The Future of the Humanities

This video made the rounds last week on Facebook.  I'm sharing it here for those of you who may have missed it (or who want to watch it again).  It offers a tragicomic glimpse into the cynicism that pervades the academic humanities these days -- a result of poor job prospects for many, limited funding, and diminishing respect within and beyond higher education.  It's biting, but for exactly the reasons I wish it were not.

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Digital & Social Media Job Posting

My department at Indiana University, Communication and Culture, is looking for a top-notch person to fill an opening in digital/social media, at the level of assistant professor.  Check out the job announcement, below, and please circulate it widely.

I'm not a member of the search committee, by the way, so if you have questions it's best to contact the committee chair--my colleague, Professor Barbara Klinger.

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Indiana University

Department of Communication and Culture

Digital and Social Media

The Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Digital and Social Media to begin Fall 2011.

We seek a humanities-trained Ph.D. whose primary area of research expertise and training is in digital media studies focused specifically on the social dimensions and potentials of digital media. This applicant will be expected to interact productively with colleagues in one or more of the department’s three areas: Rhetoric and Public Culture; Film and Media Studies; and Performance and Ethnographic Studies. The applicant must have a well-developed research program and teaching experience in digital and social media. She or he will be responsible for developing an introductory lecture course and advanced undergraduate courses, as well as for actively shaping and teaching graduate offerings in this field of study.

We particularly encourage applicants whose research involves specialization in areas such as:

• Social networking


• New technologies of political advocacy


• Ethnographies of new media


• Convergence and participatory cultures


• Digital video


• Games and gaming

Candidates are expected to have a strong research agenda and a commitment to excellence in teaching. Preference will be given to those who have their Ph.D. in hand by the date of appointment. Applicants should send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, writing sample, and three letters of recommendation to: Professor Barbara Klinger, Chair, Digital/Social Media Search, Department of Communication and Culture, 800 E. 3^rd Street, Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405. Review of applications will begin December 1, 2010 and continue until the position is filled.

Indiana University is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. The university actively encourages applications and nominations of women, minorities, applicants with disabilities, and members of other underrepresented groups.

Get Organized

About a month ago a friend and fellow academic contacted me to ask how I organize all of the material that we accumulate in the course of our careers.  With the school year starting for most of us here in the United States and elsewhere, I thought it might be worth sharing what I told her.  It never hurts to start the year off on the right foot, eh?

Confession: I'm a prodigious keeper of academic stuff.  I'm not of the caliber of the people featured on the TV show Hoarders (which, by the way, literally takes my breath away), but my collection still runs pretty deep. Heck, I even have a few of my old notebooks from my undergraduate days, and truth be told I do refer to them on occasion.  I'm able to keep this much stuff because I live in the Midwest where housing prices are relative affordable.  Folks living in urban setting ought to take what I'm about to say with a major grain of salt.

One of the main items I hold on to are photocopied journal articles and book chapters.  Each one has its own separate file folder, and on the tab I write the author's name and the selection title.  Where possible I note the full citation on the document itself. I file these alphabetically by the author's last name in a four-drawer file cabinet that I've just about outgrown. In the event that the article is more topically-focused or doesn't name the author, I place it in a colored file folder and file it alphabetically by topic.

I've also begun amassing a growing number of e-readings of late, which I save on my laptop in a folder called "articles."  I use the author's last name and a keyword from the title as the file name.  I'm not yet convinced this is the best system, but it seems to be working for now.  Regular backup is a must.

I keep my old notebooks from graduate school in a cardboard file box. They're filed chronologically by semester, with the oldest ones toward the back.  I've moved a few of the notebooks I refer to most frequently to the front, even though that violates the chronological system.

I organize my teaching files by class and semester. Every class gets its own hanging file every semester, and in each I place three manila file folders: one for lesson plans, one for handouts/tests/syllabi/etc., and one for any other course related documents (e.g., enrollment records, grade rosters, etc.)  I keep the most active files in my desk-drawer file cabinet at home, and the older ones (usually for classes I'm not teaching anymore) I have archived in one of the file cabinets in my campus office.

My research files vary, but for the most part I keep a hardcopy of every finished manuscript in its own separate file folder labeled with the title and publication/presentation date. These I keep in a cardboard file box organized chronologically. The accompanying research materials I contain in accordion files, which I label with the project title. I keep these in a file box separate from the finished papers, although I've gone back and forth on this. Any articles I've used on a project go back in the metal file cabinet once I'm confident the project really is done.

I've managed to collect electronic copies of all of my published research, which I keep on my laptop in a folder called, surprisingly enough, "Published Research."  Within it I maintain separate folders for journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews.  Again, backup is essential.

Books: if I haven't read or referred to one in a long time, or if I've never read it at all, then it becomes a candidate to sell to a used bookstore -- although the only problem here is that I end up just trading them in for more books.  Otherwise, I use foldable/stackable bookshelves (a carry-over from graduate school, when I used to move around a lot) to house the many volumes comprising my library, the bulk of which I keep at home since that's where I mainly do my writing.  The titles are organized loosely by topic (philosophy, media studies, communication theory, postcolonial studies, race, cultural studies, etc.) and then by author, but I don't maintain any type of formal alphabetical system here. I try my best to organize multiple works by the same author chronologically.  Most of the time textbooks and odd or duplicate volumes end up on the bookshelves in my campus office.

That's my system in a nutshell.  What are your best tips, fellow travelers?

Higher Education: Let the Free Market Reign!

