On Public Intellectualism, and Vertical and Horizontal Divides

When somebody walks into a perfectly nice room full of people and takes a shit on the floor, everybody reacts. Somebody checks on the defecator to see why this happened, somebody opens the windows to let the air in, somebody else gets a mop and a bucket, some extraordinarily well-composed characters carry on, pretending that it didn’t happen. But a lot of things are revealed in that moment.

This week’s room-shitter is Nicholas Kristof, who wrote a column whinging about how academics are keeping their valuable knowledge locked up, or only developing useless knowledge, or… well, it’s not exactly clear what he’s arguing, since those two arguments are in fact diametrically opposed. The column was, as mentioned, a turd. But it got lots of responses, spurred the whole room to action, in fact. (I here abandon the metaphor, you’ll be happy to know.) There were a great number of academic responses pretty much tearing Kristof’s premises to shreds, but Matt Houlbrook  and Corey Robin homed right in on the position of the academic in the contemporary economy: 

• Quoth Corey: The problem here isn’t that typically American conceit of “culture” v. nonconformist rebel. It’s the very material pressures and constraints young academics face, long before tenure. It’s the job market.  It’s the rise of adjuncts. It’s neoliberalism. Jacoby understood the material sources of the problem he diagnosed. Kristof doesn’t.

• And Matt: If only it was that easy. Here is the problem that Schama misses: engaging with an audience beyond the academy often (but by no means always) means participating in a market in knowledge-as-entertainment. And like all neoliberal capitalist markets this one is profoundly unequal. We do not have the same resources to draw upon when we participate it; not do we have equal access to the mediating institutions and networks that control access to that market.

As an academic publisher (as Matt’s publisher, no less!) I get just a wee bit defensive about hints of exploiting the labor of academics. A couple of points, therefore, seemed in order with respect to the structures in which academic work gets put out to the world—and what I see as the issues separating knowledge-makers from society. And, to be fair to Kristof, this separation is a better summary of the problem that he's trying to articulate, but to be fair to his critics, one common thread among those respondents is that it bridging that divide is something that many academics are trying to do. But publishers, whose very mission is the dissemination of knowledge, have been (from what I’ve seen, and I think I’m pretty plugged-in) absent from the discussion. 

One of Robin’s arguments is that Kristof is a symptom: someone who is as well-informed as he is should in fact be more familiar with the many publicly engaged academics out there. But this is a symptom of a serious problem, what I refer to as the "middle of the market falling out.”* There are a very few well-known (and well-compensated) public intellectuals, and a great many blogging along wonderfully but not making any money or fame or reward beyond the approval of their audience. This is not just a problem for that latter category of writers, but for the quality of our public argument as well. 

It is totally fair to say that publishers need to to a better job. Academic institutions (departments and societies) see academic publishers as part of the peer-review and promotion process,** not as outward-facing institutions who bring knowledge to the public. The movement toward Open-Access requirements on the part of funders assumes  that the important work of academic publishers is peer review; once something is vetted and ready to go, it should be given away free. A noble aspiration, indeed, and publishers wonder “how are we to survive in this environment? Where will we get funded? How do we justify what we do, so that people will continue to pay us to do it?” And so we talk about what we do—you can just go through the departments of a press: acquisitions, manuscript editing, design, production, marketing, sales, royalties payment—but we don’t talk about the importance of the market itself. 

Peer review is a judicial model; it is very explicitly posing a yes-or-no question (to publish or not) to a jury of one’s peers. And that provides a valuable type of information, as well as one particular kind of equality. However, it is a dangerous naiveté to suppose that a judicial system provides some form of unalloyed truth, still less of worth (of persons, in the case of the justice system; of ideas, in the case of the university). 

And this is where the market itself comes in. It also provides valuable information***—and (here’s where I part most from Robin and Matt) a valuable kind of equality. The market doesn’t merely fill the role of rewarding better ideas with cash, although publishers' very dependence on sales provides a necessary gut-check on the limits of peer review. 

The equality that the market brings to academia is that consumers of ideas are equal: the $29 that a professor pays for a book means precisely as much to us as the $29 that an interested undergraduate pays, or the $29 of a fringe theorist, or—to bring us full circle—the person watching a TV show about World War I, who shows up at a bookstore (or, more likely, at Amazon) saying, "Hey, I’d like to learn more about life on the Home Front.” 

This delicate balance between judicial and market models is in peril—like the status of public intellectuals, books, too, are developing a bimodal distribution on the price and circulation axes. Too many publishers’ catalogs have affordable trade books up front, and $100+ academic books at the back, with the middle range sparse or nonexistent.**** (I’m proud to say that we are holding out against this trend, and doing our damnedest to keep our books under $40. ... Ok, well, $50.) 

One can only fault publishers so much; the sales data indicate that we only lose a few sales when we raise prices on an academic book, but the problem is who those marginal cases are: they are precisely the interested non-academic reader. The person who is not buying a book because it is required for class, or because it must be cited in the next article to be written. In short, it is in that middle ground that good—and even great—public scholarship occurs. Yes, the marginal cases are few, but they make all the difference. 

