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Dr. May was California
State University Monterey Bay's
(CSUMB) very first recruited Dean of Instruction and founding
Dean of Science, Technology, and Information Resources in 1994.
He retired in 2000 but retains his status as Professor of
Information Technology and Communication Design.
At CSUMB he taught courses in Community Networking, the Internet,
Technology Tools, Business Administration, and a Pro-Seminar for Earth
System Sciences and Policy, as well as Ethics in
Communication and Information Technology.
For the California
Faculty Association (CFA), representing the 23,000 faculty of the
California State University system, Dr. May was elected and reelected
as statewide Treasurer, serving from 1999 to 2003. He was also
the union's
president at Monterey Bay for the years 1998-2001 and is again for
2004-05. In 2000 and again in 2002 he was given a Union Member of
the Year award by the Monterey and then Monterey Bay Central Labor
Councils.
He was also appointed the first Community Technology Coordinator at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian from January 2000 to April 2002. He worked with the staff and Board of Trustees to develop electronic outreach to native communities in the Western Hemisphere and assist in planning the technology for the new mall museum near the U.S. Capitol.
James May holds a doctorate from Columbia
University in library and information science, a Master in Business
Administration
from Harvard University (its first
American Indian to get an MBA), and a
Bachelor
of Science in civil engineering from Stanford
University.
Dr. May currently is Chairman of the Board of Native American Public Television and on the Board of Directors of Native American Public Telecommunications. He served on the Board of Directors of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (2002-06), where he headed it Education Committee, In the past he was on the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian Board of Trustees Information and Technology Committee, and was on the Commission for Learning Resources and Information Technology of the CSU, and served as staff to the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council. He has been a board member of the Society for Computer Simulation, International and its Official Historian. In October 1995, the Stanford American Indian Alumni Association, on its silver anniversary, presented him with the first award it has ever granted -- for his service to the Indian community in the field of Technology.
For nearly 12 years, as Dean and Vice Provost at California State University, Chico he directed the Library, Computer Center, Instructional Media Center, Telecommunications, and Institutional Research. With 18 broadcast licenses, his organization operated satellite uplinks for national delivery and a microwave network for a 33,000 square mile service area to provide one of the largest distance-education operations in the country. His organization at Chico won many national awards, particularly in television production, satellite teleconferencing, and publications, including International Teleconferencing Association awards (twice), AECT Exemplary Media Center Award, four National Educational Film Festival 1st place awards, two 1st place ACM Outstanding Computer Center Newsletter Awards and others in national competition, Best of West Awards, a Cindy for commercial video, a JVC 1st place award, national recognition for distance learning and innovative library services, and other honors.
Before Chico he co-founded a publishing company in New York that
produced the first commercial online bibliographic database in the
country and became a subsidiary of Macmillan Publishing, taught
research and Native American studies, administered a university
library, and ran a Center for Communication and Information Research at
the University of Denver. He also has served as an officer in the
Navy Civil Engineer Corps in the U.S. and abroad.
For calendar year 1993 he also had an appointment as Visiting Scholar at Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information. At Stanford and at Apple Computer he explored ways to preserve native cultures and languages through use of multimedia and other information technologies.
President Bush appointed him to the first ever White House Conference on Indian Education which was held in January 1992. A year earlier the National Congress of American Indians commissioned him to do a paper on "Technological Needs: Joining the Information Age" for its Native American Pre-Conference to the White House Conference on Library and Information Services. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs on information technology for Native Americans. In the summer of 1991 he participated in the White House Conference on Libraries and Information Services. He has also guest lectured or conducted seminars at Stanford University, Mankato State University, the University of New Mexico, Sonoma State University, and California State Universities at Chico and Sacramento.
His publications include "Information Technology for
Indigenous People", in Digitial
Democracy published by Oxford
University Press (1998). In 1998 he also was invited to give
the Plenary Lecture
at an international distributed data processing conference in Siberia,
sponsored
by the Russian Academy of Sciences. In December 2000, he was a keynote
speaker
for the International Open Learning 2000 conference in Brisbane,
Australia. More recently he was keynote speaker for an E-Learning
Conference in
Northern Ontario, Canada for native people. He participates with
the American Distance Education Consortium in
their
programs to tribal colleges and rural education and in 2003-05 helped
D-Q
University, California's only tribal college, in its development.
Jim is an enrolled voting member of, official representative for, and advisor to the United Keetoowah Band, an independent federally-recognized tribe of predominately full-blood Cherokee-speaking Indians. He designed his tribe's seal and flag and speaks several languages including his own Keetoowah (Cherokee).