R. Murray Thomas, professor and dean emeritus of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School, along with Dr. Marie Iding, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa and a Gevirtz School alumna, have published Becoming a Professor: A Guide to a Career in Higher Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
Becoming a Professor is designed primarily for graduate and undergraduate students and others – instructors, lecturers and new tenure-track professors – contemplating careers as professors in post-secondary education at colleges, institutes, and universities. The book identifies kinds of higher education institutions, and types of teaching positions along with the nature of each position’s responsibilities and advantages and disadvantages. It explains how graduate students can promote their future as faculty members while they are still in graduate school and suggests ways to find suitable faculty positions and succeed at the application and interview process. The book also addresses a range of other matters that influence careers in higher education once a candidate is hired in a faculty position – such matters as the tenure and promotion process and how to succeed in other aspects of the professorial role (research, service, teaching), and as well as how to avoid pitfalls (political and ethical aspects) in such positions.
“Had Becoming a Professor been available to my generation, our academic careers could have been not only more productive but much more fulfilling,” writes Noel McGinn, professor emeritus, Harvard. “Just as The Joy of Cooking formed a generation of culinary artists, this book rejuvenates higher education. Professors Iding and Thomas have probed into every aspect of academic life, sifting out the values and skills that make higher education such a rewarding profession.”
Dr. R. Murray Thomas is emeritus professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he also directed a program on international education. He began his career as a teacher for Kamehameha Schools and Mid-Pacific Institute in the 1940s, when he also served as crime reporter for The Honolulu Star-Bulletin, and wrote press releases for UHM’s School of Tropical Agriculture. He then earned his doctorate from Stanford University. His professional publications exceed 400, including 57 books for which he served as author, coauthor, or editor. He has taught and conducted cultural research in American Samoa, Indonesia, and the United States.
Dr. Marie Iding has served on the faculty of the Department of Educational Psychology in the College of Education at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa since 1991, when she was awarded her doctorate in education from UCSB. She also earned a MA degree in education from UCSB in 1989, and her BA from Loyola Marymount University. She has served as Guest Researcher in Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen, Norway in 2005 and as Visiting Professor at the Computational Social Science Laboratory in the Center for Applied Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark in 2011. Iding has written a number of articles regarding learning with multimedia and on-line learning, and has taught and conducted research in the Pacific region including Hawaii, American Samoa, and Chuuk, Federated States of Micronesia.