Discussion in a Faculty Office, Part II

It has been almost five years since I’ve written about Sam Stamper, the young Assistant Professor who was taken to task by one of the most senior full professors in his department following a classroom observation. We left Stamper as he ran off to teach.

After class, he contacted his union representative and filed a grievance against Professor Fayles and asked his department chair to schedule another observation. The chair conducted it himself. When, a few months later, the grievance succeeded, the report Fayles submitted was removed from Stamper’s file, the glowing one from the chair remaining.

Though the bullying attempted by Fayles did not succeed, that was not the end of such incidents in the department. Today, with a new chair and quite a number of retirements (including Fayles), the atmosphere is quite different—though inappropriate attempts at intimidation do still happen, even to Stamper.

The college has a seven-year tenure clock and Stamper’s turn came up last fall. He decided to apply for promotion to Associate at the same time. In both cases, he was successful. Tenure and promotion will commence at the start of the fall, 2012 semester. The process was not without pitfall, however, and bullying once again interfered in what should have been a much more collegial (though rigorous) process.

Professor Anthony Scolia, whose specialty is the history of the English language, is one of the only senior members of the department with real scholarly credentials. Though he never has produced a book, his articles have appeared in respected venues and he has been an influential officer in several professional organizations. Proud and a little bitter over having spent his career far from the research institutions where he feels he belongs, Scolia has always seen himself as different from his professional colleagues at the college. He does, however, take his responsibilities to the department seriously, actually reading promotion files (for example) before voting on them.

Stamper shares an office with seven other junior faculty, a long room with an aisle down the middle with alcoves on each side separated by moveable dividers. The eight can talk together, if they want, by simply rolling their chairs a few feet towards the middle, where all eight desks can be easily seen. One day last fall, Scolia walked into the office and stopped at the center-most point in the aisle, near Stamper’s desk, which was one of the middle two on the left. Five of the occupants happened to be there at the time.

“I have a bone to pick with you.” One hand behind his back, he stared at Stamper, who looked up in surprise. “Take out a dictionary.”

“No.” Stamper had no idea what was going on, but he wasn’t going to accept such condescension. “Just tell me what your problem is.”

“What does ‘adumbrate’ mean?”

“You tell me…. I’m sorry, but I don’t understand your point.”

Scolia brought his hand forward. It had been concealing Stamper’s book, borrowed from the promotion file. “On page 13 of this book of yours, you use the word incorrectly.”

Stamper stared up at Scolia, who was now leaning over him, the book waving under Stamper’s chin. In defense, Stamper stood, finding himself nose-to-nose with Scolia.

He didn’t know what to do or what to say. Sandbagged, he wasn’t willing to argue a point of definition with a man who had made a career out of the minutia of the English language—a man who, also, would soon be sitting in judgment on him on the Peers Committee. But, with four colleagues watching, he couldn’t let this pass. So, he changed the subject, doing something he should not have done, for he knew what would hurt Scolia most, what his greatest career disappointment was.

“If you had ever written a book, you would know that errors get through, and in every single case. Now, give me that book,” he grabbed it out of Scolia’s hand, “it belongs in the chair’s office.” He stalked out of the office, leaving Scolia staring after him, speechless.

Even as he slipped the book back in its folder, still angry, Stamper knew he had done the wrong thing. In his mind, he was already composing what he knew would be a necessary apology. By the next day, he had both emailed Scolia and spoken to him personally, telling him he had reacted poorly. Scolia did nod graciously, but gave no more of a response than that.

And ‘adumbrate’? Had Stamper used it incorrectly?

He looked carefully at his book, at the passage. He had, he saw, been using two meanings, the one (‘to obscure’) carrying ironic hints of the other (‘to foreshadow’). Clearly he had failed to communicate the nuance he had intended, but… all he could imagine was that Scolia had seized on the first thing he had seen that could be used to put Stamper in his place.

Looking a little deeper into the book, Stamper winced. There was plenty in it he could be criticized for, and he knew it, remembering problems as he paged through. It was a good thing, he thought to himself, that Scolia had stopped so quickly and on such a trivial point.

The Return of the Public Intellectual?

