Fri 8 Dec 2006
This “Internets” thing the kids are so crazy about
Posted by Misha under Life online
I remember, back in the mid-90s, showing a grad school friend how to use Netscape. When she clicked on a link and the screen changed, she nearly jumped out of her seat in shock.
Nice to know not that much has changed in academia higher education in the humanities. (Change as per that extremely academic virus-lover Ian.)
Via Crooked Timber, I found this choice quote from a Michael Bérubé essay in Inside Higher Education. Bérubé was on the MLA committee that just recommended major changes in the tenure process, and his essay addresses some of the forces that led them to suggest large changes.
About the digital age, most doctoral departments are largely clueless: 40.8 percent report no experience evaluating journal articles in electronic format, and almost two-thirds (65.7 percent) report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format. This despite the fact that the journal Postmodern Culture, which exists only in electronic form, has just celebrated its 15th birthday. Online journals have been around for some time now, and online scholarship is of the same quality as print media, but referees’ and tenure committees’ expectations for the medium have lagged far behind the developments in the digital scholarly world. As Sean Latham, one of the members of the Task Force, said at the 2005 MLA convention in Washington, “If we read something through Project Muse, are we supposed to feel better because somewhere there is a print copy?” For too many scholars, the answer is yes…
Criticism, at its best, ought to be an engagement with the critic’s own culture as well as with the work being discussed. For digital scholarship to be ignored by tenure committees, and therefore actively discouraged to the junior faculty hoping to impress them, is to cut off a major developing form of engaging with modern culture from the ongoing discussion among literature departments. It’s those departments, not the intarweb, that will lose out on this one.
(In other fun news, Bérubé notes that when you do the math, 34 of every 100 Ph.D.s in the MLA’s member fields gets tenure. Do you feel lucky, punk?)
December 8th, 2006 at 4:58 pm
What’s “academia”? In my field, paper is almost ignored as far as journal are concerned. No one goes to the library — all the journals are online, and that’s what everyone, be they never so emeritus, uses. Peer reviews have all (as far as I know) gone paperless — you get a PDF copy, sometimes you have online forms to fill out and step through for the recommendations, sometimes you work through email. Submissions for all the major journals are electronic, many won’t even take paper submissions any more.
Am I not academe? If you cut me, do I not write a manuscript, with footnotes, references, and snide sideways allusions to my competitors, about it?
As for the 34 tenures per 100 Ph.D.s — that sounds extraordinarily high to me. I’d have expected something like 34 tenures per tenure-track faculty (which is, I think, approximately what we see in my field), and a lot of attrition between PhD and tenure-track.
December 8th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
There’s a lot of PDF-ing in the humanities , but there’s still a touching belief in the value of the printed word, no doubt tied to the link, which the MLA panel is trying to break, between published books and tenurability.