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Friday, December 08, 2006

A Report to Make
Ivan Tribble Dribble

The MLA Task Force, reports Inside Higher Ed, insists on “the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media,” and the need to "end the assumption that print is necessarily better. (And to the extent that some professors and departments don’t know how to evaluate quality in new media, 'the onus is on the department' to learn, not on the scholar using new media.)"

Other findings: "For books that get published, readers may be few. Press runs that used to range from 600-1,000 are now more likely to be 250." That's an appallingly low number; it really makes you wonder why The Book continues to carry such weight in department decisions. It's become an empty symbol.

You know UD hates Dr. Phil, but even he knows that you have to get real eventually.

The IHE account ends with some very sensible words from Clark Hulse, a dean, who


said he saw the MLA pushing departments to accept their responsibility for evaluating scholarship, instead of assuming that anything published by a university press is good and any scholarship that couldn’t find a traditional publisher must be bad.

“We need to have the courage to deny tenure based on a bad published book and to award tenure based on a great manuscript,” he said.

As to considering different forms of scholarship — in dissertations and for tenure — Hulse said that he thought most deans would “be eager to embrace these changes.”

Today, he said, “all dissertations are produced electronically,” and most start off as a series of linked articles, so the idea that they must follow a traditional book format doesn’t make particular sense. Whether a dissertation ends up in print or ends up being a series of articles is “almost a trivial question,” he said.

What needs to be preserved isn’t the monograph or dissertation [or] any one form of scholarship, he said. “What I think is sacred is the creation of a substantial and coherent and significant body of work.”
Posted at: 12/08/2006 08:49:00 AM