One of the biggest frustrations for me, as a scholar, is continual denigration (by certain academics) of my work as addressing only a "general audience." I can't be a "real" intellectual, you see, unless I write so that only a few specialists can parse my sentences and unearth my meaning. [It's also frustrating that I am criticized on the other side, as being too difficult for some readers--but that's another story for a different post.] Each time it happens, my memory forces up John Collins Bossidy's bit of doggerel about a Boston:

Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God.

I don't want to live in that world, and don't want to write for it, either. Still, each time I read "general audience," I bristle--even though that's exactly who I am writing for. A couple of weeks ago, I received a comment back from the editor of a volume I am contributing an essay to, telling me that my piece would be perfect for sparking discussion in a college classroom or a synagogue group. I wanted to feel complimented, but I had a slight suspicion that I was being damned with faint praise (though the editor is including the chapter). Yesterday, Robert Leston, my co-author of Beyond the Blogosphere, pointed out that there is a new description of the book on The Free Library. It says the book is for "general readers"--and it is. Yet I can't help feeling vaguely insulted, though that is exactly what I want the book to be. The power of intellectual snobbery affects me, whether I want it to or not.

The culture of the academy is strong--and I feel its disdain even as I claim not to care. Though I pine for the days when college professors were regularly invited to speak to church groups and at public libraries (after all, if William James did it, why can't we?), I still feel the force of the intellectual snobbery that has become contemporary academia.

I have felt this for a long time. In fact, it is one of the reasons I didn't enter the profession on completing my PhD. I didn't want to live as "removed" from the world as I saw my contemporaries in academia living--intellectually, at least.

Or culturally.

For my father's generation, moving into academia hadn't been a right or an expectation. They had come back from World War II to a future that swept them in totally unexpected directions (he became a professor of Psychology)--but they had behind them something other than experience within universities. Though I had seen no war, I was oddly proud, during my first, tentative semester as a grad student, of showing up to class in my blue work uniform with "VW" over one pocket and "Aaron" over the other, grease under my fingernails and a red rag dripping from my back pocket. I had, at least, experience of something other than school.

So it was that, on defending my dissertation, I joined Peace Corps, where I worked in agriculture (teaching farmers techniques for using oxen for plowing in northern Togo, West Africa). Later, I spent more than a decade running the store/cafe I established in a brownstone Brooklyn neighborhood. It was only when I started writing again, when I realized I could use my "intellectual" skills to reach a "general" audience, that I began to consider entering academia as a new career. It was only when I realized I could teach in a school like City Tech, where the students bring in a world far beyond my experience, that I became enthusiastic about the idea.

Almost as soon as I began teaching full-time, I also started agitating, trying to change the culture, trying to move my colleagues beyond their complacency. This got me into a bit of trouble, but it also led me to a greater understanding of why the likes of David Horowitz (with whom I developed something of a contentious relationship) view American universities so poorly. Though Horowitz is as myopic as "the professors" he criticizes, he does have a point: the arrogance, both cultural and intellectual, of university faculty is both unwarranted and harmful. It further isolates the professoriate from the culture as a whole and provides an echo chamber that masquerades as affirmation.

We professors, I thought, need to get out more.

There are many reasons we don't, but the primary one may be our archaic and isolating processes of tenure, promotion, and funding. Each of these looks to small groups for affirmation, creating "ivory tower" hierarchies that serve as barriers to concentration on work addressed to people outside of the academy. Of course, there are needs for decision-making bodies, but they don't have to be insular and unquestionable--as many of these are.

In addition, as the "Boycott Elsevier" movement is now showing us quite dramatically, we have allowed other barriers to be raised between academia and the "general" public--in this case, making access to scholarly journals available only to those who can afford it or who have affiliation with academic institutions who have decided to afford it.

Though speaking to small groups in churches, film societies, and other interest groups may not have the same cachet as presenting a paper at MLA, it is just as valuable an exercise--even though our inward-looking peers committees may not think so. Though writing an op-ed or a feature for our local, small-circulation weekly doesn't look quite so fantastic on a CV as a piece in PMLA, it may get as many readers, and spark as much discussion. Then there's blogging (since starting to aggregate, a bit, "boycott Elsevier" on Facebook, I've been looking at more academic blogs than ever before--and am impressed by their range and intelligence) and online publications like Raging Chicken, edited by my friend and former colleague Kevin Mahoney. Even though the audiences for these venues may not be "intellectuals," contributing to their debates and discussions is an intellectually viable activity, and it need to be considered so.

