Perspective: 'Take a deep breath, sugar, you're living in Dixie':
"Lawmakers seem to see classes and laboratories as tedious academic appendages of useful and interesting football factories. Florida is a large and prosperous state; its universities' peer institutions should be Michigan, Berkeley, Ohio State, Wisconsin. These schools have Top 25 football programs as well as first-rate libraries, highly ranked programs, upper-end faculty salaries and (this is signally important) excellent stipends for graduate students and teaching assistants. Instead, Florida's universities belong to the sphere of Ole Miss, Oklahoma, LSU - colleges in states still struggling with the old Southern curse of poverty and low expectations."
Posts
1 comment:
I've lived in a couple of states since I left Oklahoma, and for the most part, here's what people who have never been there believe:
- Oklahoma is a flat, dry, hot prairie with a couple of big towns where they still drive cattle down Main Street.
- Everyone lives in trailer parks that routinely get blown away by tornadoes, at which time they declare the state a National Disaster Area and everybody moves to bigger trailer parks.
- Big businessmen in Oklahoma City wear cowboy boots, jeans, and string ties to work every day, and like to cut loose at the ro-day-o on the weekends.
- There are no people of color in Oklahoma, and all Oklahomans are right-wing fundamentalist Christian racist bigots who bomb abortion clinics for fun.
- Everyone in Oklahoma drives a pickup, except for a couple of guys with '68 Mustang fastbacks, painted primer gray. Many homes have another car, but it's up on blocks in front of the trailer.
- The only radio stations in Oklahoma play either country music (especially Garth, Reba, and Vince) or Rush Limbaugh (sadly, the last time I was in Oklahoma I noticed that Clear Channel had apparently taken over the airwaves and mostly made that one true).
Librarians at the state university in the Northeast where I work--and I'm not one of them, so I don't have to temper this with professional courtesy--seem to believe that OU's library school isn't nearly as good as the one at the institution where we work, which requires fewer hours, no thesis, no comps, and no exposure whatsoever to social sciences research methods. They believe that automation hasn't yet made it to Oklahoma libraries, even though their ILS is--I'm not making this up--the version of NOTIS that OU implemented in 1989. They're very proud of their web interface to it, though, which probably *does* seem pretty neat to somebody who's never seen a well-designed homegrown library system--like, say, the MARS system that the Metropolitan Library System in OKC developed, which is awesome by just about any standard.
Sigh.
Post a Comment