Results tagged “academia” from Collin vs. Blog

An interesting piece of news floated across Twitterspace, and across some blogs this week: the revelation that the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine was, in fact, a fake journal sponsored by a pharmaceutical company. Even more dismaying was a followup story about how Elsevier, publisher of AJBJM, has an entire division devoted to such fraudulence, the so-called strategic medical communications agency, Excerpta Medica. Over at the ACRLog, Barbara Fister has a nice post with the link to the original Scientist article that outed the journal, as well as some discussion of the information literacy implications. Long story short, Elsevier's track record with respect to integrity is not particularly sparkling.

While it's hard to imagine something similar happening in the humanities, recent discussions of a particular anti-plagiarism vendor should probably give us rhetoric and technology folk pause, particularly when you recall that the most likely outlet for scholarship related to said vendor happens to be an Elsevier journal. But I digress.

It's tempting, I think, to see this and other events as further indictments of the academy's fetishization of peer review, but I'm not sure I would agree. And I say that as someone who would really like to see other models available to us for the circulation and distribution of our work. But the fact of the matter is that problems like these have more to do with the oligopolists than with peer review per se.

I review for several journals now, and honestly, I see maybe 1-2 submissions per journal a year. I have some quality control as a result, but the real responsibility for quality lies with the editorial staff of each, the folk who aggregate the results. I've thought a bit about what it must be like for those who were hoodwinked by the press into sitting on the board or reviewing for these journals, because my gut reaction to this story was to blame the reviewers. But that's assuming that submissions actually made it to reviewers, and there's no real guarantee that this is the case. Writers and reviewers alike operate on good faith, the assumption that there's some integrity at the editorial stage. Beyond a certain size, the editorial staff cease to function as part of peer review--their function is more aggregation and facilitation. And given the kind of money involved with the oligopoly journals, I guess I'm not totally surprised at something like this.

It's shameful, but not as shameful as it would be if the reviewers for a "real" journal had been found to be accepting money from Merck (or whomever) for certain outcomes.

Hmm. I feel like I have more to say, but I'm not sure what. Maybe I'll revisit this post after I think about it. For now, though, that's all.

Whatever else we may want to say about the financial crisis, and our leaders' ability to respond to it, I suspect that we'll be feeling the repercussions on the ground, so to speak, for years to come.

It's already begun in subtle ways here at Syracuse. Yeah, we're a private university, and so aren't subject to the whims of state legislatures, but the health of our endowment is entwined with that of the stock market, as you might imagine. We're hiring this year (I'll post the ad here soon, once it's approved), a replacement for one of my colleagues who's retiring, but at least one more will be leaving soon, and I'm not especially confident that even replacement hires will be authorized without a fight. At a time when our department is growing in terms of its leadership needs and administrative workload, that's a concern, needless to say. And in a year where I'm doing a little more travel than normal, college support--available to us in the past--has dried up, meaning that most of it will be out-of-pocket for me. I suspect that this is only the first sign of cuts to come.

I'm thinking of all this because I meant to point to Tim Burke's discussion of the need for higher ed to works towards economic sustainability, rather than relying on unchecked growth, as its baseline position. Fortunately, IHE picked up his column, making my paltry link unnecessary-ish. I think his analysis is really smart--it deserves a wider audience:

I think the most important but subtle thing that has to happen is just that every stakeholder in academia is going to have to develop new mental habits, to stop assuming or believing that growth is the default. At least at selective institutions, I find that in everyday conversation about curricular questions, administrative choices, and so on, the assumption of growth or plenitude is deeply ingrained.

Check it out.

Wrote this a few days ago, as some of the posts I link to below were just breaking--there are good conversations circulating about them at each site...cgb

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There's a little extra transparency afforded to us by the Interwebs, such that when panels like those of Chris, Debbie, and Becky are rejected by our flagship conference, it doesn't simply happen behind the scenes, as it used to. I'm sure that there are lots of other good proposals that didn't make it; I'm likewise confident that there are a number of proposals that were accepted for papers that will be written days (if not hours) before their actual presentation. I've attended some of those panels, and complained bitterly about them to anyone who will listen. Many of us are lucky enough to receive travel support from our schools to attend CCCC, but it took me a year where I footed the bill on my own to realize that I owed it to my audience to put together the best presentation that I could.