We rue the loss of the "public intellectual," but we do very little, actually, to return that figure to its place. It's time we do so--by acting the part ourselves and by rewarding, rather than disparaging, our colleagues who try to do the same.

Remodeling Academic Journals

As David Gosser's comment on my post yesterday indicates, there are already a number of possibilities online that can be used by and for new types of academic journals--and people are taking advantage of them. The problem lies in finding an audience, in getting the necessary eyes and necessary responses, the two things that make an academic journal viable.

This is why I would like to see large research universities and university systems become their own aggregators, so to speak, taking control of dissemination of the scholarship generated within their walls, making it so that all of it is easily available and easily transferable. The universities are paying for this work, after all (supplemented by grants, in many cases, but it is in the universities where primary responsibility lies), and should want to see it made use of in the best possible manner.

Many schools already provide web pages for faculty, but these are generally rudimentary and are rarely seen as an integral part of research projects or of university activity. Taken more seriously as "housing" for promotion and tenure documentation, however, these could become key parts of a broader university structure and could serve functions far beyond what they do now. Professors could keep (at least partial) public listings of the books and articles (and more) that they are using in their current work--surveys of the literature, as it were--listings that could then be assessed as a whole, showing what, in a particular field, is proving most useful to ongoing research. Blogs, even like mine, could also be housed under the university umbrella, as could wikis, interactive journals, and online versions of print works, both journals and books. People could even "publish" scholarly work through their pages--it happens now, but generally only when the scholar has already reached a level of institutional security. The site's statistics could tell whose work is generating the most interest outside of the particular university or system and could lead people to look at things they might otherwise have missed.

All of this, and much more, could be done right now. Some of it is, in tepid ways, but it will need much more high-profile leadership and top-level university support for it to really have an impact. It will require universities to recognize that they are control of resources that they are not adequately handling but will also require trust in the faculty that is, quite frankly, not often seen, these days. For, if the university decides to act as gatekeeper for such a site, the purpose will be defeated, and scholars will find themselves migrating away--just as is happening now with the commercial academic journals and with blind peer review.

There is a unique opportunity available right now for universities to re-situate themselves in terms of scholarship and the public--in terms of scholarly publishing. They can take their university presses, their journals, their "faculty commons," their department websites and make them into something cohesive and useful, something that facilitates scholarship in ways never before seen.

Will they? I don't know. The opportunity has been around for a number of years, now, but nothing has been done at an institutional level by any research university or university system that I know of.

I hope that will change.

Update: At City Tech, we are now encouraged to update evidence of scholarship in our files with digital documents. That's all well and good, but those documents often cannot be made public on our websites due to copyright considerations. Publishers are quite jealous of their rights, and don't even care much for authors presenting their own work, if that work falls under publisher rights. One of the changes that could occur, were a system such as what I describe above instituted, is that copyright could be viewed a bit more leniently. The ownership of the Intellectual Property would rest with the scholar or, possibly, with the institution. It could be offered, then, depending on the circumstances, under Creative Commons licensing, something much more useful to future scholarship than ownership rights as presented under current copyright law (Creative Commons, in general, provides a way for giving blanket approvals for many different types of copying and usage of IP).


Instead of hiding what we are doing behind IP walls, putting all of our work together on a public web page would allow us to participate more readily in the broader conversations going on both within and beyond our disciplines. It would also make it easier for promotion and tenure committees to evaluate scholarship, for it would be easily compared to what others are doing.


Secrecy and protection of IP may have their place (or may not), but these should not be our main concerns as scholars. All of us, as professionals, should be working to enhance knowledge and its dissemination. We did not go into academia to make money, after all, but to learn, to teach, and to explore.

Why Keep Academic Journals As They Have Been?

