Submissions to UUP’s Working Paper Series — designed to inspire good ideas and good writing — are posted on the union’s Web site for all to share.

“The Working Paper Series is open to both academic and professional SUNY faculty, who can write on any subject in any discipline,” said UUP Vice President for Academics Frederick Floss. “The purpose is to spark discussion among our faculty on all campuses and to help junior faculty in the tenure process. We encourage everyone to participate.”

The papers submitted to the series go through a peer review process; reviewers’ comments are shared with the authors, who also retain the copyright to their submissions. Submitting papers to the UUP Working Paper Series does not preclude the authors from publishing them in academic journals or other publications.

In a paper posted in October, right,

New York Law School visiting professor Isabelle Katz-Pinzler discussed the “very real threats” posed by recent Supreme Court decisions to uphold state’s rights over those of state workers. Katz-Pinzler’s paper began as a speech presented during a conference on preserving the rights of public employees, sponsored by the UUP Human and Civil Rights Committee in cooperation with NYSUT and three other New York public employee unions.

The following are examples of papers submitted to the series by UUP members:

• Peter Bradford, associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Buffalo HSC, The Blackboard Learning System, July 2007, in which Bradford and his co-authors discuss how Blackboard Inc. offers easy-to-use systems for educational instruction, communication and assessment.

• David F. Butler, SUNY Canton professor of English, Repercussions: Frederick Exley’s Burden of Grief and Guilt, March 2007, about the Watertown, N.Y., novelist’s inability to forgive himself for the summer night that Cass McIntyre gave herself to him.

• Cindy Lou Daniels, SUNY Canton assistant professor of English, Bruising the Heart: Meaning in George Elliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil,’ May 2006, which outlines Elliot’s attempt to embody some truth — or truths — about life.

• Stanley Feist, SUNY Farmingdale professor emeritus of psychology, Crisis Intervention: It is Neither Counseling nor Therapy, which notes that mental health professionals must be ready to treat individuals and communities in the aftermath of a catastrophic incident.

• A. William Godfrey, SUNY Stony Brook lecturer in European languages, The Reinstatement of the Draft, June 2005, opines on why reinstating the draft for men and women may be the one idea that saves the nation.

• John Schumacher, System Administration, Open Access and SUNY: How New Forms of Publication are Transforming Scholarly Communication, November 2005, notes that a growing number of scholars, librarians, funding agencies and university administrators are advocating for opening up access to scholarly literature.

Submissions to the Working Paper Series should be e-mailed to Floss in Microsoft Word at ffloss@uupmail.org.

— Karen L. Mattison