Let me be clear, however, and say that there are also certainly numerous proposals that both were accepted and worthy of acceptance. That's not a question for me. But there are also a lot of good proposals that are annually rejected. Here are a couple of reasons why.

First, our conference leadership has in recent years been preoccupied with making the event more inclusive. By this I don't mean making presentations accessible (which is good), providing child care (which is good), subsidizing under-represented populations (which is good), or any other attempt to meet the needs of conference-goers. I'm talking about the measures that have been taken to bring in first-timers, and in particular, the flattening out of the proposal process to such a degree that one need barely know anything about the field to write a successful proposal.

And perhaps I will be accused of being less than democratic here. So be it. I've never seen the longitudinal demographics on conference attendees, nor do I even know if such data exist, but I do know that the conference is about as big as it can get. (I've heard a lot of people complain in recent years about it being too big--anyone who's ever had to present or attend a talk in a curtained off corner of the exhibit hall would probably agree.) I'd be interested in hearing if our push to "grow" the conference has resulted in increased subscription rates for the journal, memberships in the organization, or any such long-term benefit for those of us who are already committed to the organization and the conference. Perhaps it has, but that data would be have to be qualified with information about the growth of tenure-track positions and programs in the field. I'd be surprised if that information has been gathered in a systematic way, but I'm prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

As the number of proposals has increased, the amount of space devoted to describing the actual projects has shrunk, and that is a trend that privileges the pithy, speculative kind of prose that is its own genre, and which requires far less disciplinary expertise than one might imagine. Again, this makes the process more inclusive, but it does so at the expense of thoughtful research that actually exists. It privileges light, buzzwordy, trendy proposal writing, the kind of writing that gets more difficult to produce once one actually undertakes research and gets into the nuances and complications involved. As Becky notes, "I could have taken a half hour to write a snappy little proposal for an opinion piece about plagiarism, with a little media analysis folded in, and it would have been on the program in a heartbeat." The fact is that our current proposal system privileges this, partly in the interests of making the program as inclusive as possible.

Second, our program is done by percentage, meaning that if technology proposals are 10% of the total, then 10% of the program will be technology panels. The number of proposals in a given area determine the percentage of panels on the program. Democratic, yes? Well, the problem here is that not all areas are created equally. It's no accident that two of the rejections above are for data-driven studies, and another is for historical work. Those are areas where (a) pithy, trendy accounts are not as possible, but more importantly, they are areas where (b) you can't simply read a couple of articles and be prepared to present research. Both historical and qualitative work require a great deal of experience and research, and are likely to have higher percentages of more experienced researchers among their proposals. The Area Clusters are not "equal" so asserting equality among them will often have the opposite effect when it comes to quality.

This would be one way of testing this. Take one year's proposals, and have them rated without reference to Area Cluster (an individual AC reader is going to feel pressure to produce a range of scores--I know because I did when I read one year). Then separate them into Area Clusters and see what the mean scores are. My guess is that we would find that more specialized areas have a higher percentage of strong scores, and that our current system actually penalizes researchers doing more specialized (and potentially more advanced) work. My guess is that there's a much broader range of quality in the catch-all areas.

But that has to be a guess, because we're not allowed to use proposals for research purposes (as of the mid80s, I think). It's why I still hand out that chapter from Berkenkotter and Huckin on CCCC proposals--it's the most recent study possible of this stuff.

I do know that recent attempts to study the field by reference to CCCC Programs (and there are several) are deeply flawed, because they don't allow for the vagaries of the process. We persist in the belief that the annual convention somehow represents our field in a given year, but the fact is that nothing could be further from the truth. It represents the version of our field represented by a flawed process, a version that discourages many who do and prefer certain kinds of work, and the result of a process that I continue to be critical of. That process has seeped deep into the bureaucratic structure of our field, such that we can make small changes around the edges, but I honestly doubt that any sort of sweeping change is possible. And honestly, I don't know that there are that many people who would agree with me--I've believed for some time that our conference is much less than it could be, that it's broken in important ways.

Like Debbie suggests may happen for her this year, I hesitate every year before I send in my membership dues, wary of the degree to which my membership constitutes a vote, however small, for a status quo I find deeply problematic.

Three final notes. As bitter as this may sound, it's not anywhere close to the bitterest version of this entry. Believe me. I still believe that it would be possible to have a better conference, one that I could look forward to attending for more than the opportunity to see my friends.

