke down. We had a similar problem in November, when, returning from the ICTCM in Chicago, Steve had a flat tire. I am no longer allowed in Steve’s car. Paul is going to drive tomorrow.
May 1, 1998: I received the following letter in the mail from the Dean: "The Personnel Committee for the Science and Mathematics Division has recommended that you be reappointed with tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at Grand Valley State University. I am please to approve their recommendation and will forward it to the Board of Control for confirmation at its next scheduled meeting. Your professional endeavors on behalf of the Mathematics and Statistics Department and the Science and Mathematics Division are appreciated by your students and colleagues. I look forward to your continued contributions to Grand Valley State University in the years ahead." Great!
So, that leaves the Board of Control. When do they meet?
Someone asked me today about when I am going to take my sabbatical. I was shocked by the very idea. When did I get to be old enough to take a sabbatical?
May 4, 1998: Steve and I, along with some of our colleagues, went to Western Michigan University on Friday for the annual meeting of the Michigan Section of the MAA. On the wavelets front, we gave a 45-minute talk on student projects in wavelets, and we talked with a representative from Wiley. He gave us an update on how our manuscript is being received by that publisher. Apparently the reviews have been good so far, but they are waiting to hear from some others. Steve and I have grown cynical enough now to not get too excited by that news.
Another publisher that we have been talking to recently moved some corporate offices, and a representative for that publisher sent our manuscript to the old address instead of the new one. For some reason, the post office didn’t forward the package to the new address, but they didn’t return it to the representative either – for two months! So, last week, it was re-sent to the corporate offices. I’m not holding my breath on this one.
At the meeting, I got some feedback from someone about my diaries from the early Nineties. She was surprised at my naivete as I finished graduate school, and wasn’t sure whether to attribute that to me or to Rutgers. Hey, it was a little of both, and maybe I overstated my ignorance at times to make a point. Now, if people would stop introducing me as Ed, the Diary Guy ….
May 5, 1998: I had a little trouble today trying to determine the next meeting of the Board of Control. A secretary in the President’s office told me June 5th, but she had no idea what was on the agenda.
May 14, 1998: After setting up the "Discovering Wavelets" web page, I contacted a number of search engines and web directories to get us listed. This apparently has been effective, since as of this morning, we have had 537 hits on the web page – not bad for a few weeks. Of course, I don’t know how many of these hits were by the "webcrawlers" of the search engines themselves. I’ve also received e-mail from a James Wang, who had his own web page devoted to a wavelets-based project on image retrieval from a database. He asked me to put a link on our page to his page, and I obliged.
Still no word from the publishers, though.
May 20, 1998: Klaus Peters of A K Peters sent Steve and I e-mail the other day concerning our manuscript. He found our web site (today’s count: 722) with the prospectus and liked what he read. I talked with him this morning and he requested a copy of all we have written so far. It is kind of nice to have someone come to you for once, rather than the other way.
May 27, 1998: With the final decision on tenure a week away, I think there is some irony that a new report from the NSF just came to my attention. Entitled "Report of the Senior Assessment Panel of the International Assessment of the U.S. Mathematical Sciences", it warns that the United States’ dominance in mathematics is "fragile", and it suggests various remedies for this situation. Most of the recommendations come down to saying "Send money now!" – money for graduate students, money for postdocs, money for interdisciplinary research. It’s 1986 all over again!
A similar report was released by the NSF is 1986. That report warned of an impending shortage of scientists and mathematicians in the United States, in part due to an expected large wave of retirements. As a consequence of that report, the NSF substantially increased its funding support for graduate students in mathematics and science.
That report affected me in a few ways. I recall during my senior year at Michigan State, a few professors told me that when I completed graduate school, I could "write my own ticket", as jobs would be plentiful. During one of my years in graduate school, I received a "National Needs" fellowship from the NSF, because the nation needed more mathematicians! As we all know, by 1990 the job market started to collapse, and I got to experience this personally in 1992 and 1995. It makes me wary of reports like this one.
Besides, I thought the real problem has been that universities have not been hiring into tenure-track positions to replace those that have retired. Will money from the NSF make a difference here? I have been quite lucky to be working at a school that is increasing the number of tenure-track positions, but we aren’t doing it because of the NSF. We are doing it because we have been able to significantly improve the allocation we receive each year from the Michigan legislature.
GVSU is making a life-long commitment to me this spring. They can do this, in part, because they believe they have a life-long commitment from the people of Michigan. But NSF money comes and goes.
