An op-ed in the New York Times by the chair of religion at Columbia brings together familiar arguments about how American universities should change to avoid obsolescence.
Like Francis Fukuyama, Mark C. Taylor wants to abolish tenure because it has created “institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change.”
Although university tenure as an institution still seems to UD pretty secure, she reminds you of the recent upheaval at Mr UD’s University of Maryland over how stringent post-tenure review should be.
UD‘s most intrigued by Taylor’s comment about scholarly publication:
In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.
It’s certainly true that tenure has wedged into place senior professors who may value nothing but older models of print publication. These professors review junior professors who look more and more like Taylor’s mixed modern model.
The Modern Language Association came out a number of years ago against the tyranny of the book manuscript and for the new formats Taylor mentions, but he’s correct that virtually nothing has changed.
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Update: It’s useful, in this connection, to look at the latest recipient of the Clark Medal in economics, second in importance to the Nobel. Professor of Economics at Berkeley, Emmanuel Saez has never published a book, and he has never occupied a narrow subject band. He publishes articles, mainly online. His work sometimes appears as book chapters.
In an earlier post on this subject, UD quoted Lindsay Waters: “To make a group of scholars turn on a dime, we need a publication not as thick as a brick, but as thin as a dime.” UD continued:
Economists, scientists, and political scientists have long known this, and their tenure standards focus upon essays as much as, if not more than, books. Waters describes an economist asking him “why the people in many of the disciplines in which I publish want to waste so much of the time of young people in the prime of their lives with such a lot of make-work. In economics, he said, they want to keep the kids working hard to generate new ideas that the rest of the profession can feed off of, because youth is the leading edge.” The economist, Waters concludes, is right: “Why should we encourage young humanists to do a lot of Mickey Mouse work, to go through the motions, when what they should be trying to write are moving essays… .?”
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(Paul Krugman titles his blog entry on the prize SAEZ DOES MATTER.)
(“Mr. Saez, an easygoing Frenchman who loves surfing, has resisted overtures from the powerhouse economics departments at MIT and Harvard University.” The model here, of course, is Colin McGinn.)
April 27th, 2009 at 6:07AM
A comment partly to the side:
A significant issue with students expounding their research, theses, dissertations, etc. as videos, youTube mashups, etc. is that more often than not students and professors alike are unqualified to articulate thoughts at a high level in those forms. Smart people don’t always know when they’ve made dumb things.
"I want to make a video instead of a paper", to me, sounds as heart-warmingly eager and unintentionally flippant as "I’m going to write my paper in Urdu." "Can you speak Urdu?" "Can your professor read Urdu?"
If we are to embrace our non-verbal future, does that mean we’ll also restore arts funding in our schools? Right after kids finish their first grade segment on schwas, after recess, directly into an analysis of pans and zooms…
Or, more on topic, maybe the Art. Dept. already has a system for evaluating non-scholarliness in tenure that it can lend to the rest of the university.
April 27th, 2009 at 6:23AM
I take your point, meteechart, and I’d go farther and suggest that some of these forms may not be all that conducive to high-level thought. I certainly don’t want a non-verbal future, and although Taylor talks about “analytic treatments” via things like video games, I’m not at all sure.
As you say, a new type of competence, at the very least, needs to come into play.
My own alternatives to the old model are more along the lines of online essays than video games…
April 27th, 2009 at 7:35AM
So, wait, journal articles in horribly obscure economics journals that no one reads or subscribes to except university libraries at horribly inflated rates are held up as the "new" model?
April 27th, 2009 at 7:49AM
No. Journal articles available online are the new model.
And online summaries of your work that you make available to the public are the new model.
http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~saez/saez-UStopincomes-2006prel.pdf
April 27th, 2009 at 8:04AM
The economics of the monograph are interesting. Footnotes are much cheaper than they used to be because of computer typesetting (also illustrations and Greek letters), but press runs seem to be down (or at least aren’t growing). The cost of maintaining a stock of backlist books is up.