And second, I have no axe to grind this year, as I didn't send in a proposal. Like Becky, I've been accepted almost every year I've proposed, because I learned early to write pithy, acceptable proposals. I like to think that I use this power for the forces of good, but it took me a few years longer than it should have to arrive at that point.

Three: again, I'm not criticizing those who do get accepted. I myself have had great luck proposing to CCCC, and I don't doubt that the conference will always be a mixed bag. My point, though, is that different areas of the field have different thresholds for entry, and the process itself ignores that fact.

I'm fully willing to admit that I may be wrong about some of this, but I've tried to be fairly careful here. The fact of the matter is that there's way too much of this process that's hidden behind bureaucratic opacity, and I have my suspicions about why that is. Even the tiny amount that's visible, though, is enough to persuade me that it would be worth our collective time to think about why our conference is alienating to its core audience and about what we might do to change that.

That's all.

It's been a remarkably unconferential spring for me--I bailed on CCCC this year, am not going next year, and currently, RSA and C&W are happening without me, and doing just fine, I imagine. But over round Blogora way, Rosa asks, "who is livebloggin RSA in Seattle?" and the answer would appear to be no one. I've seen a couple of entries, and a handful of tweets, about C&W, but nothing steady. So I'm breaking prose silence to offer up a modest proposal, one I think I may have talked about before...

If I were hosting a conference, I think I'd see about raising money in order to have a bunch of folk blog the sessions. I know that there used to be something similar for CCCC, but I think that that was strictly a volunteer effort. So here's my proposal:

Offer 5 travel stipends to graduate students at $1000 apiece. To earn that money, they must commit to blogging at least one panel during the majority of sessions during the conference. (I can't be more specific, because it would depend greatly on the conference format, breaks between sessions, keynotes, etc.) For the sake of argument, let's say that that number is 10. So $100 per session.

In an ideal world, the organization would provide the laptops. That is coming closer and closer to becoming a reality, financially. My ultra set-up cost less than $300, and the prices on these things will only drop as Intel gets further into the game. But for the sake of argument, I'm going to assume that most would have their own or one they can borrow.

Also, lap desks. They don't need to be from Levenger or anything. You can get a good one at B&N for $30. It's worth it.

Also, a lounge/room set aside for them to store coats, bags, gear, laptops, with Wifi, cable hookups if they need, and bottles of water and bagels/muffins. Also, if they prefer to type up handwritten notes, they could do that here as well.

Someone from the organization would coordinate with them, so that all 5 aren't blogging the same panel during a given session, of course. But otherwise, they'd just be turned loose on the conference.

The upside? It'd be awfully nice for the majority of people in any organization who don't come to the conference, yes. But it would also provide a means of archiving what is now our #1 source of almost completely disposable scholarship. I've given some interesting papers now and then, and the only record of them outside of my hard drive is the paper title in the program. It would give all of us access to a largely untapped area of our disciplinary scholarship.

I'm not talking about posting the papers themselves, although I sometimes will do that for myself, so it wouldn't be an issue of a pre-print threatening those who want to publish longer versions later on. But a good blog summary of a panel would be enough to let researchers know if they'd like to follow up and email a presenter for a copy of the paper.

Or, imagine that you're putting together a panel on X for a future conference. It'd be nice to be able to do a search for folks working on that topic. Or to gather some ideas about possible folk for an edited collection. Or to get some idea about whose work you might want to follow up on for an article of your own about X.

Right now, the scholarship we do for conferences vanishes into the ether for the most part. Blogging the conference in a semi-systematic fashion would mitigate against that, and it would make all of us who don't attend every single conference feel a lot more connected. That wouldn't be a horrible thing, either.

Let's say that we have 1000 people in an organization, which is probably an overestimate for some and under for others. But given 1000 dues-paying members, it would take and extra $5 a year to pull this off, and the result would be access to a cumulative database of 150 presentations per conference (5 bloggers x 10 panels x 3 presenters/panel).

Finally, it would be a nice way to support our graduate students and it would be, I imagine, a really valuable introduction to the breadth of our discipline for those who participated. At conferences like RSA and C&W, the majority of the panels could be blogged. It would be a little more of a drop in the bucket at a conference like Cs, but that's the organization most capable of scaling this up beyond just 5 bloggers, too.