Over the past decade, newspapers have learned that they need to change to survive. The deaths of papers all over the United States made that quite apparent, and the journalism industry, though hating to do it, learned to adapt. Today's newspapers aren't merely print, but are intertwined with other media, including television, radio, and websites of many natures, including blogs, online versions of the print edition, and quite a bit more. Flexibility and adaptability have become part of any newspaper model.

Academic journals, not having had to respond to either changing readership habits or advertising models, have not similarly expanded. With "captive" writers--scholars who need to publish in "name" academic venues in order to gain grants, tenure, and promotion--clamoring to provide them with content and libraries (not themselves beholden to any commercial model) trapped into paying almost anything the publisher demands, there has been little incentive for change. Even online, an academic journal (with a few significant exceptions, of course) looks little different today than it did a quarter of a century ago.

The newspapers had to adapt--or die. For academic journals, there has been no similar need.

So far, at least.

It may take an act of some bravery, but the mechanics of presenting a digital-age replacement to the traditional academic journal, one that can easily step into the "certification" role of the "top" journals, are not hard to imagine. The bravery will come when one large university or university system says, "Enough!" and offers its own replacement, challenging the rest of academia to show why the new entity is not as scholarly and relevant as any older venue.

The universities, after all, are paying for the work that the commercial academic-journal publishers are profiting from. They don't need to continue giving scholarship away for the commercial gain of others. On the other hand, they don't need to lay their own proprietary blanket over the work of their professors, as commercial enterprises do when their employees create. They can find ways of presenting and promoting the work their scholars do, ways that promote the university, the scholar, and subsequent work based on that presented.

Sure, there are plenty of academic journals housed in universities and even colleges. But these tend to be in individual "silos," each one standing on its own and not as part of a system-wide collective, well channeled, mapped, and linked. Such a system could provide a home for "traditional" academic journals, but also for blogs related to them, or aggregating sites relevant to particular topics. Some parts of the collective could be carefully structured, vetted, and edited, while other portions could be clearly informal. The trick would be to make the whole easily negotiated, both by visitors and by scholars, particularly by scholars wishing to contribute, or to update their contributions.

Problems, in terms of university administration, will come when desire to protect reputation butts up against academic freedom, as will happen. This, probably, is one reason why nobody has yet to offer a large, freewheeling site of this sort.

What we would have would be something akin, in part, to academia.edu, a blog, a wiki, an online academic journal, and much more--all structure so that they interact, so that a researcher can go back and forth between parts with ease, and can even organize documents, providing their own aggregation within the whole.

Once something like this appears--a CUNY Research Commons (to imagine one in my own system), for example--the commercial journals will begin to disappear and the non-profit journals will migrate into such sites. Scholarship will begin to be more accessible and usable. The universities will be able to boast of work that is there for all to see, and scholarship, in general, will be able to come out from behind the walls that have been built, too often, around it.

Boycott Elsevier? Yes, But the Real Solution Lies Elsewhere

One does not become an academic to get rich. Even the most successful, those who end up owning a patent or writing a best-selling book, earn paltry amounts when set against any real standard of wealth. The reasons one does become an academic are myriad, from passion for teaching and/or research to desire for a safe and predictable haven in a chaotic world.

No one, though, goes into academia with the desire to make others rich. We may want to help others succeed, but we do not expect them to use what we have done to reach high levels of profit, profit that comes, in part, through charging us to use "our" work in further scholarship.

What we are seeing in the growing Elsevier boycott is a cultural clash. On one side are the academics who are both philosophically and culturally attached to the idea of the commons. Our work depends on the work that has gone on before us. For us to work effectively and efficiently, we need access to as much of that as we can possibly have--quickly and cheaply. With access to the commons, we can contribute to the commons, allowing all of us to rise on the generated tide.

On the other side are those who believe that profit is the single most important motivating factor, and that it is production through desire for profit that propels the world forward. Elsevier, in a "Message to the Research Community," says that:

While some of the facts about Elsevier are being misrepresented, the depth of feeling among some in the research community is real and something we take very seriously. We’re listening to all the concerns expressed and redoubling our substantial efforts to make our contributions to that community better, more transparent, and more valuable to all our partners and friends in the research community.

All of which may be true--but it does not address the problem: No matter what it does, Elsevier will always come to scholarly publishing from a perspective different from that of the scholars, one that constrains and limits necessary resources.