Great news for all of my readers who despise profligate government spending! My buddy Kembrew McLeod published a thought-provoking article in Tuesday's edition of the Huffington Post called, "A Modest Free Market Proposal for Higher Education Reform." In it, Kembrew outlines a compelling vision for ending the financial bloat that's endemic to today's public universities.

Among his proposals, he calls for corporate sponsorship of classes. Personally I'm looking forward to the day when the syllabus for my Introduction to Media class, which enrolls 250-plus students every fall, can finally say, "brought to you by the Walt Disney Company." Kembrew also suggests that undergraduates be given the green light to utilize paid-for research assistance companies, which makes a good deal of sense, really, for how else are we to grow the economy in tough financial times? My favorite idea of his, though, is to incentivize cheap graduate student teaching. Soon-to-be PhDs, Kembrew writes, ought to be able to outsource their doctoral dissertations:

By no longer having to conduct original research themselves, graduate students will have more hours to spend in the classroom as adjunct instructors. Let's do the math. PhD-Dissertations.com charges $17.00 per page, which adds up to $3,400 for a 200-page dissertation (plus, their website states that, "A discount of 10% applies to orders of 75+ pages!"). Although this might seem like a lot of money, consider the fact that most colleges pay adjuncts roughly the same, between $3,000 and $4,000, for each course taught per semester. Therefore, by just adding one extra course to his or her roster, a graduate student can pay for an entire dissertation in less than one academic year--while at the same time serving the university's undergraduate teaching needs. Once this new generation of scholar/project managers enters the profession, there will be no more need for traditional professors.

Since I'm an overpaid university professor who's contributing to all the bloat, I'll happily step aside to let someone with a bachelors or masters degree do my job for, say, seven or eight bucks an hour. But don't worry about me. I'll be lapping it up over at PhD-Dissertations.com, where at long last I can put my skills and experience to some real use.

Academic Publishing Roundup -- Communication Edition

Wow! I'm happy to report that my home discipline, communication, is finally making some strides in terms of bringing its book and journal publishing policies into the 21st century.

Last week, the International Communication Association (ICA), in Conjunction with American University's Center for Social Media, released its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies devised a similar statement of best practices way back in 1993 (it updated the document in 2009), so needless to say I'm pleased to see ICA catching up at long last.

These types of policy statements are vitally important for media and communication scholars, and indeed for scholars more generally. As more and more of our work engages words, sounds, images, and other artifacts drawn from the popular media, we need to be reasonably assured that we can criticize and, where necessary, reproduce content protected by copyright, trademark, and other forms of intellectual property law. That's exactly what these best practices statements do, in part by identifying a "community of practice" and carefully defining its -- in this case, scholarly -- customs. But it's not only about "show and tell." Reproducing copyrighted content in academic work is important to the scholarly process. How else would reviewers, other scholars, and anyone else who may happen to read our work assess the validity of our claims?

Academics routinely -- and often unnecessarily, I might add -- self-censor our work, for instance by opting to exclude images we're analyzing for fear we'll get sued by some deep-pocketed media giant. Heck, I've even done it myself. And that's why I'm such a champion of these best practices statements. They may not give us carte blanche to use intellectual properties in our work however we may see fit. They do give us a useful set of guidelines for making informed judgments about how best to proceed in these matters, though, plus they underscore how our own practices are in solidarity with others.

The other bit of good news is that Boston College's Charles (Chuck) E. Morris III has drafted a resolution calling on the National Communication Association (NCA) to revise its fees for licensing NCA-copyrighted material. In a preamble to the document, Chuck writes:

The resolution seeks to regulate the prohibitively expense copyright fees charged by Taylor & Francis [publisher of NCA journals] in conjunction with NCA. Particularly alarming is that while for more than a decade NCA Executive Directors, who contractually have the prerogative to waive or reduce fees, intervened to make reprinted NCA journal materials affordable for high quality anthologies/readers of pedagogical and scholarly value, the current NCA Executive Director, Nancy Kidd, has prioritized profit and is allowing a dramatically higher fee.

Basically, NCA jacked up its licensing fees about a year ago, a move that will price smaller publishers out of the business of republishing top-quality communication research. The change not only promises to whittle down the competition (leaving only giants like Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, and Sage standing), but it's also inimical to the larger cause of scholarly communication. When Chuck writes that NCA is putting profits ahead of publishing, he's exactly right.

If you're an NCA member, you have until Tuesday, June 29th the add your name to the document. You can do so by contacting Chuck via email: morrisch@bc.edu. And hey -- if you're not an NCA member but you believe in the spirit of the resolution, why not go ahead drop Chuck a line anyway? I don't know if he can add your name to the formal list of signatories, but it can't hurt for him to be able to attest to support coming from beyond NCA.

Now, if only we could get NCA to adopt a best practices for fair use statement of its own. It's an embarrassment, frankly, for the oldest and largest professional association for communication scholars in the United States to lag so far behind its peer organizations.

Scholarly Journal Publishing

My latest essay, "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing," is now out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(1) (March 2010), pp. 3-25. In my opinion, it's probably the single most important journal essay I've published to date. Here's the abstract:

This essay explores the changing context of academic journal publishing and cultural studies' envelopment within it. It does so by exploring five major trends affecting scholarly communication today: alienation, proliferation, consolidation, pricing, and digitization. More specifically, it investigates how recent changes in the political economy of academic journal publishing have impinged on cultural studies' capacity to transmit the knowledge it produces, thereby dampening the field's political potential. It also reflects on how cultural studies' alienation from the conditions of its production has resulted in the field's growing involvement with interests that are at odds with its political proclivities.