Seriously, I'd pay $5 or $10 more a year if a database from each year of the conference was the result. If someone could get on that for me...heh.

That is all.

[Flickr: ollily]

Lindsay Waters has a piece in yesterday's IHE about how we evaluate what we do in the academy, "A Call for Slow Writing." Now, you might recall that my own feelings about Waters are, shall we say, less than glowingly positive. But I will say that my feelings about this essay are mixed, and not in the worst way.

First, it's a well-wrought piece, showing off Waters' own skills at prose, and it is replete with erudition. I don't usually write like that, but there you have it. And second, I'm actually in complete agreement with the major point of the essay:

I have claimed elsewhere that the book-for-tenure system is coming to an end, that it is unsustainable, that its growth has been an obscenity, because it was mindless, because it sought to make something automatic and machine-like play the role that should only be played by the soul....There is no good reason why the essay should not replace the book, and a lot of good reasons why it should. I am tempted to say -- in order to be maximally provocative -- that anyone who publishes a book within six years of earning a Ph.D. should be denied tenure. The chances a person at that stage can have published something worth chopping that many trees down is unlikely.

Waters' argument is that we need to start unlearning the system that prompts us to push out writing as quickly as we do, in the interests of bumping up our pre-tenure numbers. I don't know that he'll have many takers for denying tenure to those who do publish books, but I will say that I very consciously reset my tenure clock when I moved from ODU to SU. And my book was better for it, I believe.

So far, so good. It's a little curmudgeonly of me, but I am willing to grant that most of our writing would be improved by shaking it free of the shadow of tenure. But then...

What I'm saying is that the first step to re-establishing the essay as the standard in humanistic writing is to reinvigorate the sentences we write, so that, when one reads an essay, one feels it. One feels it the way one tastes -- and here I'm going global -- a good curry. It really sets you back. Or maybe forward. Style, maniera, modo is what we readers demand.

It's hard for me not to react negatively--and here I'm going local--to the modo for modo's sake here. But the larger point is where I'm set back. To imagine that an entire profession sits around thinking, "hmmm, how can I write a really crappy sentence here?" is beyond laughable to me. Is there writing in the humanities that is largely indefensible from a stylistic point of view? Almost certainly. Are there writers in the humanities who consciously set out to produce inelegant prose? I seriously doubt it. So the notion that an entire tenure system is going to be changed by our conviction about the quality of our prose just sounds cranky to me, to be honest, and not serious at all.

Now, Waters goes on to talk about the editorial changes going on at boundary 2, and they sound great. I'm even willing to grant as part of a thought experiment that other journals follow suit. Not all, I'd imagine, but some. Let's even suppose that some of the essays written in this renaissance of clarity trickle upwards into book form. How long will that take? And where does the system tip?

Most importantly, though, what will any of this have to do with the demands placed upon us by our institutions? Who will be the first top-flight university to say that their tenure expectations are aberrant, and should be scaled back to allow more quality work? Which administrator, content with a system that translates qualitative work into quantities, is going to admit the "obscenity" when most university and college budgets already build into their calculations the retirements and tenure denials, and the budget line resets that they bring?

Seriously.

I've never been all that adept at the kind of nominal-dense, code-wordy prose that Waters and others decry, so I don't really take this stuff that personally. What I do take personally is the transfer of value judgments from the work (this work is difficult, obscure, and personally offensive) to the folk who write such works, in some kind of weird moral algebra. Honestly, I find that a little sloppy.

There are things that we can do. That much I agree with. We can strive to write as well as we can, certainly, and we can try to hold each other accountable as we read manuscripts, offer advice, direct projects, etc. But to imagine that we are the ones who have driven this system within which we toil is a little facile.

And this is from someone who's been fortunate enough to receive tenure. I'm not one of those who believes that the current system was good enough for me, so it's good enough for anyone else. But I don't see this essay offering anything like a solution for the problem it poses.

That is all, except to note that I'm not the CB who left a comment on the original post...

How your mouth feels after eating too much sugary junk?

When I read this just a few weeks after MB admonished someone to "do some homework before passing opinions on matters out of [his] depth," my soul suffers from a similar overload, one of irony, that almost leaves me nauseous.

Apparently, we can now define "homework" as "skimming a 3-year-old conference program."

And that is all I can bear to say. Except maybe for a quick thanks to Trish Jenkins for being the first commenter.