The real solution to the problem that the boycott is trying to address, then, will never lie in Elsevier. The company (and all the others like it) saw an opportunity for profit and took it.

As academics, our real aim beyond the boycott itself must be reform of our own institutions and culture, reform that will close the window of opportunity that the Elseviers have responded to so profitably. There are a number of ways we can do this, as institutions, departments, and individuals.

Colleges and universities expect scholarly work from their faculties, but provide only minimal possibilities for publication of that work, letting it be 'outsourced' to the likes of Elsevier instead of using their own considerable power to take advantage of the scholarship they have, after all, paid for.

Departments still rely on un-examined and outmoded concepts of peer review for re-appointment, tenure, and promotion. "Name" journals (often owned by for-profit enterprises) are accepted as legitimate venues for publication uncritically--the work itself rarely even being considered, as long as its place of publication is top-tier. If we can start moving towards a model that examines the scholarship itself, allowing something published in an open-access journal (or even on a blog) equal standing if the work proves equally valuable, there will be less and less reason for publication in the commercial academic journals.

As individuals, especially once we have achieved tenure and promotion, we can add to the legitimacy of alternative venues by offering them our scholarship first, and by serving on their boards and review panels. This will help give younger scholars a little more confidence when they look to publish, confidence in seeing their work appear elsewhere than in the journals of companies like Elsevier.

The Myth of Peer Review--And Helping Make Academic Gatekeeping Work in Digital Environments

Peer review has long been something of an unexamined black box. Something is peer reviewed? We accept that it has been checked and re-checked, examined and tested. Just look at the way it is used in the popular media--"peer review" is accepted as reflecting a process of rigorous vetting. In situations of promotion, re-appointment and tenure within academia itself, it is often seen as a necessary benchmark indicating importance. We imagine, without ever really examining it, that peer review is a carefully crafted and considered system. We imagine that it is a process of submission, consideration, reflection, and review--and it can be, in fact. The system of Kairos explicitly fosters just this, through a three-step process open to author, editors, and reviewers. [During the question-and-answer part of our recent MLA panel, Kairos editor Cheryl Ball did make it clear that "open," in this context, does not mean "public," but open to all of the participants--in contrast to "blind" peer review where the names of author and reviewers are hidden from each other.] Most peer review, however, is neither carefully structured nor tailored to improvement of submitted work. The peer review system was never a careful creation; it only appeared in response to need--a need that has now changed completely. It's value--as a whole, at least--is the result of myth, not fact.

The range of what peer review can be is extensive. From Kairos with its deliberate process meant to help an author build something substantive to proforma rubber-stamping of what an editor wants, peer review can be used, also, for a variety of purposes. For the most part, it's a rather simple system: an editor of an academic journal receives a submission. After an initial vetting (often of the researcher's credentials, the formal aspects of the paper, and the surface logic of the presentation), the editor (not likely to be a specialist in the particular area of the paper, though probably someone within the same or related field) chooses from a panel of reviewers two or three people whose interests and expertise relate more closely to the paper under consideration. The reviewers, generally (like the editor often is) unpaid, have been selected by the editor or editorial board for their willingness to review in a timely fashion and on the basis of their own publications.

Much of the time, the review is conducted "blind." That is, the reviewers have no access to the name of the writer, and the writer (when receiving reviewer comments) has no idea who the reviewers were. This process was established to ensure no favoritism and no negative consequence. Unfortunately, as with almost any closed system, it has led to just the opposite, and to an unwillingness to take risks on the part of those submitting to peer-reviewed journals--when you don't know who is going to be judging your work, and you need positive judgment for your own career, you are unlikely to stray too far from the standard line of thought in your field.

Though it has been a system that has not faced the challenges that gatekeeping in journalism has (not until recently, that is--see my posts here and here), peer review probably worked as well as any system within a milieu of scarcity--during a time when it just was not possible to publish everything any scholar (or anyone at all) wrote, when the expense of publication required selection. Yes, it can be unfair, but it can also work quite well, when the editors, reviewers, and authors are able to cooperate with each other to improve the scholarly product. Personally, I don't think it should ever have been "blind," but I do understand even the motivation behind that.