Keywords: Cultural Studies; Journal Publishing; Copyright; Open Access; Scholarly Communication

I'm fortunate to have already had the published essay reviewed by Ben Myers and Desiree Rowe, who podcast over at The Critical Lede. You can listen to their thoughtful commentary on "Acknowledged Goods" by clicking here -- and be sure to check out their other podcasts while you're at it!

Since I'm on the topic of the politics of academic knowledge, I'd be remiss not to mention Siva Vaidhyanathan's amazing piece from the 2009 NEA Almanac of Higher Education, which recently came to my attention courtesy of Michael Zimmer. It's called "The Googlization of Universities." I found Siva's s discussion of bibliometrics -- the measurement of bibliographic citations and journal impact -- to be particularly intriguing. I wasn't aware that Google's PageRank system essentially took its cue from that particular corner of the mathematical universe. The piece also got me thinking more about the idea of "algorithmic culture," which I've blogged about here from time to time and that I hope to expand upon in an essay.

Please shoot me an email if you'd like a copy of "Acknowledged Goods." Of course, I'd be welcome any feedback you may have about the piece, either here or elsewhere.

CFP -- Canadian Journal of Media Studies

CANADIAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES

CALL FOR PAPERS

2009 marks the 30th anniversary of the publication of Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. “[I}t is common knowledge,” he wrote, “that the miniaturization and commercialization of machines is already changing the way learning is acquired, classified, made available, and exploited” (1984, org. 1979: 4). In 2010, "Connected Understanding" will be the theme of the Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities in Montreal (http://www.fedcan.virtuo.ca/congress2010/). The Canadian Journal of Media Studies announces a special issue on Media, Knowledge and the Network University edited by Bob Hanke, York University, and David Spencer, University of Western Ontario.

The massification and informationalization of the university has transformed not only the content of teaching and research but also disciplinary processes of knowledge production and the technological form of academic life and culture. The integration and normalization of ICT's raises many questions about the university, academic labour, scholarly communication and collaboration, and academic technoculture. In 1957, Marshall McLuhan invited us to reconsider the education process by announcing that, with the advent of television, the “classroom without walls” had arrived. A half a century later, we are working in the university without walls and the ICT “revolution” is over. In “Universities, wet, hard, and harder,” German media theorist Friedrich Kittler reviewed 800 years of university-based media history to observe that “universities have finally succeeded in forming once again a complete media system.” Yet media scholars have rarely chosen to study their own universities as media systems. This special issue of the CJMS is an invitation to reflexive, critical media studies. Established and emerging scholars are invited to address continuities and transformations in new media and the network university and to set the agenda for future study and debate.

Possible questions and areas of research and critical inquiry include:

• What is unthought, unrepresented and unquestioned in discussions of the public university and the ‘neoliberal turn,’ technologically-mediated post-secondary education, and institutional initiatives in the virtualization of the educational process?

• What is the impact of the cybernation of the university? What is happening in information technology (IT) infrastructure, planning and governance? What IT strategies are pursued by specific institutions in different jurisdictions? What is the role of IT professionals as intermediaries between IT industries, intermediating organizations, private-sector partners and the university? What is the faculty experience of ICTs, and IT “solutions,” services, and support?

• What are the networks of possibility and affordances of technology, and what are the obstacles and limits? the unintended, unanticipated consequences?

• What hybrid methodologies, research techniques and software enhance our capacity to map the wireless campus and network condition of the university?

• What philosophers of technology and politics are relevant to sharpening our thinking on the question of technology? What scholarly perspectives on invention, innovation and the process of emergence enable us to break the habit of instrumentalist thinking and discard the “tool” metaphor? How can we take technical artifacts, from small, portable technology to entire campus networks, out of their “black boxes” in order to study them? How does the technical substrate matter to our thinking? Our reading and writing of “texts”? Our notions of “research”? How is the university embedded in the network society and cognitive capitalism? What are the drivers of IT change in universities? What are the consequences of the disjuncture between the digital culture and practices outside the university and IT (planning, procurement/evaluation/implementation, support and services) inside universities?

• How can we move beyond user-centric approaches to Web 2.0 based software applications and learning management systems, peer-to-peer networks, and small tech in academic settings? In the new network culture, how can we grasp the relations between what is “given” and what is unlikely, surprising, unexpected and unrealized?

• How can we move beyond debates over “student centered” learning and faculty deskilling to new models of reskilling and organized research networks, technological literacy and technologies of the common? How can we articulate scholarly “collaboration” and student “engagement” with a politics of knowledge (commodified knowledge, open scholarship and knowledge within the social sciences and humanities, popular knowledge, indigenous knowledge, etc.) that will strengthen the public mission of the university after the recession? How can we turn away from the “knowledge economy” and towards knowledge cultures? What does the prototype of the Canadian Institute for Health Research’s Knowledge Broker Model portend for the social sciences and humanities?

We also invite investigations of:

• computerization, campus networking strategies, and ICT-related organizational change since the advent of distributed computing, the Internet and the WWW

• space, time, speed and rhythm in the network university

• the production and operativity of networks and archives, scholarly journals and portals, web-based learning environments and objects, research cyberinfrastructure, critical cyberpedagogy, technological literacy, copyright/left, intellectual property rights

• open access movement, open access research, open educational resources, open courseware, institutional repositories, ‘Do it Yourself’ education or edupunk

• tropes of factory, ecology, network, mobility, common

• articulations and destabilizations of oral/written, actual/virtual, bureaucratic records/institutional memory, off-line/on line, knowledge creation/information sharing, formal learning on campus/informal learning off campus, amateur/professional, artist/researcher

• ideology of convenience, ethos of performativity, immaterial academic labour, general intellect, circuits of knowledge and struggle

• technological “progress,”“knowledge economy,” knowledge “transfer” or “mobilization,” creativity, innovation, academic freedom, academic capitalism

• the coming network university, knowledge futures, ecoethical perspectives on the university’s inputs and outputs and the discourse of “sustainability”

Since intellectual innovation may be engendered at the intersections of disciplines, contributions are welcome from outside of Communication and traditions and trajectories of media studies outside of Canada. Solo or collaborative work that provides a comparative, international perspective on the network university in different countries is especially welcome.

