I am up for tenure next year. This means that I am spending a significant part of my summer putting together my tenure packet.
The tenure packet encompasses (almost) everything I have done since joining Duke in 2006: published articles and book chapters, working papers, grant proposals, course syllabi, course evaluations, etc.
The most important thing in the tenure packet, however, is the statement of intellectual development. This document describes in great detail the research I have done, the research I am doing, and the research I plan on doing for the next five to 10 years. It also describes my teaching philosophy and my teaching strategies. Finally, it describes my service to the university and to the profession.
The bulk of the statement of intellectual development is about research. I have been working on my statement for the past two weeks, but I am about 99 percent done, so I decided to make a word cloud of the research part of my statement, to see what it would look like. Here it is (click on the word cloud for a full-size picture):
Looks about right.
Posner on Gay Marriage
Probably the best thing I have read on the issue of gay marriage:
[The gay] population is on the whole law-abiding and productively employed, and having a below-normal fertility rate does not impose the same costs on the education and welfare systems as the heterosexual population does. It is thus not surprising that in response to the President’s announcement of his support for homosexual marriage, Republican leaders cautioned their followers not to be distracted by this issue from the problems of the US economy. This was tacit acknowledgment that homosexual marriage, and homosexual rights in general, have no economic significance.
It seems that the only remaining basis for opposition to homosexual marriage, or to legal equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals in general, is religious. Many devout Christians, Jews, and Muslims are strongly opposed to homosexual marriage, and to homosexuality more generally. Why they are is unclear. If as appears homosexuality is innate, and therefore natural (and indeed there is homosexuality among animals), and if homosexuals are not an antisocial segment of the population, why should they be thought to be offending against God’s will? Stated differently, why has sex come to play such a large role in the Abrahamic religions? I do not know the answer. But whatever the answer, the United States is not a theocracy and should hesitate to enact laws that serve religious rather than pragmatic secular aims, such as material welfare and national security.
The emphasis is mine, but here is more from Richard Posner, and here is his co-blogger Gary Becker’s response.
Interestingly, in his post, Posner brings up the
19751967 Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia. In that case, the Court held that prohibiting interracial marriage was unconstitutional.