When I said, during my MLA talk that blind peer review is dead, but just doesn't know it yet, that line was picked up for an Inside Higher Education article.  Since then, I've become something of a focal point of the debate over peer review, something I never expected nor really want. I've even been accused to being a technological determinist, though that was not my intent at all (I do not argue that technology is determining the death of blind peer review, but that it allows it to be taken off life support--the distinction is significant: the former makes the technology the driving force, the latter keeps the human in that position).

What worries most scholars isn't my claim. Most of us recognize the truth of it. What worries people is what will replace blind peer review. Are we in academia to face the tsunami of unfiltered information that seems to be today's internet without any way of determining what we should look at and what we can safely ignore? In asking this, we are following in the footsteps of journalism and of culture as a whole. What we are about to experience isn't new, but is something we are going to have to deal with--which is why I made my statement. The reality we have to face has already been dealt with (to some extent, at least) by journalism, where alternate means of gatekeeping are now in place in response to the explosion of 'citizen journalism' over the last decade. Blogging, for example, is no longer seen as a threat but as a tool that can be enfolded into any journalistic endeavor.

The old system of peer review, like the older versions of gatekeeping in journalism, are not effective within a digital environment where publication itself has ceased to be a nearly insurmountable barrier. We need to accept that ('peer review is dead'), but we haven't yet, not really ('but it just doesn't know it yet'). We shouldn't be arguing about that, nor is it worth our time to see the statement as one of 'technological determinism' or of anything else. It is simply a statement of observable fact, and a challenge for us in academia to decide what we want to bring to life in replacement. I'm not advocating anything by pointing this out, merely illuminating what should be obvious.

There's quite a bit going on today, activity that will lead to a replacement of blind peer review. Some of it has rather surprising outcomes, but it is all a question of experimentation, of learning. In some places, journals like Kairos are trying to take the older model and rebuild it for a digital age, making it more responsive to changing needs and more effective in promoting scholarship. Others, such as academia.edu and researchgate.net, are trying to use social-media formulae as means for sorting and presenting academic work. Science Works Magazine (soon to be Science Works Journal) is trying to use blog format and a new business formula to provide both gatekeeping and sustainability. There is much more going on, of course. All it takes to find it is interest and a little bit of time on the web.

In addition, in many academic departments, peer review is retreating as the standard for re-appointment, promotion, and tenure. In its place, scholars are asked to provide a broader grounding for proving the importance of their work. How many subsequent works cite the article, chapter, or book? What other reactions have there been to it? What is the distribution of the journal (just calling something "peer review" never should have been sufficient--and is less and less so, every year)? How many libraries hold the book? Who else contributed to the series, the journal, the volume--and what is their status? Rather than relying on a poorly understood outside process, departments are asking individual candidates to provide specific defenses of each piece of work presented. 

The old system, no longer sufficient, is being replaced. There's nothing we can do about that. If any of us wants to have an impact on the new system, we can't be spending our time defending what is already doomed. We can't even spend our time addressing the more obvious problems of peer review. That's like trying to put patches over the most rotten part of a roof when it is time for the whole to be replaced.

What we have here is the old situation where, if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. The sooner we accept that the old system of peer review is not only unsustainable but is, in fact, dead, the sooner we can all help the various experiments in replacement along to the point where academic gatekeeping is productive and supportive, furthering scholarship and promoting it, never narrowing it.

The Bearable Light of Openness: Renovating Obsolete Peer-Review Bottlenecks

This is a talk I gave at the Modern Language Association annual conference in Seattle 1/5/2012:

When I was opening my café in the early nineties, I redid the plumbing for the entire space. This meant, at the time, that a New York City plumbing inspector would have to sign off on the work before we could open. My licensed plumber was there, of course. We followed the inspector around, his face growing more and more glum as he looked at the new waste lines, the sinks, the hook-up to the espresso machine. Finally, when he had seen everything, he turned to the plumber and shrugged. The plumber suggested that they take a little walk around the block. When they returned, the inspector was smiling. He signed the necessary forms and left. When I asked the plumber how much I owed him for the bribe, he laughed and said I had already paid; it had been worked into his estimate.