Submission Guidelines

Authors should submit papers of about 25 pages (or 8000 words) in MLA style with abstract and keywords electronically to David Spencer, Editor, dspencer@uwo.ca. With the exception of the title page, please remove all indications of authorship.

The deadline for papers is February 28, 2010. Peer review and notification of acceptance will be completed by March 31, 2010. Final manuscripts accepted for publication will be due April 30, 2010.

Comments and queries can be sent to Bob Hanke, Guest Co-Editor, bhanke@yorku.ca.
For more information about the Canadian Journal of Media Studies, visit http://cjms.fims.uwo.ca/default.htm.

More bad copyright news for academic authors

Off and on throughout the years I've been reporting on instances in which academic authors were prohibited from doing their jobs as a result of unreasonable intellectual property regulations -- or the perception thereof. Here's the latest case: composer and Bard College Music professor Kyle Gann, whose latest book, about the music of the avant-garde art group Fluxus, will be without some important material. Gann reports:

Apparently I've just broken copyright law. I can't believe what's holding up my Cage book: you are no longer allowed to quote texts that are entire pieces of art. This means I've been trying to get permission simply to refer to Fluxus pieces like La Monte Young's "This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean," and Yoko Ono's "Listen to the sound of the earth turning." And of course, Yoko (whom I used to know) isn't responding, and La Monte is imposing so many requirements and restrictions that I would have to add a new chapter to the book, and so in frustration well past the eleventh hour, I've excised the pieces from the text.

You can read the complete post over on his blog PostClassic, which is hosted on the ArtsJournal website.

Odd, isn't it, how you can pay a relatively small fee to license the rights to cover an entire song, yet you can't get permission to do the same thing in a different medium for academic purposes? Something's gotta give. Really. This is getting ridiculous, and it is an affront to academic freedom.

Scan this test!

From today's Inside Higher Ed:

Friday was the last day of classes at the University of California at San Diego, where students faced a weekend of studying before finals began on Monday. If any of them ventured to a nearby La Jolla shopping center, they might have encountered representatives from a new Web site there to make their pitch: Give us a test — any old test — and we’ll give you a $5 Starbucks coffee card.

If that sounds like a surprisingly blunt quid pro quo, it’s consistent with the purpose of the site, called PostYourTest.com, which encourages students to upload tests and exams from their courses — anonymously, if they want — for others to find and download. The concept has already aroused suspicion and concern among some faculty members at UCSD, where many of the posted tests originated, and seems to run afoul of both traditionally accepted norms of academic integrity and, potentially, copyright law.

Even though I'm vigilant about changing the content of my exams, I do not permit my students to keep their tests once I've marked them. I always review their tests in class with them, however, and although I collect the documents thereafter, I make it clear that it's the students' right to access their exams should they have questions, want to review the material in anticipation of future exams, etcetera.

I implemented this policy many years ago now (in graduate school, I believe), after hearing many stories about old exams finding their way into files and getting passed down through generations of students.

PostYourTest obviously raises the stakes on the old "exam file." I wonder: should I begin placing copyright declarations on all future exams I create? And has it really come to that?

Anyway, you can read the full Inside Higher Ed story here.

Peer-reviewer personae

Josh Gunn over at The Rosewater Chronicles has an excellent post about the various critical personae one might encounter in the process of double-blind academic peer-review. He classifies them (us?) as "gushers," "assassins," "turf pissers," and "empaths." My favorite characterization (although probably my least favorite type of reviewer) has to be the "naysayer," whom Josh describes like this:

The Naysayer: Nothing of quality or interest has ever been published in the field, and your essay is no exception. Communication Studies is a sub-par and parasite field, and your essay continues this horrible, alien existence. The Naysayer wanted to be a philosopher or studied comparative literature, but reluctantly took a position in Communication Studies out of necessity. S/he is bitter about being in Comm, and will take it out on you—especially if you take up concepts from high theory or philosophy.

I'm sure anyone who's been through the gauntlet of double-blind peer review has encountered at least one cranky naysayer in her or his lifetime, and probably one or more of the other characters as well. I only wish there were more gushers and empaths out there. Too often, I find, academic peer-review seems as much about hazing as it does about ideas and execution--and I say that as someone who's enjoyed reasonably good success at getting published.

Anyway, be sure to check out Josh's post and the lively discussion that follows. Great stuff.

Goodbye, tenure-track faculty

I'm not sure what to make of this:

Every other year, data released by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics provide a snapshot of the growth of part-time positions in the professoriate. This year — an off-year for that data — the federal statistics provide evidence for another shift, in which the majority of full-time professional employees in higher education are in administrative rather than faculty job.

So I guess we tenure track faculty are now a minority in the academy. Could it be that we're also an endangered species? It's certainly odd to think about universities as places not abounding in professors (at least, as the term has tended to be understood).

