Making the Dean’s List

I read this book once per decade. It is a dark tale on many fronts, but one that, for some reason, gives me inspiration. Speer is a complex figure having started rather naively as Hitler’s architect, but for reasons that escape me, agreed to become his minister of armaments in 1944, and consequently, one of the most notorious Nazis of all time—and that is saying a lot! He was so good at his role, some speculate he prolonged WWII by several years. It is for that work he was given a 20-year sentence at Nuremberg. Some claim that Speer feigned culpability to appear innocent. Others believe he was the only Nazi who honestly ever admitted culpability. But that is for the historians to decide. As a reader, I experience vicariously what it is like to be incarcerated for any period of time, and I gain insight as to how one deals with, or rationalizes, such guilt on a daily basis. I gain a glimpse into the way one survives for so long under such circumstances.

Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History
by Donald Canfield

To read a book like this, the reader must first embrace the idea of deep time (i.e., that the earth really is 4.5 billion years old). Admittedly, I am at times shaken by that number, but like it or not, it is true and that’s okay. The book investigates how oxygen came about in our ancient atmosphere, how it has changed through time, and the interesting scientists who made those discoveries. Earth was a dreadful place prior to the arrival of sufficient quantities of oxygen for life as we know it. Oxygen levels through time have ranged from about 10 to 40 percent, quite a range compared to our relatively modern concentration of 21 percent. Imagine living your daily life at an elevation of 20,000 feet! As I read these kinds of books and as I sit on ancient outcrops of the desert Southwest, my mind wonders at the enormity of earth’s history and why God would have done it this way.
A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It’s Everyone’s Business
by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden

Provost Jones assigned this reading prior to our most recent dean’s retreat. To be honest, I didn’t want to read it as it seemed irrelevant to academia, the liberal arts and sciences. After finishing the book, I slowly changed and began to first accept and then finally embrace what I was reading: It isn’t a book about making money (although you can take it that way); rather, it is about how to deal with adversity in one’s professional or life circumstances. That adversity, or constraint, brings about one’s most creative moments. Adversity jolts you. It wakes you up. It gets you out of your comfort zone. Regarding business, had it not been for constraints, we might well still be living with the technologies of the early 1900s. If not for constraints, we in academia would be building budgets and developing initiatives in the way we had 50 years ago. I highly recommend this book, whether for business, academia or everyday life.