The Long View

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On the third day he arose at 6:00 (more than an hour before dawn) in order to arrive on time in the hotel conference room where the panel on which he was presenting a paper was to convene at 8:30. (He hates waking up in the dark.)

Unfortunately, the Hyatt Regency was designed either by a deconstructionist (my hypothesis) or by M.C. Escher (Richard Kopley’s hypothesis), so I got lost and arrived with only minutes to spare.

The same thing happened last night when I went to a ballroom for the Gay/Lesbian/Queer Caucus cash bar, which was scheduled next to a cash bar hosted by the University of Illinois English Department (one of my alma mater). When I got to Ballroom C, everybody looked queer all right, but I didn’t recognize anyone (and I’ve been a member of the caucus since 1989, so I should know someone there), then I went next door to Ballroom D and discovered that it was the Stanford cash bar. Right ball gown, wrong ball room. I finally found the official queers in another ballroom in another tower.

The Modern Language Association (MLA) Committee on Community Colleges convened a session first thing this morning entitled Rescuing Literature: Developing Lifelong Readers at the Two-Year College, organized by Pam Hardman (Cuyahoga Community College), that included Connie Jacobs (San Juan College), Diane Krumrey (Bergen Community College), and me. My paper, entitled “Rescuing Reading: The Community College, General Education, and Literary Reading across Curricula,” summarized my two-year Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professorship project, including quantitative data about program outcomes. I will post my paper in PDF format at

http://www.tncc.edu/rescuingreading 

where you can also learn more about the project than you would ever want to know. I recorded my talk on my iPod for podsterity, which I’ll arrange to have uploaded onto iTunesU.

Next session, hosted by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, was a fascinating and meaty roundtable for journal editors and authors. Similar themes from Day One: The over-production of books; the need to restore the professional value of smaller publishing projects (e.g. notes, reviews of scholarly books); the fact that graduate school does not train the junior scholar in the mechanics of publication (either by default or design, mystifying the process).

Had lunch with my high school pal, Tony Dobrowolski (and his partner Bob), whom I’ve been coaching on a book project of his. If you think it’s tough for newly minted PhDs to figure out how to get published, imagine what it’s like for Tony, an actor and stage historian who is not affiliated with an academic institution (an independent scholar) and who has discovered a set of unpublished or long out of print late Victorian stage satires of the Aesthetic Movement and the Decadents that he wants to assemble into an anthology. I got him set up by interviewing publishers the last time MLA was in DC (his and my home towns), where he got a few nibbles. Without technical resources and institutional resources (and time), however, it’s difficult and fitful work.

Afterward another two-hour turn at the CELJ booth, this time with drop in clients, hungry to be reassured that they can write scholarly articles (and find and keep academic jobs). Several eager and anxious advanced graduate students. I’m struck again how important is the role of senior mentors and how hopeful the junior colleagues are for that support.

Lots of conversations last night and today with people who like and respect their students, love teaching, like and respect their colleagues, love the research that they are doing. Rather remarkable when you consider the extent of job dissatisfaction in the US and how much we identify with our work. (When was the last time that you met an American who didn’t ask you, So, what do you do?)

In a culture that appears ready only to value measurable quantitative outcomes, scholarly labor in the humanities becomes increasingly difficult to sustain, and we become increasingly defensive. Not everything that can be measured is important, however, and not everything important can be measured. At the same time, we need to explore and validate a greater variety of scholarly labor and endeavors, particularly now that we have new media at our disposal. Standards of academic review and evaluation remain the touchstone, but the media by which scholarly products are published should be varied and that variety honored.

Call it the “luxurizing” of American higher education. Nowadays in our consumer culture, everybody wants luxury-label commodities (Mercedes-Benz, Louis Vuitton, Rolex), no, thinks that they NEED and DESERVE luxury-label commodities. One result is that “de luxe” (which once meant hand-crafted of the highest quality material) has depreciated into a “luxury” label (which you can get for a fraction of the retail cost from those nice folks on Canal Street in lower Manhattan; my $10 Mont Blanc pen lasted for years). Pretty Good University used to expect its humanities scholars only to conduct and publish regularly some research (at national conferences, in peer-reviewed journals or editor-reviewed collections), but nowadays everybody wants to be “world class.” Everybody’s a star! No room for garage bands when you can compete to be the next American Idol.

In the words of the Broadway show tune, “Well, it’s been a long, been a long, been a long day.”

And so to bed.

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