I wonder: is this the university's version of the widening gap between the rich and the poor, or between the administrative class and an increasingly "casualized" workforce (for whom there is nothing casual about their labors)? Are tenure tack faculty getting "compressed" out of existence, given how cuts in state education budgets, combined with increasingly high administrative salaries, would seem to demand a more "flexible" workforce at the bottom? For any economists out there who may be reading, please chime in anytime....

For more on the global distribution of wealth, see my previous entry, below. And for the complete story about the changing shape of university employment, check out today's Inside Higher Ed.

Attn. grad students: How to get published

The following essay, which has been posted to the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), is perfect for graduate students and anyone else trying to break into the world of academic presentation and publishing. It discusses all the ins and outs of getting book reviews, conference papers, and articles accepted, but in a way that's neither pedantic nor condescending. It's a must read, at least, as far as I'm concerned. You can download the pre-print by clicking on the link below. Enjoy!

Publishing Advice for Graduate Students
THOM BROOKS
University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK)
Newcastle Law School

Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences.

A quick shout-out to Siva Vaidhyanathan over at Sivacracy for alerting me to the paper.

Saturday night's Presidential debate

It was enlightening to watch the ABC News/Facebook/WMUR Presidential debates this past Saturday night, for many reasons. I was aware of Obama and Huckabee's having won the Iowa caucuses, but honestly, I hadn't kept up much in terms of who-stands-for-what. The Indiana primary (where I live) doesn't occur until May, which is about two months after the Democratic and Republican nominees will have all but been determined. (The states with primaries later than ours are Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, and West Virginia.) I lived in New Hampshire many years ago, home of the nation's first primary, and was I born in New York, a state teeming with electoral votes. It's strange now living somewhere that barely registers in Presidential elections, other than as a place that can be counted on to go red literally within minutes of the polls closing.

Two things struck me most about the debates themselves. First, I appreciated seeing former Libertarian Ron Paul mix it up with the Republicans. His presence there changed the whole tenor of things, try as the other candidates might to stay "on message" and stick to their don't-let-them-seem-rehearsed sound bites. Though I have no intention of voting Republican, it was still refreshing to hear someone, finally, talking about the implications of the massive devaluation of the dollar that's occurred under Bush 43's watch. My only regret was that ABC News excluded Dennis Kucinich from the Democratic half of the debate. No doubt his presence there would have broadened the scope of the conversation and made it much more interesting.

Second, I was flabbergasted, as was the studio audience at New Hampshire's St. Anselm College, by a comment made by the debate moderator, ABC News' Charlie Gibson. He premised a question to the Democratic candidates about tax cuts by saying, "If you take a family of two professors here at Saint Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on." Huh? Did I miss something here? Since when did it become routine for professors to make $100,000 per year or more? Apropos, there's a story in today's Inside Higher Education that talks about the public's misperception of the nature of, and compensation for, academic labor by full-time faculty. No wonder folks still can't manage to shake the myth of the ivory tower. Heck--most of what's in my office is made of plastic.

Uh, did I miss something?

From today's Inside Higher Education comes a story about a recent symposium, convened at George Washington University, to explore copyright issues on university campuses. The sponsoring agency? A new group benignly calling itself "Copyright Alliance." Its mission, according to the piece, is to "promote strong copyright protection for artists."

Did somebody say, "thinly veiled PR front?"

What struck me most about the story was this particular passage, which refers to "a lack of critical engagement with copyright issues at the university level and the result that students often don’t understand the logic behind prohibitions on illegal file sharing."

Huh?

For my part, I can only imagine teaching about intellectual property critically, and trying to cultivate a critical sensibility in my students with respect to I.P. issues past, present, and future. Indeed most of the folks I know who teach about I.P. do exactly the same thing, trying their best to balance a healthy respect for the law with a recognition that, at least in some cases, I.P. law may well have been extended too far beyond the parameters set forth in the United States Constitution.

The question I'm left with is this: since when does "critical engagement" really mean "acquiescence?"


P.S. You can check out Siva Vaidhyanathan's (somewhat off-the-cuff) thoughts on the so-called Copyright Alliance by clicking here.

U of MN strike update

I have disappointing news to share, courtesy of Gil Rodman's Revolution on a Stick. Gil writes: "Less pretty--and something closer to a total loss (at least to this point)--is the AFSCME strike at the U, which officially ended last Friday...but only because the striking workers couldn’t afford to stay away from steady (if still inadequate) paychecks as long as the administration could afford to hold out. There’s much more to say here, but I’m still feeling far too angry about it all to get it down cleanly."

Sigh. You can read Gil's full post here, as well as his follow-up. The AFSCME strike website has even more detailed information about the strike and the reasons why the U of MN clerical, technical, and health care workers decided they couldn't hold out any longer.

Open access update

A couple of weeks ago I posted a piece called "The Publishing Industry Strikes Back," in which I advocated for more open-access publishing in the humanities. There I also talked about a PR front called Prism, whose goal is to undermine open-access journal publishing in medicine and the sciences. Well, as it turns out, this week's Chronicle of Higher Education included a couple of really interesting reports, both from the front-lines of open-access journal publishing. I figured D&R readers might appreciate an update.

The first of these stories spotlights James D. Jordan, President and Director of Columbia University Press. Last month, he courageously resigned from the Executive Council of the Association of American Publisher's Professional and Scholarly Publishing division. He did so, notably, because he opposed Prism and its efforts to restrict open-access to publicly funded scientific and medical research. If you're a Chronicle subscriber (unfortunately, the publication's not open-access), you can read the whole story here.

