Sunday, October 08, 2006

A Promotion to Report

My friend for nearly 30 years, grad school roommate, and sometimes coauthor Brian E. Roberts has been named chief of IT services at the ginormous campus of UT-Austin.

According to the news release, he has been named "Vice President for Information Technology," and COO of IT. That's "chief operating officer."

Other places this would be called "CIO," or "chief information officer."

Of course, in South Carolina, the job would be "X", accompanied by "Important Guy, his mark" in crayon.

And in Nebraska, instead of CIO, it would be "EIEIO," just like all other jobs.

Congratulations, Dr. Roberts!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You know, as a proud South Carolinian, I ought to beat you like Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate for such a scurrilous insult.

Unfortunately, truth is an absolute defense....

Anonymous said...

We just had a UT prof up giving a seminar and he was both lamenting the loss of Brian from his previous post as associate dean and happy about the prospects of his impact on IT at UT. Congrats Brian!!!

Kevin G.

Anonymous said...

As one of BER's former PhD students, I'm happy to hear of his promotion (and your lauding of it). But I wanted to ask you about an unrelated topic. Have you seen Eugene Hickok's recent NYTimes opinion piece about accountability in higher education? It seems the whole notion of (governmentally mandated/enforced) accountability flies in the face of his conservative roots. As someone in the same business (higher ed) and discipline (polisci) as me, I was curious about your take on the matter. Thanks.