Interim Dean's Welcome
Welcome to Library and Information Services (LIS) at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE). We are an innovative, student-centered unit that seeks to foster the best of emancipatory education.
We seek to cultivate reverential thinking that recognizes the best of human heritage and be a portal to those rich legacies while at the same time equipping students with the tools and skills necessary for critical thinking so that they can identify the limits of their society and themselves and overcome them. We seek to foster the dispositions, attitudes, and skills necessary to collaborate effectively and respectfully in a diverse world. And we aim to empower patrons--students, faculty, staff, community members--to take up the challenge of tackling and solving the myriad problems that confront our world.
Beginning 1 January 2022, I was asked to serve as Interim Dean of Library and Information Services. My goal is to serve as a sound steward of the library until a permanent dean is selected. I am trained as an intellectual historian and a historian of modern Europe. I have served at SIUE for 23 years, first in the Department of History (1999-2013) and since 2013 as the Director of the University Honors Program. During the last two decades, I have been privileged to lead the reform of the University's general education program (2005-2008) and to co-chair the Academic Continuity Task Force (2020-2021) that helped guide the University's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These roles have helped prepare me for my current responsibilities, which are far from my original training.
My role in the coming months is to be a bridge so that my colleagues in LIS, the dedicated and skilled faculty and staff, can continue: to teach students the fundamental skills necessary to acquire true knowledge of the world; to inoculate them against misinformation; to support faculty from across the university in their research; to offer diverse patrons a welcoming place for inquiry, contemplation, and self-reflection.
LIS should provide you ways to root yourself in the past while vaulting you into the future. We hope you visit us.
Sincerely,
Eric W. Ruckh, Ph.D.
Interim Dean of Library and Information Services