The second story ups the ante even more. Other university press officials and the Association for Research Libraries are speaking out publicly about how Prism misrepresents its constituency and makes erroneous claims about the nature of open-access journals. The story also recounts how some open-access supporters are beginning to resign from the editorial boards of journals whose publishers support Prism. Here's an excerpt:

Reactions to Prism have been widespread and vigorous, with some commentators calling for a boycott of the association. The news provoked one university-press director, Mike Rossner of Rockefeller University Press, to make a public request that a disclaimer be placed on the Prism Web site "indicating that the views presented on the site do not necessarily represent those of all members of the AAP." Mr. Rossner continued, "We at the Rockefeller University Press strongly disagree with the spin that has been placed on the issue of open access by Prism."

The Association of Research Libraries sent its members a talking-points memo, dated September 4, that deals with some of the arguments made on the Prism site. The librarians' group wrote that Prism "repeatedly conflates policies regarding access to federally funded research with hypothesized dire consequences ultimately resulting in the loss of any effective system of scholarly publishing. Many commentators agree that inaccuracies abound in the initiative's rhetoric."

One of those commentators, Tom Wilson, took his own advice that "academics should resign from editorial boards of journals published by the supporters of Prism": He posted an open letter on the Information Research Weblog announcing his resignation from the editorial board of the International Journal of Information Management. Mr. Wilson, a professor emeritus of information technology at the University of Sheffield, in England, was founding editor of that journal. He is also publisher and editor in chief of Information Research, an online, open-access scholarly journal.

There's much more to the story, of course. In any case, I hope you can see just how much momentum the effort to resist Prism seems to be gaining. What's especially encouraging, as I think I mentioned last time, is the fact that individuals and groups from across a whole range of fields and professions are joining together to support the cause.

The decisive battle has yet to be won on Capitol Hill, of course, and so the fight's long from over. But it's precisely this mobilization of pointed counter-arguments, coupled with a refusal to support publishers who actively oppose open-access, that must persist in the short term.


P.S. I have to give a shout-out once again to my friend Julie Bobay, the Director for Scholarly Communication Initiatives at the IU Libraries, for passing links to these stories on to me.

The publishing industry strikes back

I mentioned briefly in a post last month that I've been working on a piece on cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing. It's evolving, and I have other projects in line ahead of it, so I haven't yet had time to give it the polish it deserves.

In the interregnum, I've been doing my best to stay on top of trends in this no-longer-so-small corner of the academic publishing universe. (It's a multi-billion dollar industry, in case you didn't know.) And I've been fortunate in this regard that Julie Bobay, a colleague of mine at IU and Director for Scholarly Communication Initiatives, has put me on her mailing list. A week or so ago she sent me a copy of this Washington Post article, which reports on an organization called Prism. Its job? To fight open-access journal publishing, beginning in medicine and the sciences.

For those who don't know, open access refers to a range of publishing initiatives, all of which are designed to make knowledge cheaper and more readily available to researchers and the public at large. In some cases publications may be made freely available on a website; in others, they may be placed into sophisticated digital repositories, where they're not only made accessible, but they're also massively cross-referenced with other published research. In most cases, open access tends to respect authors' and users' rights better than the scholarly publishing industry. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The case for open access is especially--though by no means uniquely--acute where the research in question has been funded by public money. Consider this: a state university (for example) may subsidize a given professor's research. She or he is then expected to sign away key rights (e.g., copyright, translations rights, electronic publishing rights, terms of access, etc.) to whatever press has agreed to publish journal articles related to this work. The university then will essentially have to buy back that research, typically in the form of a high-priced journal subscription. Now, this isn't to suggest that traditional academic journal publishers don't add significant value to the work they produce. They do. But it is an odd situation, don't you think, when universities and other institutions are expected to pay for their employees' research on both the front and the back ends?

Prism apparently is a none-too-thinly-veiled public relations front for the Association of American Publishers (AAP), whose aim is to convince scholars, administrators, and especially government officials that cheap and accessible knowledge is a very bad thing. You'll see from Prism's website (if you care to go there) that it's "on message" and fairly, if predictably, astute from a rhetorical perspective. I say "predictably," because one of its main tropes against open access is the tired old saw, "big government." One of the organization's main aims is to convince you, or whoever cares to listen, that open access portends government control, and worse yet censorship, of published research; it also claims that the established publishing industry, and only the established publishing industry, can safeguard the rigorous peer review standards that help give published research its legitimacy.

I won't refute Prism's arguments here. That work is already well underway elsewhere. For now, I merely want to point out one significant danger that Prism poses: it has the ear of the US government. The AAP is headed by Pat Schroeder, a former US Congresswoman, who no doubt was hired because of her contacts in Washington. The Prism website also has lots of nifty wizards that make it easy for you, dear reader, to generate emails and letters to send to your Congressional representatives, proclaiming the evils of open access publishing.

I take comfort in the fact that librarians, scientists, doctors, mathematicians, and others outside of the humanities are rather well-organized in opposing Prism and what the organization stands for. It's my sincere hope that more scholars in the humanities will become aware of the issues, realize they affect us as well, and sign on to this important cause.

Good advice

Because I'm knee deep in the trenches of academic book publishing right now, I couldn't be happier to have run across two OUTSTANDING blog posts about what it takes to get one's first book published. Claire B. Potter over at Tenured Radical details a host of things to think about as one transitions from dissertation to book--and let me tell you, it's a big transition. The other post, appended below, is from Siva Vaidhyanathan over at Sivacracy. Note in particular Siva's point about "writing short." What many people don't seem to tell first time authors is that long doesn't necessarily mean brilliant, and that because you're ostensibly producing a commodity, form to some degree determines content. Read, enjoy, and do share your own advice or experiences in the comments.
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• Do not be shy about asking senior colleagues you admire and trust to introduce you and your idea to her editors (or editors she knows and who want someday to publish her). Editors trust the judgement of respected people in the field. They know their blurbs help sales. And editors like to do favors for authors they would like to publish.