June 10, 1998: One of the reasons that I have been happy with being at GVSU is that I feel that I can relate to several of my colleagues. We are of a similar age and have similar interests. Recently, I’ve realized how special that really is. I’m sure I’m just one of a majority of mathematicians who felt out of place as teenagers in high school. I recall my excitement about going to college, in part because I would be with people, who, like myself, valued learning, success in school, and mathematics. OK, so college wasn’t quite like that, but working at GVSU has been that way for me.
It hasn’t been that way for everyone, though, and I think that is a little sad. A place of work is more than just a place of work – it is a second home. I can see, though, that sometimes working in a mathematics department is like being in high school all over again. There are cliques, the "in-crowd", the "fringe" – all we need now is the drive-in restaurant. Seriously, though, I think I am beginning to understand the type of frustration that I have heard in the voices of some of my tenured colleagues over the past six years. It must come from a sense that if you can’t fit in with other math professors, where can you fit in?
The count on the wavelets web page is now 1173. Steve and I still haven’t heard anything from any of the publishers.
June 18,
1998: Finally, I received the letter that I have been waiting for from
the President of GVSU. He writes: "I am please that the Board of
Control, at its meeting on June 5, 1998, accepted our recommendation to
grant you tenure and promote you to Associate Professor of Mathematics and
Statistics in the Science and Mathematics Division effective fall semester,
1998. This action is an indication of approval by your colleagues and a
recognition of your professional achievement. Congratulations!"
Well, this is just great! Now it is official!
June 19, 1998: Yesterday afternoon, I sent e-mail out to the contacts we have at three different publishers, inquiring as to what is going on with their reviews of our manuscript. One of the e-mails bounced back. No immediate response from the other two.
(Later that day…) At 10:00 AM this morning, one of the secretaries received a call from our "Mini-Print" center on campus. (This is where all the major copying is done on campus.) A fax had arrived for me there, so I went over to pick it up. (Yes, we have a fax machine in the department, but my business cards still have the old fax number on it.) The fax was from Wiley & Co., and the cover page said, "Here are two reviews of your manuscript." The fax was seven pages long. Uh oh.
The first review wasn’t very positive. It began by describing our manuscript as "more in the form of an extended abstract than a book." After some benign comments on individual chapters, we get to the "General Assessment" section of the review, which featured the following statements: "This manuscript appears to be an attempt to strike the balance between the necessary theory and the sought-after applications, stating existing textbooks are too mathematical. It is precisely these choices, made by the authors, to achieve that balance between theory and application that is my most severe concern about the manuscript. I cannot help but thinking that the manuscript is too simpleminded for senior students and most certainly for graduate students in mathematics however brief an introduction to wavelets they want. On the other hand the present form of the manuscript is too advanced for the more popular mass market, hence making the potential market very limited." The reviewer then went on to describe other "decent" books on wavelets that already exist, such as ones by Strang & Nguyen, Daubechies, and Hubbard, and notes that "a search on a public data base on books in print reveals an excess of 20 titles [on wavelets], excluding purely academic titles, e.g. conference proceedings."
The reviewer also didn’t like the way we used the metaphor of "father", "mother", and "children" wavelets thoughout the book. The reviewer writes: "While we all strive for the spirit of the late R. Feynman in our writing, I do not believe this is the right approach." Our critic "finds it hard to recommend" that the manuscript be published.
After reading this review, I thought, "OK, I guess that’s it with Wiley. Let’s look at the second one and see how much more bashing there is to take."
The second review started pleasantly enough. The first paragraph discusses the "hands on" approach to the book, which is described as "the book’s greatest strength." In the second paragraph, the reviewer writes, "The 50 pages I read were brisk and uncluttered. The reader is not asked to work through the kind of rigorous, abstract analysis that makes for thick books and slow reading …. I would hope and suggest that the authors continue to write in this vein …. (Books in this style occasionally go on to become classics, prized for their liveliness and accessiblity.)"
At this point, I am starting to think, "Hey, finally someone who recognizes what we are trying to accomplish. But the first review was kind of harsh, so I’m guessing that Wiley is going to turn us down."
Back to the review, this second reviewer notes that "some will be turned off by the informality of the book," finding the style "irritating", and that it would probably not be used at "schools with very serious undergraduate mathematics programs," but the book "should find favor with faculty in several disciplines and at many schools." The reviewer goes on to compare our books in some detail to other books about wavelets. (Some of the twenty mentioned above, I gather.) One book (by Burrus, Gopinath, and Guo) is described as a close competitor, but not that close. The others (by Chui, by Kaiser, and by Walter) are not that close either. The reviewer then writes, "I’d say that [the manuscript] has the field of the truly introductory more or less to itself." Wow, this is a nice review!