I’d like to say, “bwahahaha! Look at those foolish other publishers, ceding this area to us!” but the fact is that we’re all operating in the same arena and the many pressures of competition (hey, I never said markets were perfect, just that they had virtues!) are pushing us all into a bifurcated catalog. We need a robust community of middle-range books and scholars in order to keep a healthy ecosystem of ideas—and one that bears fruit for citizens outside the academy. 

_________________

* I haven’t yet read Tyler Cowen’s Average Is Over but from his summaries of and nods to it, I think there are many institutional parallels to the argument he’s making about employment and skills. 

**As I pointed out in the kerfuffle over the American Historical Association’s statement on Open Access, the most embarrassing part of their statement was that one of the cnetral goals of the historical profession is the acquisition of a publishing contract—an awful confusion over means and ends. 

***I have to tip the hat here to Natalia Cecire, whose slide deck on "Distributed Knowledge and the Digital" is (cheekily) full of Hayek. 

****Worse, though, is seeing a book supposedly intended for a general audience with a price tag of $150. 

How academic ebooks will happen

My kids both have iPads now (and this post is not about how they're growing up "digital natives"—it's much more practical than that). Theirs are a few generations old, hand-me-downs from an aunt and a friend of ours. We have other friends who are already eager to get the latest models and pass on their old ones (and, to be honest, we're looking forward to getting these as hand-me-downs from them: thrice-outdated tablets).

All of which adds up to the increasing ubiquity of 7- and 10-inch screens in our lives. As a family of two adults, one reading child, and one pre-reading child, we now have two 10" tablets, one 7" tablet, and three e-ink readers. (I note here that of those, we've purchased only two of the e-readers—avid consumers will have even more.) And this erodes one of the biggest competitive advantages of paper books over e-books in an academic context: the computing power of a big desk.

When I was in graduate school, it was not uncommon for me to be working with a monograph or two open on my desk, a Greek text of Josephus or Philo, a translation of the same, a Septuagint, a Hebrew Bible, a commentary or two, a lexicon or two—and a computer on which I was taking notes or writing. Obviously, the first of these to go electronic were the lexica (flipping alphabetical pages is a nearly-unmitigated waste of time). Then—mostly when reading secondary literature—the ancient texts. Again, flipping for references, and checking text against text (Josephus's telling of a story, the Septuagint's rendering, and the Hebrew) are sped up by clickable text. But for delving deep into the texts themselves, the 15" screen of a laptop was too crowded.

It's well-known that bigger monitors increase productivity. Academics, however, already had bigger "monitors"—to wit, desktops, with two, or six, or ten books and journals and notepads and scraps of paper on them. You could (I did) physically print out a paper and cut it into sections, and rearrange those sections in order to see if the argument made more sense a different way, or if a section of the thing you were writing was weak on evidence.

The sheer number of screens in our daily lives, increasing by the year, makes ebooks vastly more practical for the way academics work, comparing and weighing sources (whether textual, visual, or artefactual). The next step, by the bye, will be apps to make multiple devices work together seemlessly.

Some thoughts on the AHA's statement on Open Access

This is just a brief note on the AHA Statement on Open Access (with a special hat-tip to Jason M. Kelly’s insightful point-by-point response).

Though I’m writing from a standpoint within academic publishing, I won’t comment on whether we deprecate works published open-access as dissertations (for various reasons I'm sure you can imagine). I want to pull the focus back a bit and point out a few obvious things. (Hey, somebody has to!) The AHA’s statement is quite pragmatic in working within the status quo: publishers have a lot of power, especially over young academics’ careers.

However, publishers have that power because departments (and, perhaps more crucially, university administrations above them) have given it to them: hiring and tenure are not, cannot be done in today’s university, on the basis of a departmental decision. Rather, there needs to be outside evidence, measurable evidence!—checklists and scores and quantifiably lawyer-proof mountains of Why we hired X and not Y. This is a fact of life, and the AHA is wise not to take on the ABA (and that ain’t the booksellers’ association here).

But the AHA could have done more. Let me quote one point from the AHA and Kelly’s counterpoint.

AHA: By endorsing a policy that allows embargos, the AHA seeks to balance two central though at times competing ideals in our profession–on the one hand, the full and timely dissemination of new historical knowledge; and, on the other, the unfettered ability of young historians to revise their dissertations and obtain a publishing contract from a press.

Kelly: It is important to protect the interests of early career historians.  But, this statement seems to understand their interests narrowly.  What kind of academic community should we help craft with them?  I would suggest that we help craft a community of openness and collaboration — one that embraces technologies that are likely to expand our impact and reach wider audiences.  This may mean remaking the conventions of the profession and likely requires that we abandon ad hoc attempts to protect the status quo.  This will likely mean confronting the habitus of our profession and disrupting the institutions that we have been working in for over 100 years.

(my emphasis)

The “ability of young historians to revise their dissertations and obtain a publishing contract from a press” is not by any possible stretch of the imagination an “ideal in our profession”—it’s a means, a practical stepping point to keep future scholars in business. But far more importantly, academic publishing is exactly the business of “full and timely dissemination of new historical knowledge.”