• Understand that academic presses are businesses, but not very efficient ones. Even if you convince an editor that your work is brilliant and important, the editor must convince her marketing people and board of directors that the book has a clear and definable market.

• Therefore, never claim in your proposal or cover letter that your market/audience is a "general readership." There is no such thing. Delineate your field, the courses in which your book might appear (very important), and professional or interest groups beyond the academy that might take a liking to your work. Be realistic.

• If you are writing regionally, publish regionally -- i.e. if you have written about Western Native American history, the first places you should go are the University of Oklahoma Press and the University of Nebraska Press.

• Expect rejection. Everyone knows there are too many books chasing too few buyers and the price of production only justifies books that can sell more than 5,000 copies. Of course, too much rejection can mean career death for an academic. But them's the breaks.

• Meet editors at conferences. They love to hear quick, clean, effective pitches from authors who are excited about their projects. When the editors are sitting at tables full of books, you can get a sense of whether your project would fit the trajectory of the list.

• Start early, but be patient. If you have just started a tenure track job, do not expect to have a real book in your hands by third-year review. But do plan to have a contract and many pages ready to show your department by third-year-review. Many academic books can take four years from contract to book.

• No dissertation is ready to be a book. If you are rewriting your diss for publication, wipe your committee from your mind. Write for your colleagues and students instead.

• Course assignments matter. That's how academic presses justify many of their titles. Tailor the writing and length to course-usable standards.

• Write short. Most academic publishers want their books (especiallly first books) to be shorter than 250 pages when published. More than 250 pages, the price of the book goes up.

• Talk to librarians early and often. They know which books are likely to get picked up by their peers. They know which presses do good work.

• Do not expect reviews beyond the scholarly journals. Do not expect scholarly journal review within a year of publication.

• Double dip. Get as much of your work out in journal form as possible. That way, if something goes wrong on the way to book publication, you can demonstrate that your work has passed muster.

• Read your publishing contract carefully. Cross out the "options clause" pledging your next book to the press. Be a free agent.

Oh, one more:

• A first -book author should not aim for the academic press pantheon (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, U of Chicago, California, Yale, etc.). These presses carry huge lists every season and do not treat books by first authors with care or interest. Instead, aim for the smaller university pressses that treat their authors with care and dignity and are deeply appreciative or honored to have those books (Rutgers, NYU, Minnesota, Columbia, Stanford, Oklahoma, Georgia, North Carolina, Penn State, UMass, etc.). A good editor is far more important to a young scholar than the brand name of the publisher. A quality book from a smaller press can have a much bigger effect on the field than a sloppy book remaindered by a big press. If your first book is a success, then consider Oxford.

Iowa-a-go-go

What a trip--and I mean that in two ways.

First, you've probably noticed that I haven't written in close to a month. Though I'm not the most frequent blogger by any means, I do try, when possible, to let no more than about two weeks elapse between posts. The last month has been--it would be an understatement to say--incredibly busy, so I've had to forego writing new material for D&R. I appreciate your patience as the semester winds way, way up for me before it starts to wind down.

But my "what a trip" comment also refers to something much more enjoyable--my recent visit to the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. There I had the good fortune of presenting my paper, "Harry Potter and the Culture of the Copy (Warning: Not Endorsed by J. K. Rowling!)," which looks at the Potter phenomenon, authorized and unauthorized works "derived" from the series, and clashes over intellectual property resulting from the boy wizard's global popularity. (The piece I presented is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Late Age of Print.).

What made the trip to Iowa memorable, though, beyond the hospitality and engaging dialogue I had there with faculty and grad students, was my getting to see some of the creative media/cultural activism going on. And in that vein I got to screen a rough cut of Kembrew McLeod's forthcoming documentary, Freedom of Expression®, which is based on his outstanding book by the same name. Mark Andrejevic, meanwhile, sent me link to a great audiovisual mash-up he's put together on the perils of watching too much Fox News. And last but not least, Kembrew alerted me to a recent intervention by a graduate student with whom he's working, Peter Schaefer, who's concerned by how all the championing of the Apple iPod has tended to eclipse the company's sometimes problematic relationship to workers' rights. Check out Peter's iPod and what he's had to say about it:

I attached a photo of my iPod with the inscription of "Apple exploits workers in Longhua, China." It's pretty amazing that Apple was willing to accept a message that is critical of their own suspect iPod labor practices. Working conditions at several sites in China were exposed by the London-based newspaper the Daily Mail last year. Yet Apple rejects inscriptions that condemn the Recording Industry Association of America, refusing messages such as "Rip, Mix, & Burn Down RIAA Headquarters" and "Screwing The RIAA One Download At A Time."

Or, as Kembrew put it to me: "Once again, we are reminded that, for the culture industry, copyrights are more important than human rights."

Like I said, what a privilege to have been privy to such smart and punchy work and to have shared the company of an engaging group of people.

McClassroom

...courtesy of Kembrew McLeod and The Chronicle of Higher Education, a sobering "report" on the state of a liberal arts education in an increasingly corporatized university. Enjoy...?

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Chronicle Careers
Monday, January 15, 2007
An Educational Prank

By Kembrew McLeod

In a groundbreaking marketing move, six corporations sponsored my undergraduate course during the fall of 2006. To be more accurate, I should say, with a wink and a nod, that they "sponsored" the course.