That said, the real issue in the academic world, especially as regards tenure and promotion, is peer review. That has to be separated from publication as such.
April 27th, 2009 at 8:15AM
Publish on demand websites as well as the availability of the hardware for this in university bookstores is just around the corner.
This will lead, hopefully, to cheaper textbooks and easy thesis preparation.
As a scientist, I hope that the medieval practice of writing a thesis – with footnotes – will continue. This is an extremely useful exercise, especially for the science and engineering types.
Bill
April 27th, 2009 at 8:29AM
But scientists – most of them – keep it short and substantive, Bill. Humanists go blah blah blah.
April 27th, 2009 at 9:19AM
I’ve been looking around and I can’t find an account of how the dissertation came to its modern form. I came across this article because I googled "medieval dissertation." I found the article interesting, but I still don’t really understand what a medieval dissertation is. Could you point me in the right direction?
April 27th, 2009 at 9:50AM
UD – well sort of…
My wife is an art historian and we have discussed the difference between theses in the arts and humanities and the ones typically done in the sciences.
In the arts the thesis IS the work. In the sciences and engineering, usually, the thesis describes work that has been done. Of course it is a little more complicated than this binary comment implies. But in a lot of ways it is much easier to write a scientific thesis than one in the arts and humanities. Good blah, blah, blah is hard.
April 27th, 2009 at 10:14AM
greg: Here’s a place to start. See the “history” section:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_degree
April 27th, 2009 at 10:52AM
UD, there was no "medieval print model of publication." They didn’t print anything in the medieval university, since they didn’t have presses. The footnoted dissertation came into being, building on medieval forms of examination, in the Renaissance. William Clark has told part of the story in a big and really interesting book, and a terrific historian named Kevin Change will soon tell the rest.
On the serious point about articles, though, you’re right on the money: and I sure share your and Meteechart’s reservations about those cool video assignments.
Mostly Taylor seemed to be generalizing from his own experience. He teaches in a field that notoriously doesn’t have a unified disciplinary base in the way that history, say, does: so no one needs to be trained in those old-fashioned disciplines. And he teaches at a place where no senior professor will be dismissed for taking a political stance or standing up to administrators like the ones at SIU whom you have flayed so well–so every one else must be teaching at a place like that too, whatever the ACLU says about those schools it investigates and censors.
It’s striking that the TIMES is willing to publish a piece on this level about us and our world. Sure shows what they think of us, except when they’re trying to get their kids in.
April 27th, 2009 at 11:54AM
Thanks for the correction, tony. I’ve altered the post.
As for Taylor’s idea that we should now be organized in terms of Water and Body rather in terms of established disciplines – I found this so unpersuasive that I didn’t even write about it in the post. But you make an interesting point – that coming from a field lacking much of a unitary disciplinary base from the start, Taylor might well find this new approach attractive — rather than amorphous.
April 27th, 2009 at 1:48PM
"Journal articles available online are the new model"
Ah, journal articles available on obscure websites are the new model. Excellent. Welcome to the 20th century.
I’m not rising up to defend the scholarly monograph as the be-all and end-all of research, but replacing it with a mid-1990s model doesn’t seem particularly useful either.
April 27th, 2009 at 2:00PM
I’m not persuaded that the journal articles will be on obscure websites. In Economics, there are several Berkeley electronic journals (all those bepress references in economics dossiers these days) that maintain the same level of conscientious review of American Economic Review or Economics Letters but with faster turnarounds. That most working economists now use Scientific Word or something similar to compose the equations makes the publication a lot easier, one simply converts the professor’s keystrokes into page images. There’s less work for typesetters and technical typists, but the work is available to just about everybody a lot faster than it was years ago, when you had to be on the working paper distribution lists of the major departments to keep current, or wait two years for the print version to hit your mailbox.