And here’s where the AHA erred. They should have called out both publishers and their own membership for slowing down the timely publication of new scholarship. “Confronting the habitus of our profession and disrupting the institutions” is another way of saying, “We need to raise our game to a new level, and fast, or we're going to be looking for a new game."

Young scholars--don't just "obtain a publishing contract," make that diss into a manuscript. 

Senior scholars--turn around your goddamn manuscript reports.

Publishers--you know how complicated this is and the gazillion things that can derail or slow publication.

Everyone: Do it better. 

Accidental Haiku

The New York Times has gone and created a haiku-generator—no, it's a haiku-discoverer, pulling haiku-meter quotes from NYT articles. It's based ultimately on an open-source Python program, written by Jonathan Feinberg. I grabbed the code and tackled my sent email from the past few months. Here are the (better among the) results:

I may ask for house

    keys later but we'll see how

the day is going.

The other issue

    is one of length -- and this could

be a bit tricky.

Save your work often,

    you know how reliable

your computer is.

I think m4m

    is a little too oblique

for a subtitle.

Hope you celebrate

    with champagne and foie gras, or

some facsimile.

And, as expected,

    the Terman and Kinsey books

are totally cool.

I should start to look

    at those if I'm sending it all

in less than two weeks.

They are not stylists,

    but their writing is clearly

comprehensible.

Do you want to hang

    out with daddy more because

he is not as brown? 

Then they went and moved

    the whole thing to Las Vegas,

ruining our plan.

Just took a skim-look.

    I think this is a good plan.

But not a good goal.

This is, however,

    putting some parts of the cart

before the horses.

She has published two

    dozen journal articles

in addition. Bored?

Yup, that's it! The back-door

    one has been clicking away

since February.

Or is discretion

    dictating another day

in prone position?

Is there anything

    additional coming, or should

I just remove that?

Ponder what you might

    do with a few extra hands

for a long work day.

It is hard to lift

    out the title embedded

in the lighter text.

As a grad student,

    you're managing one big project,

the dissertation.

So I got involved

    in the 'keeping the author

happy' end of things.

You can tell her, too,

    that we're processing the second

half of her advance.

Map Is Not Territory*

It's not enough to write a book any more. Now you have to write a proposal to get the book under contract, a grant application to get funding, another grant application to get funding (rinse and repeat as necessary), a report for your department on what you've done this year, and what you plan to do next year... and now your publisher is asking for chapter abstracts and keywords when you send the final manuscript in for editing.

"Have you had any push-back from authors?" our manager asked. Well, no. They're used to writing about what they've written about—not that it's necessarily enjoyable, or valued. But the reflexivity of that activity (writing about what you're writing about) isn't just a cute way of stating the obvious, it reveals a bit of a truth about writing: the object of the writing (the research, the story) and the writing itself aren't easily separable. You're always trying to tell the story, you're always inevitably condensing and narrating and leaving out and framing and filtering. Whether you're giving your elevator pitch ("You'll love it; it's about this early modern German named Hermann Connring and the fundamental shift in the relationship of past and present.") or writing an 800-page manuscript, or editing that manuscript down to a reasonable 120,000 words, or even distilling that manuscript into a 7-line table of contents (Germans, by the way, call it a "table of content"—that little change always reminds me that there must be substance to the book.), it's always a representation. The only sharp line in representation is between the representations and reality.

And so, no, we don't get push-back. Maybe grumbling about another task to do, but hey, we've been adding to authors' tasks to do ever since we took away their typists (well, most of their typists) thirty years ago. (The division of labor giveth, and the division of labor taketh away.) We still overexplain the need; we throw around words like "mixed media environment," "searchability," and "discoverability," but fundamentally, we're asking for a map.

And so I write: You’ve already created one map of your book: the table of contents. The table of contents is a large-scale “highway map” of the general route that your readers will take. There will soon be another map in the form of an index; this is a very local map (“Where was that excellent taco restaurant? Come to think of it, where are all the taco restaurants? This guy did a wildebeest-shooting helicopter ride but I want to do a cross-country taco hop.”). The abstracts and keywords are yet a third kind of map: they’re like the maps posted on signs at the entrance to a campus, with a “you are here” to situate the visitor, and to show that reader, who may not have come in the main entrance, what there is to see. Publishing now involves searching and coming at books (and chunks—that's a technical term—of books) from all sorts of directions, and so you can't rely (if you ever could) on a reader looking at the Table of Contents and the Introduction.

But it's all representation, and it's What Authors Do.

*Thanks to J.Z. Smith for my title phrase.

What makes a good e-book

David Pogue reviews Al Gore's latest here.

The key point: "Thanks to all of the smoothly integrated multimedia, the book engages more parts of your brain than just the one that reads prose. As a result, Mr. Gore goes much farther in his mission — persuasion — than he could on the printed page alone." Abraham Lincoln, when he wanted to study a text, would read it aloud as he copied it, on the logic that he would not merely read it that way, but write, speak, and hear it as well. It sounds time-consuming--but, then again, so is immersing yourself in a multi-media project with "over an hour" of narration.