Twenty years ago I drew the ire of the governor of Virginia.

I was an instructor at a public community college (the second lowest genus on the higher education food chain), and L. Douglas Wilder was the governor. Virginia’s economy had slipped into recession, and the US was in the midst of a presidential primary campaign. The Great Wilder, testing his presidential prospects, was traveling around the country making “policy” appearances using travel resources of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

I wrote to the governor from my home address telling him that I had voted for him and that I looked to him for fiscal leadership when the state treasury was strapped, but that his travel for personal political purposes did not strike me as leading by example. A few weeks later I received the usual and accustomed letter thanking me for sharing my views.

But then several months later at a college picnic, the college’s president, a man of integrity and courage, chatting with me said, “Oh, by the way, Tom, your letter to the governor caused a bit of a stir in Richmond.” He went on to explain that the secretary of education for the commonwealth, James W. Dyke, Jr., called him to ask, What are you going to do about this employee?

My college’s president asked the secretary of education if I had written on college stationery (I hadn’t) and asked if I had written anything threatening (I hadn’t). So the president said, It sounds to me as though Mr. Long is exercising his constitutional right to free speech, and there is nothing that I am going to do about him.

I learned an important lesson: that speech, though free, may have a cost, as well as about the difference between one executive’s courage and integrity on the one hand, and another’s thin-skinned vindictiveness on the other hand.

I’m reminded of this event in my own life two decades ago (but under very similar circumstances as today) by the story of Emma Sullivan. Ms Sullivan, a high school student in Kansas, infamously tweeted on her Twitter account after a field trip to the state capital of Kansas. It is phrased in the usual vulgarly snarky idioms of adolescents and young adults: “Just made mean comments at gov brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot.” (I don’t know what she actually said to him or if she said anything to him at all; this tweet may just be the usual trash talk to impress friends.)

Brownback’s official court minions, ever vigilant, monitor Twitter, and finding this tweet, contacted Ms. Sullivan’s Shawnee Mission East High School Principal Karl Krawitz, who called her into his office to reprimand her. According to Ms. Sullivan in the Huffington Post, the principal ”laid into me about how this was unacceptable and an embarrassment . . . He said I had created this huge controversy and everyone was up in arms about it … and now he had to do damage control.” She also told NBC Action News that she was asked to write the governor a formal apology. Subsequent reports indicate that she has been the object of bullying by fellow students.

The Kansas governor’s director of communication, Sherriene Jones-Sontag, is charged with the daily monitoring of any negative comments about Brownback on social-media websites. Having rid the high schools of science, this is where Kansans spend their education time and energy.

I imagine that Ms. Sullivan has learned an important lesson about adults: We are often feckless, and will devour our young to save our skins.

My hope is that “brownback” will become a common noun as “santorum” has done: brownback, (noun): the liquified fecal discharge of the gutless , usually when scared (see colostomy, colostomy bag).

This news item comes under the “kulcha” category.

Reported today, Rutgers University (chartered in 1766 as Queens College, opening in 1771) is bringing to its campus this week Nicole Polizzi, someone who is otherwise known as “Snooki.”

No maven of pop kulcha, I even know that “Snooki” is a celebrity du jour  on one of the myriad of “reality” television shows. In other words she is a vacuous and talentless entity who has produced nothing of lasting value or worth, but is famous for being famous.

Presumably, student activity fees at Rutgers are paying for the privilege. New Jerseyites must be proud. Which says something about New Jersey.

The reason that I bought the Barnes & Noble Nook Color e-book reader was that it seemed to provide an ample catalog of the kinds of books that I read (including scholarly books) and more important, that it seemed, in comparison to another reader that I’d used and other readers that I’d reviewed, more facile in allowing highlights and notes and providing accurate page numbers (essential for a scholar).

I got took by the Nook. In at least one significant case, an expensive book that I’d downloaded, highlighted and notated fairly extensively, suddenly stopped working (it would open at the page on which I’d been last reading and then immediately close, refusing to remain open). Email exchanges with Nook “tech support” (Zach, Benoni, James, Paul, usually taking several days to respond my queries) were time wasting and fruitless. They recommended several complicated and time consuming fixes, the final one requiring me to find where the digital file of the book was located on my computer, then tethering the Nook to my computer (using their–of course–proprietary USB lead), and moving the book file from my computer to the Nook.