April 27th, 2009 at 2:31PM
It is dangerous, I know, to generalize from personal experience, but I am quite happy with the current model of subscription journals (with print and online versions) and monograph publication. Lag times are annoying, but hardly unbearable, and it is – as it should be – difficult to get a book contract. So what? Good stuff gets published, and so does a lot of over-theorized and under-written junk. It was always thus. I can’t see how moving to a different model will increase the former. The latter would presumably flourish as never before. Or is that the point? If everything gets published, there is no way to tell good from bad, and thus nobody is a failure as a scholar. The real danger is the economic demise of the University Press, in its capacity as both monograph and journal publisher. As for the rest of it, I would rather cook and serve my own kidney than participate in a Department called ‘Water’.
April 27th, 2009 at 3:13PM
Colin: On the last thing – LOL.
April 27th, 2009 at 8:55PM
As someone who studied at Williams in the late 80s, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I agree with some of Taylor’s recommendations, and I heartily concur with his judgment that parts of graduate education have become little better than a scam. My support for the editorial is, however, lessened by the fact that it was written by … Mark Taylor, who when I was at Williams was an uber-deconstructionist who cultivated a small cult of personality around himself; whatever he was doing back then, it wasn’t telling students to "do not do what I do" or urging them to wander off and follow their own drummer. It’s pretty offputting that he now sells himself as foe of academic specialization and enemy of pedantry.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:57AM
Most of the (newer) articles in "better" journals are available online: the best example is jstor: (http://www.jstor.org You might want to try to log in from your university’s net, there is a good chance your university is already subscribing. Moreover, most of the major publishers like North Holland (Elsevier), Springer,.. have websites where you can (for a hefty fee) download papers.
Every major science has its own tribal treasure-trove of preprints and tools to find papers (SSRN for social scientist – economists, http://arxiv.org/ for Math/Physics), so availability seems to be not the issue.
The biggest problem, however, seems to me quality control. Currently (at least in my field) peer review takes too long. Papers in "Econometrica" often take more than two years between submission and publication. So I think that there definitely is a need for a new system. There are some proposals, like e.g. publishing any manuscript on the "journals" website and let the readers rate the paper. I am, however, optimistic that a solution will be found. It would be a shame if we as scientists can not make use of the peculiar advantage of cyberspace, namely its practically limitless nature.
Scientific work using the cyberspace will be much easier to digest: References will be given as links, so one will be able to check quotes with a click of a mouse, animations will add an additional dimension to graphics (literally – we will be able to illustrate dynamical effects!)
Personally, I like books (and I even do not have a kindle): But I am aware that my fascination for printed material is like a child’s fascination with dinosaurs…
April 28th, 2009 at 5:51AM
Lots of useful stuff in there, econprof. Thank you.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:21AM
It’s important not to confuse formal characteristics (short, long, with/without footnotes/cross-references) with the medium of delivery (print, internet, manuscript codex, etc.). Who’s to say that electronic scholarship is necessarily more snappy? One could argue (as Robert Darnton has) that electronic books offer the possibility to include *more* extra data, documentation, etc., since marketing and printing costs are less relevant. (Darnton sees it as a boon for historians.) And why not view the constraints of print as salutary: a 1000-page dissertation probably needs to be trimmed an edited to become a print, but it could just be dumped on the internet. As for EconProf’s point that electronic formats are "easier to digest," a lot of tasks are arguably easier in print: reading long passages (ever read a novel on-line?: ugh!), skimming, jumping to a specific page or chapter (usually), reading in the tub, reading in glaring light, annotation, etc…
We should certainly use technology to advance scholarship, but it shouldn’t define our goals and we shouldn’t exaggerate it’s virtues. It’s like Powerpoint: go ahead and teach with it if it’s the best tool for your specific needs, but it shouldn’t be a crutch when you’re too lazy to put together a good lecture.
April 29th, 2009 at 8:56AM
All good points, FrogProf.