There was no contractual exchange of money or services in this faux patronage experiment and, to be honest, some of the businesses didn't want to be involved in my scheme. (One company representative, sensing the political motivations behind my endeavor, told me via an e-mail message: "You will not use the Disney logos or any connection to the Disney Co. in your class.")

I began referring to my syllabus as a McSyllabus, and for the duration of the semester my corporately sponsored name was Professor McKembrew McLeod.

I even planned to plaster a tweed sports coat with the logos of my pseudo-sponsors -- McDonald's, MTV, AT&T, Disney, Pfizer, and Sony Music. Kind of like a NASCAR outfit, but with elbow patches. Alas, I never went through with that part of my plan, as there were too many papers to grade and not enough time.

My experiment was a provocation, a quiet protest that escalated near the end of the semester after a contentious move made by the University of Iowa's Board of Regents. That body had increasingly adopted a top-down management style and embraced a corporate model for the university, and demonstrated that last November by scuttling a 10-month presidential search because it didn't like the finalists.

The board's actions inspired me to push my prank even further, and so I personally contacted each regent, telling them about my plan. It came as no surprise when one regent -- unaware of my satirical motives -- happily endorsed the idea of a corporately sponsored classroom. But more on that later.

I should point out that I write this column from a protected position. As a newly tenured professor, I have strong free-speech rights in the workplace -- a right that is weakening across the country as colleges reduce the number of tenure-track professorships. Cutting the workforce and extracting more labor for less compensation may increase the bottom line of corporations, but it's no way to run a university, for a number of reasons.

Close attention from faculty members was a privilege I enjoyed while attending a midsized state university in Virginia during the early 1990s. That one-on-one interaction broadened my intellectual horizons, and it transformed my life.

But few students I have met at Iowa have had the same experience. My own department, for example, is bursting with more than 1,300 majors, but we have only 12 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members. Of course, some of our students do receive the special attention they deserve, but it comes from the goodwill of a faculty whose workweek easily exceeds 40 hours (not to mention our hardworking graduate students, visiting instructors, and office staff members).

The arts and humanities have obviously been hit hard, but even "big money" units have been affected. For instance, the blossoming university-industrial complex has experienced serious consequences in certain areas of basic scientific research, where the sharing of information is becoming less and less free. As universities and their corporate partners place a greater emphasis on developing valuable patented technologies, the norm of openness among scientists has eroded.

That has been widely documented, including in a survey of nearly 2,000 university-based geneticists the results of which were reported in the January 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. According to the survey, a third of the scientists agreed that it was becoming more common in their field to withhold data for financial reasons.

About three years ago I interviewed David J. Skorton, then the president of Iowa, about some of those issues. During our talk Skorton told me that he understood and took seriously the expectation that we should do "the best we can to commercialize technologies developed in the universities for the state's good."

"But," the president quickly added, "my own point of view has been, and will remain, that I am more concerned with freedom of expression than with the commercial imperative."

I'm sure his philosophy did not sit well with the university's regents, with whom the president had skirmished over other issues. When he left last year to become president of Cornell University, few people on our campus saw his departure as a coincidence.

Iowa's presidential searches have always been campus-led affairs, but after Skorton announced his resignation, for the first time in the university's history, the board appointed a regent as head of the search panel and exercised unprecedented control over the committee's operations. The regents also appointed the former dean of the business college as Iowa's interim president, who is quoted in a Q&A on the university's Web site as saying that "in educational programs and in research and clinical programs, we should seek partnerships, relationships where we're not bearing all of the costs and we're sharing the rewards."

All of which got me thinking, "What would a liberal-arts education look like if McDonald's underwrote it?"

My project gained a new sense of urgency when the regents terminated the search for Skorton's replacement. In a cryptic press release, the regents explained that the board "needed candidates who had more experience as leaders who oversaw complex health-sciences operations as well as the myriad of other academic and nonacademic operations of a large university." The Des Moines Register reported that the final applicant pool did not include an earlier candidate who had been favored by the board president, a candidate with significant ties to the insurance industry.

This disturbing sequence of events prompted me to send the aforementioned e-mail message to each member of Iowa's board explaining my prank in a straight-faced manner:

"In a class exercise I thought you'd appreciate, we are imagining what it would be like if several corporations sponsored this class. In one assignment, the students will be making an advertisement for one of these 'clients,'" I wrote, adding, "Because it is so important to organize the university more like a business, I thought you would appreciate and agree with the philosophy that underpins this project."

I concluded by mock complaining, "I believe that too many professors at the university are out of touch with real-world business practices."

Because I contacted the regents in the middle of the presidential-search firestorm -- and given my prankish history, which is just one Google click away -- I worried about two things. Either the regents would (a) see through my sardonic rhetoric and try to have me fired for being a smart aleck, or (b) affirm the e-mail's core sentiments.

One way or the other, it was a lose-lose proposition.

A few days later, I received an e-mail message from one regent, who cheerfully wrote: "Conceptually, it sounds great. Happy Thanksgiving." Although this was not a smoking-gun admission -- "yes, product placement in the classroom is part of our nefarious plan for the future!" -- my suspicions were nevertheless confirmed.

The troubles faced by the University of Iowa (and our nation's universities, more generally) run deeper than a mere bureaucratic squabble. This episode highlights the systemic problems that emerge when we try to turn the university into "an economic engine for the state," a term our administrators are fond of using.

Perhaps I should start stitching together that logo-slathered tweed jacket after all.

Kembrew McLeod is an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa. His latest book, Freedom of Expression: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property, will be published this spring by the University of Minnesota Press.