Didn’t I buy a Nook so I could use WiFi to purchase and download books?

This “fix” seems to have worked except for one big problem: All of my highlights and notes are gone. It’s a new book. So what was the point of my buying the more expensive Nook Color? And will this happen to other Nook books that I purchase?

Many a kerfuffle among the punditocracy and in the blogosphere about “tenured radicals” corrupting the minds of our young people in college, with tenure as a guarantee of lifelong employment without conditions. Well, since only about a quarter of faculty are tenured or working for tenure (and the rest of us contingent labor), let’s dismiss that last claim out of hand.

Now a right-wing certified “tenured radical,” Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois (one of my maters alma) and president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has written in Inside Higher Ed a concise multi-point primer of academic freedom, what it is and what it isn’t, which deserves quoting verbatim:

PART 1: What it does do

1. Academic freedom means that both faculty members and students can engage in intellectual debate without fear of censorship or retaliation.

2. Academic freedom establishes a faculty member’s right to remain true to his or her pedagogical philosophy and intellectual commitments. It preserves the intellectual integrity of our educational system and thus serves the public good.

3. Academic freedom in teaching means that both faculty members and students can make comparisons and contrasts between subjects taught in a course and any field of human knowledge or period of history.

4. Academic freedom gives both students and faculty the right to express their views — in speech, writing, and through electronic communication, both on and off campus — without fear of sanction, unless the manner of expression substantially impairs the rights of others or, in the case of faculty members, those views demonstrate that they are professionally ignorant, incompetent, or dishonest with regard to their discipline or fields of expertise.

5. Academic freedom gives both students and faculty the right to study and do research on the topics they choose and to draw what conclusions they find consistent with their research, though it does not prevent others from judging whether their work is valuable and their conclusions sound. To protect academic freedom, universities should oppose efforts by corporate or government sponsors to block dissemination of any research findings.

6. Academic freedom means that the political, religious, or philosophical beliefs of politicians, administrators, and members of the public cannot be imposed on students or faculty.

7. Academic freedom gives faculty members and students the right to seek redress or request a hearing if they believe their rights have been violated.

8. Academic freedom protects faculty members and students from reprisals for disagreeing with administrative policies or proposals.

9. Academic freedom gives faculty members and students the right to challenge one another’s views, but not to penalize them for holding them.

10. Academic freedom protects a faculty member’s authority to assign grades to students, so long as the grades are not capricious or unjustly punitive. More broadly, academic freedom encompasses both the individual and institutional right to maintain academic standards.

11. Academic freedom gives faculty members substantial latitude in deciding how to teach the courses for which they are responsible.

12. Academic freedom guarantees that serious charges against a faculty member will be heard before a committee of his or her peers. It provides faculty members the right to due process, including the assumption that the burden of proof lies with those who brought the charges, that faculty have the right to present counter-evidence and confront their accusers, and be assisted by an attorney in serious cases if they choose.

 

PART 2: What It Doesn’t Do

1. Academic freedom does not mean a faculty member can harass, threaten, intimidate, ridicule, or impose his or her views on students.

2. Student academic freedom does not deny faculty members the right to require students to master course material and the fundamentals of the disciplines that faculty teach.

3. Neither academic freedom nor tenure protects an incompetent teacher from losing his or her job. Academic freedom thus does not grant an unqualified guarantee of lifetime employment.

4. Academic freedom does not protect faculty members from colleague or student challenges to or disagreement with their educational philosophy and practices.

5. Academic freedom does not protect faculty members from non-university penalties if they break the law.

6. Academic freedom does not give students or faculty the right to ignore college or university regulations, though it does give faculty and students the right to criticize regulations they believe are unfair.

7. Academic freedom does not protect students or faculty from disciplinary action, but it does require that they receive fair treatment and due process.

8. Academic freedom does not protect faculty members from sanctions for professional misconduct, though sanctions require clear proof established through due process.

