Results tagged “economy” from Collin vs. Blog

Debbie has an important post up about the latest issue of CCC, which "amputates" the Re/Visions feature on KB in that issue by publishing snatches of it in the journal and the complete versions online.

If there's one thing to take away from this, it's that the journal has problems, ones that aren't going away any time soon. Anyhow, here's the post length comment that I left there:

I almost blogged about this at the time, but elected not to, given that I was hazy on the confidentiality of the conversations. Although I had no role at all in the decision-making process, I was involved in some of the discussions with Deb about how to handle this problem.

The problem isn't just the ridiculously low acceptance rate--it's that rate combined with the fact that the journal has a colossal backlog right now of accepted essays. Traditionally, the answer to the latter problem has been to lower the acceptance rate--accept fewer essays, and the backlog lifts eventually. But Deb's right, I think, to note that that's not a viable solution. The acceptance rate can't honestly go much lower, and even if it could, the editor would have to start rejecting submissions that had been accepted by the readers.

The problem is one I harp on all the time, and that's scale. Our discipline is much larger than it was 10 or 20 years now, and the size of the journal hasn't accommodated the large influx of TT faculty who would like to publish work in what is arguably the flagship journal. And the problem, in my mind, is only exacerbated by a decision-making and election process that pays no attention to professional qualification. Without putting too fine a point on it, there is no guarantee that, in any given year, the people making decisions about the journal have any editorial experience.

There are several solutions that any of us might imagine for this problem, from publishing an extra issue, to temporarily adding pages, to moving to a hybrid of print and POD, etc. I can guarantee that these were all ideas that I suggested, but I don't know how many of them factored into the actual decision. I also talked with Deb about the option that they eventually chose, although my suggestion was to move review essays online, since they're less often the object of the kind of page citation that Nels raises.

So while I'm sad that this happened to you, and wouldn't have been happy had it happened to my R/V set, I also think that there's a larger problem with the journal that needs to be solved. And so I'm also sympathetic with Deb, who's had to struggle with this for some time now. There are several contributing factors--the acceptance rate, the backlog, the growth of our field and subsequent increase in the number of submissions, the obvious and warranted interest in features like Re/Visions, the fact that the average length of a CCC essay has steadily climbed over the last 20 years, the desire to keep the page count consistent, the desire to keep the price of the journal low and accessible, and so on. It's a huge problem that has very material consequences for all of us, and yet, we don't really have the organizational means to deal with it well.

Sigh. So I'm sorry, not in the it's-my-fault way, but in the damn-that-sucks way.

***

Soapboxy enough? If D's post accomplishes one thing, I hope that it sparks some sort of open and frank discussion, beyond the walls of the EC meeting, of the role that the journal plays and should be playing in our field. And how the journal might adapt to a changing economy of scale that is obvious to anyone who cares to look.

We'll see.

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.

I've seen a lot of folk actively wondering about the current financial crisis, and while I don't pretend to know everything about it, I've been reading Umair Haque's work for the past couple of years. He's one of the folk who have been predicting that this day would come, and he's got a really interesting "five-step construction kit for tomorrow's revolutionaries."

There's no way for me to summarize his position without really reducing it badly, but he's talking about a radical shift in the way businesses operate and economies function, and it makes for fascinating reading, especially given our current economic circumstances. What I understand of it, I owe largely to his work...

This is one of those posts that I've had brewing for a bit. In some ways, I feel like I've hit a milestone that's even more important than receiving tenure (!!) was for me last spring.

As of this month, I am no longer carrying any debt. No loans, no rotating balances on the credit cards. I am debt-free.

To provide a little context, let me repeat something I said the other night at dinner: I have been in debt for longer than I've been in academia. Yep. My entire adult life. And it's one of the things that grieves me mightily when I hear people talk about the cushy lives we lead. In preparation for a life in the professoriate, I spent 5+ years (and I was fast) earning less than 10,000 dollars a year. In Texas, the big perk I got for my TAship? In-state tuition. I made less than 10K, and had to pay for tuition out of that. Lucky me.

(A side-note: When I completed my dissertation, I had already taken my job at Old Dominion. I no longer had a TAship, and was living outside the state, and had to enroll for a mandatory 9 credits to complete my degree--I didn't need the credits, it was just a rule--and so I had to pay out-of-state tuition for them. I ended up having to pay something like $3500 to graduate. And as I told the representative from UTArlington who called me last night looking for donations, until I get a check for $3500 from UTA, UTA will not be seeing a check from me.)

Now, I'm not great with money. I overtip, I prefer to own the books I read and use in my research, and I generally subscribe to a philosophy of dinner karma, where the meals I buy for friends will roughly equal the number of meals they buy for me. I'd taken pretty solid control of my finances in the time I've been at Syracuse, gradually working my debt down (and correspondingly restoring my dismal credit rating) without feeling too put upon in terms of quality of life. I probably could have done it faster, if I'd really cracked down.

Anyhow, cushy lives. I guess I want to challenge the idea that our earning power offsets the financial hardships we have to endure to get to where we are, as is often the case for other professionals (lawyers, doctors, e.g.). It does eventually, but not nearly as quickly. Many of my friends still struggle with massive amounts of debt that for graduate students in the humanities is all but inevitable. We have the same taboos about talking about it that we do for all matters financial, but most of us still go through it, I suspect. And if their lives are anything like mine has been, graduate school debt is a dark cloud that hangs over each of us for a lot longer than it probably should. It's been a source of some personal shame for me, when in fact, it should be a source of shame for our institutions, who are more than content to exploit graduate student labor without even the mitigating factor of a living wage.

I don't have any grand solution to go with my personal celebration, although I wish I did. I can say that I spent part of this afternoon helping someone figure out some funding strategies for next year that don't involve loans, and I felt pretty good about that. I wish that I were in a position to be able to effect more change than I can right now--when I think of all the anxiety and stress that I experienced over my finances, I can't help but wonder how much more I could have done in their absence.

Guess I'm ready to start finding out. That is all.