After reading the reviews, I sat in my office wondering what I was supposed to conclude from all this. Then I noticed that I had just received e-mail from our contact at Wiley. I decide to call Steve at home and ask him to come in to school, to read the reviews and to open this e-mail together.
Steve arrived about a half-hour later and read the reviews. Then we opened the e-mail. It read in part: "Based on these reviews, I would like to present your project to my publications committee for the approval of contracts. Although one was somewhat negative, I believe that this is an excellent project and that Wiley is the right home [for it]." Later in the e-mail, there is this sentence: "I believe the the negative reviewer is a more ‘traditional’ mathematician and missed the point of the book, but I’d like to learn what you think." Steve and I need to write a response to the reviews soon.
Steve and I have not heard of the Burrus et. al. book mentioned above, and it turns out that it was just published last August. We decided to order the book via the Internet to have it here by Tuesday, so we can comment on it in our response.
Wow, what a week!
June 25, 1998: Steve and I have been working every day this week on our response to the reviewers. We now have four pages of response. We are still waiting for the book we ordered via the Internet. I have had good luck with this in the past, but not this week.
Also this week, I have done something that I haven’t done in a while: solve a challenging (to me, anyway) math problem. The problem is #630 in the College Mathematics Journal. I have been wrestling with this problem all week, losing sleep at night, pulling out a piece of paper at odd times to work on it, and just generally being obsessed. I don’t think I’ve been quite like this since the research I did on that baseball problem three years ago. (It led to an article in the Monthly!) I finally wrapped up the solution today. (I hope it’s right!)
June 29, 1998: Steve and I are ready to send the response to the reviews of our manuscript back to Wiley. We ended up writing four pages, which is as much as we received in reviews a week ago. Meanwhile, we’ve received two e-mails in three days from people who want to buy our book, and I’ve had to tell them to be patient and wait until we get it published. The count on the wavelets web page is 1544.
Friday, we had a 4-hour meeting of the department Council, of which I am now a member because of my election as subgroup leader last year. For the most part, we focused on how to restructure the department, because the subgroup structure has become too much of a way to manage faculty rather than curricula.
July 17, 1998: I talked to the person who may soon be our official editor at Wiley. Next Wednesday, July 22, she is going to present our project to her publisher and a few other people for approval. She is confident that Discovering Wavelets will be approved, and she will call us after the meeting to let us know what happens. She said that contracts could be mailed out to us the same day.
Before I talked to her, she sent me an e-mail outlining that they want to give us a grant to complete the book. She also described their royalty policy. This is starting to seem real.
Steve and I continue to hear from people, through our web site, that want to buy this book. The latest is from a gentleman from Indonesia. I feel bad having to disappoint these people, since if Wiley says "yes" next week, the book won’t be published for another year or so. Latest wavelets web page count: 1977.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve been turning my three previous diaries into web pages to be posted with this Tenure-Track Diary. Reading over these writings from 1991-1994, I realize how far I’ve come in so many ways. It is pretty amazing how naive I was about certain things, as was pointed out to me in May. Maybe five years from now, I’ll look at this diary and think, "Wow, we didn’t know anything about writing and publishing a book."
July 23, 1998: We got the news yesterday – Wiley is going to publish our book! They are sending us contracts that we should have by Monday. Ironically, the count on the wavelets web page just rolled over 2000.
It goes without saying that I am really happy about this. After a year of not terribly helpful rejections from a number of publishers, we’ve found someone who believes in our ideas. It has been much like a job search. And, like the job search, there are publishers who expressed an initial enthusiasm for our manuscript, but whom we never heard from again.
Looking ahead, Steve and I now have a lot of work to do. Although we have a draft of the manuscript, it needs some serious rewriting, and there are some other sections that we need to create. Having Christine Hughes, a student here, read through the book this summer has been very useful, as her reactions to different sections will lead to some better-written parts.
Our deadline for getting a camera-ready manuscript to them is next July.
Well, gosh, seems like we have a happy ending here. I have tenure. I’ve been promoted. We have a book contract. Back in 1992, friends, as I wrote in my Job Search Diary, told me to relax. Perhaps I finally can.
Yeah, right.
END
Edward Aboufadel teaches at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. This is the fourth in a series of diaries relating to his professional experience. His first diary dealt with his job search. The second explored his experiences in his new job. The third focused on his work as part of a search committee. All three were first published in FOCUS, the print newsletter of the Association, and are now available online.
MAA Online is edited by Fernando Q. Gouvêa (fqgouvea@colby.edu). Last modified: Tue Mar 30 21:01:33 -0500 1999