9. Neither academic freedom nor tenure protects a faculty member from various sanctions — from denial of merit raises, to denial of sabbatical requests, to the loss of desirable teaching and committee assignments — for poor performance, though such sanctions are regulated by local agreements and by faculty handbooks. If minor, sanctions should be grievable; if major, they must be preceded by an appropriate hearing.

10. Neither academic freedom nor tenure protects a faculty member who repeatedly skips class or refuses to teach the classes or subject matter assigned.

11. Though briefly interrupting an invited speaker may be compatible with academic freedom, actually preventing a talk or a performance from continuing is not.

12. Academic freedom does not protect a faculty member from investigations into allegations of scientific misconduct or violations of sound university policies, nor from appropriate penalties should such charges be sustained in a hearing of record before an elected faculty body.

Reminds me of the numerous times an eager undergraduate English major has sat in front of me (though on those occasions I was not nearly so jaundiced in my perspective as the professor avatar here).

Eva von Dassow, a professor of classical and Near Eastern studies, spoke at a recent public forum of the University of Minnesota Board of Regents.

According to an article in today’s Inside Higher Ed, the video of her talk is inspiring many of her colleagues at Minnesota and elsewhere, many of them fed up with what they view as unrelenting budget cuts, particularly of humanities disciplines.

At a conference of scholars (mostly historians) on the Oldest State of the South. . .

Uniformity. Unlike MLA meetings where blue jeans or black on black on black (with black Euro eyewear) prevails, the uniform of the day is the blue blazer and khaki pants (mostly men, but sometimes unisex). Depicted below, my uniformity: blue blazer, blue shirt, UConn blue and white tie.

McDonnellitis. Although we meet on a campus whose president is a former Republican senator and whose students are the sons and daughters of Republican exurbanites, many disparaging references to the ahistorical Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, whose recent proclamation of Confederate History Month conveniently forgot African American slaves (and by extension their descendants)

I’m at a scholarly conference at a small college with big pretensions, where Christian Lander could add to his list of Stuff White People Like: strip-mall neo-Colonial or convention hotel neo-Georgian architecture.

In this case, this college started out as a junior college extension of Oldest Southern College, declared its independence, got a makeover with a couple of master’s programs for “university” status (like putting a ribbon on a pig), and a subsequent reconstruction as a Public University with a Private Liberal Arts ethos (which is what I thought Oldest Southern College still is [it keeps "college" in its name, but is really a doctoral-granting university]).

So a mad building boom over the past ten years, and dorms, library (named after the president and his wife), and other buildings in Collegiate Colonial style (like Oldest Southern College). But the buildings have that bland inoffensiveness that one associates with banks, pretentious hotels, or evangelical churches: lots of pediments, oversize decorative columns, an absurdly tall cupola, creamy white walls. The library’s marbled foyer and grand staircase remind one of a hotel, but they may be because hotels are the only buildings that still try to be grand. Outside the new performing arts center, cigarette urns are Home Depot planters filled with sand. The windows appear to be vinyl-framed double-paned, ecological but like the brick facades flat and textureless.

When their children can’t get into Oldest Southern College, the exurban Republicans can feel comfortable about their children attending here. Inoffensive, textureless, lacking in detail or real history.

The last day of MLA’s annual convention. The conference has appeared in local and national news media, as always at this time of year, though this year the headlines have seemed less preoccupied with presenters’ clever or controversial paper titles and more on the deleterious effects of the grim economy and the challenges of digital media.

Last night the panel that I organized, “Translation and Medicine” (which I originally called “Translational Medicine” until conference organizers prevailed upon me to change it) went well. We were exiled to the gulag of the conference: the last session time slot on the last night of the meeting. However, we had about a dozen and a half audience members. Rishi Goyal, MD, (”The Widening Gyre: Transcription and Translation in the Medical Sciences”) offered a rhetorical analysis of the tropes of codes, language, semiotics, reading, and writing that have been used in medical science over the past half century. Anne Bavier, PhD, RN (”Nursing: In a Language They Can Understand”) provided a historical analysis of the ways in which the nursing profession, nursing education, and nursing science have entailed a variety of forms of translation. Finally, Elizabeth Lee, PhD, RN, (”Challenges of Translation in Instrument Development”) described her research translating the Beck Postpartum Depression Screening Scale into Chinese.

The art and science of health care are fundamentally semiotic and hermeneutic activities. The healthcare practitioner reads the body’s signs, attends to and interprets the patient’s narrative of symptoms, and interprets visual representations via imaging technologies or quantitative data from empirical tests. In a reading of Plato, Hans-Georg Gadamer in The Enigma of Health notes the congruence between rhetoric and health care: “Just as the apparently specific tasks of rhetoric must be integrated into the whole philosophical way of life, so too something similar is the case with all those means of treatment which medicine applies to the human body in the hope of restoring its health.”

And as the philosopher of science and the formulator of the concepts of “paradigm shifts” and “scientific revolution,” Thomas S. Kuhn, observed in his essay “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice,” even the supposedly common language of science entails interpretation: “Proponents of different theories are . . . like native speakers of different languages. Communication between them goes on by translation, and it raises all translation’s familiar difficulties.”

Afterward, I attended the reception hosted by Rosemary Feal, MLA’s executive director, held on the 31st floor of the Loews Hotel with spectacular views of the city. Hardly knew anyone there, but wandered around a bit to take in the vistas until I decided to stand with my cranberry juice (I avoid alcohol later in the evening) by the elevator. Standing in one place looking amused, serene, and mildly enigmatic is effective at parties where you don’t know anyone. In short order, Richard Kopley (Penn State), whom I’d seen and chatted with briefly the first day, stopped to chat and we ended up in a lengthy conversation. I first met Richard, who is co-editor of Resources for American Literary Study, several years ago at MLA when he complimented a paper that I’d presented to the Emily Dickinson Society on nineteenth-century verse manuscripts in friendship albums and manuscript anthologies. A scholar in the American Renaissance with a focus on Poet, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville, Richard exemplifies some of what is best about our profession: passion for his work, curiosity, willingness to encourage and promote the work of others. He has had a particularly productive year, after which he is looking forward to some new and very different creative endeavors.

Later this afternoon I will present my position paper (“In Media Res: Browsing, Grazing, and Googleizing Scholarly Knowledge”) at the final CELJ panel, “Ranks, Brands, and Editorial Process.”

Reunions

Many spontaneous reunions occur at MLA, some planned, most serendipitous. I bump into Bob and Sylvia Scholnick (College of William & Mary) on the train. Attending Bob’s session that night, I catch up with John Miller (Longwood University) whose dissertation director was Bob Scholnick. I stop to say “Hi” to Richard Dellamora outside the Loews Hotel (where I’m staying because I visited his room there a couple of years ago when we both had recently published chapters in a book and liked the setting). I catch up with former community college colleague Miles McCrimmon who chairs a panel (see below). Two longtime colleagues re-discover each other on a hotel elevator, one informing the other that she is preparing to retire. Old friends talk over breakfast, one lamenting that his post-retirement part-time position has been eliminated in cost-saving measures.

Genealogies

In Candide, Voltaire satirizes the pretensions of Europe aristocrats’ genealogies (including the bastard Candide’s noble but illegitimate descent) with their multiple heraldic quarterings, at one point providing a genealogy of Dr. Pangloss’s venereal disease. Higher education frequently appears as hierarchical and genealogical. If your PhD is from an Ivy League ranked institution, you studied with So-and-son. If your PhD is from a state flagship university, you studied with a student of So-and-so. If your PhD is from a lesser state university, you just studied.

Community Colleges

After making my second pass at the book publishers’ exhibits, I stopped in the far end of the exhibit hall where a food and beverage concession sustains (and robs: $3 for a bottle of tap water) scholars exhausted by words. I chatted with the cashier, a South Asian man whose son, I learned is at a Catholic high school and is now considering colleges and universities. “Why do colleges costs so much?” he asked me. “As much as $40,000 a year!” I explained that this conversation would take some time, but that only private colleges would be likely cost that much; if his son attended a public college or university it would cost much less, probably less than $40,000 for a full four years. And, I offered, if he attended a two-year community college, he would earn an associate’s degree and could transfer as a junior into a bachelor’s degree program at a university. “No, no one wants a community college student.”

The Rodney Dangerfield of higher education, community colleges offer affordable higher education, smaller class sizes, and learning support services. State supported community colleges offer transferable degrees permitting students to complete their general education requirements.

I sit in a session (“Intergenerational Teaching and Learning in Community Colleges”) sponsored by the MLA Committee on Community Colleges, a relatively new unit in professional organization top heavy with literary critics and scholars, including superstars of the cultural professoriate, a class that has, even at their most genial, not been quite sure what to do with general education of undergraduates, much less with the hoi polloi. The presider for the session is a former Virginia Community College System colleague, Miles McCrimmon (J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Richmond, Virginia). Maybe it’s the schedule (mid-afternoon, day three), but the attendance is disappointingly small (maybe about 30 people). Community college faculty are not likely to be members of the MLA; for the twenty years that I taught at a community college, I was the only MLA member in my department, and I knew only a few others at fellow Virginia community colleges. Community college English faculty members are more likely to be members of the National Council of Teachers of English (which includes language arts teachers in K-12) and the Council on College Composition and Communication.

Research and theoretical labor (like literary criticism) frequently trumps practice-based labor (like teaching composition). Teaching (the primary mission of the community college professor) is lower down the hierarchy among many of the denizens at MLA. Ask a professor here, “What are you working on these days?” (a guaranteed conversation starter at any gathering of university professors), and you will rarely hear, “Well, I’m teaching this course and that one, and this is what my students are up to.”

Ranks

A viral epidemic has been a frequent preoccupation of this year’s MLA meeting: The infection of humanities publishing with science-derived journal rankings and “impact factor” bibliometrics.

In addition to two panels of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Structure of the Annual Convention organized the session “Journal Ranking, Reviewing, and Promotion in the Age of New Media.” Journal rankings allegedly have accuracy but their lack of accountability (who is ranking, by what criteria, and with what opportunities for appeal?) is critical, particularly when ranking systems may be used for hiring, tenure and promotion decisions.

Questions posed to this panel: What challenges, opportunities and obstacles to scholarly journals in the age of digital media? What are the effects on journals in the Americas of the new externally performed European Reference Index in Humanities (ERIH)? What benchmarking guidelines might be employed? How are factors related to identity (race, &c) and international culture affected?

The varied panelists made divergent observations. Digital divides exist between northern and southern hemispheres, East and West, but also between scholars at large universities (which can afford to subscribe to digital aggregators) and at small colleges (which cannot afford aggregated digital subscriptions). The question of accessibility dovetails with demographics and culture. In a context of diminishing resources and raised expectations, how do we define (and document) faculty productivity? How do we evaluate quality and effect in the humanities?

Protection may be as important as access: Open access may undermine scholarly journals (which cost to review, edit and publish). Controlled access is necessary in order to continue to subsidize scholarly publication. Clone Web sites (that look like a scholarly journal) may be threaten the credibility of journal. Universities’ open access repositories (“scholarly commons” increasingly required by universities) undermine the economics of scholarly journals. Perhaps the iTunes model would work: You can preview the first page or two of the article but you have to pay $.99 to download the whole article. New media shrink the distance and time of scholarly communication.

A November 2008 report by the Association of Research Libraries and the Ithaka group, “Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication,” identifies eight forms of digital scholarly communication: e-journals in electronic format only; reviews of scholarly works; preprints and working papers; encyclopedias and annotated content; data resources; blogs; discussion forums like e-mail lists; and professional and scholarly Web hubs. Peer review and revision are time consuming, whether they are for a print or a digital journal. Faculty need to be trained to evaluate digital scholarship.

In European universities a faculty member’s funding level will depend on ERIH ratings, which are established without clearly identified evaluators or criteria; it is an administrator’s dream but a scholar’s nightmare. Moreover, metrics can be manipulated. Academic editors are unpaid and see themselves as serving scholarship, so editing could be distributed via digital media, but we have been outsourcing judgments about quality often without recognizing it. Members of tenure and promotion committees, for example, may not read all of the applicant’s publications, relying instead on external reviews. We don’t train people for peer review; a declining number of people seem willing to conduct peer review, which may be the last vestige of the old boy network, noblesse oblige. Journals will no longer exist as a product, but as a process: technologies of colloquy. It would be best if academia developed (and made available for free) the best technologies for us to do value peer review, value editing and value colloquy.