A month or so after we opened, the inspector re-appeared. He sat on a stool and I gave him a complimentary cup of coffee. We chatted.

He told me a little about inspecting, including that he could always find problems enough to fail any installation. He gave me three or four examples from my own establishment, none of which was a problem, but all of which diverged from the letter of the law. He also told me that the law would change, that inspectors would no longer be required; the plumbers themselves would be permitted to conduct self-inspections. He was philosophical about it, telling me he was ready to retire anyhow, and that he had a nice bit put aside.

It has been many years and a housing boom since—and plumbing in New York City does not seem to have suffered. Just the opposite.

Had I been involved in academia at the time of my talk with the inspector, and had I been so inclined, I could have told him that I understood completely what he was talking about. There’s not a book or an article that a serious academic can’t make look foolish. You don’t even have to be particularly dishonest, just look to the details and forget the whole, forget the purpose, forget the possible effectiveness. If you don’t like the conclusion, the scholarly trail, the particular school of thought or the place where the scholar works, you can even ignore those and hide your bias, making a case against the work solely on petty grounds.

Until recently, the scholar whose work you are reviewing had best make the right payment, just as my plumber had done with the inspector. The payment’s not in money but in conformity. Peer reviewers, particularly those conducting blind peer review for academic journals, are picked because of status in their fields. They are the ones who have already made it; they define what is legitimate and are rarely open to challenge from those who have not yet reached “peer” status—the state of many of those writing for such journals. We all know this, and understand the corruption. Yet we continue to participate in the system. Well, some of us do.

Last month, I was asked to review an article for a rather prestigious venue on a topic relating to one of my books. The general editor had suggested to the area editor that I be asked. It was something of a set-up: the article contained no reference to my book, even though it purported to be an overview of the specialization. Clearly, the general editor had noticed this. For whatever reason, that editor did not want a positive review; I could be pretty well guaranteed not to give one. So, the burden of rejection was being passed on to someone the author could never identify.

I refused the opportunity, pointing out the omission and saying I did not believe it would fair for me to review the article. The area editor wrote back, clearly surprised, but thanking me for being so honest. I got the feeling that my response was a rare one. To respond otherwise, however, would have been just as corrupt as that plumbing inspector.

I’ve also been on the other side recently. An article I wrote was panned by a blind reviewer, one who, for whatever reason, had taken umbrage. To make a point, I had illustrated a parallel progression in two American institutions; the reviewer scathingly pointed out that I made no convincing case that the two are the same. Quite rightly; I wasn’t trying to, for they were tangential. The reviewer then listed a number of statements I had made, claiming I had not substantiated them. Again, quite rightly—but I hadn’t been trying to. At no point did the reviewer address my argument or refute my claims. There was no advice for the author in the review, and none for the editor, except “reject.”

So, I wrote back to the editor—who had praised the piece before sending it for blind review—and withdrew it, though the second review was not yet in. I love the editorial process, and love comments that can help me improve what I write—but not this. So, I published the piece myself, on my blog…

where I’ve already had a scathing comment from the right-wing political agitator David Horowitz: “Aaron why do you continue to peddle this horseshit about me, which you know not to be true?” Frankly, though Horowitz addresses my points no more than did the blind reviewer, at least he is willing to do it in public. I can respect that: Horowitz is nothing if not open about his prejudices.

All of this brings me to my main topics: bottlenecks and the dark.

In an earlier time, when there was limited space for publication, a rigorous pre-publication peer-review process could have been justified—to some degree, at least. Keeping it blind, though, had even less justification. An attempt to allow openness and honesty without consequence, it just as often produced pettiness. Today, when it is possible for anyone to publish at any time, we don’t need either the bottleneck or the darkness, especially since the process is so easily corrupted. Just as advances have made plumbing self-inspection safe and efficient, we now have open enough and strong enough post-publication review possibilities to make blind peer-review prior to publication unnecessary. As we all know, whether we admit it or not, it continues simply because we have made appearance in peered-review journals the standard for advancement. It continues because our committees on re-appointment, tenure, and promotion want an easy benchmark. We have not yet institutionalized post-publication review, though why that is baffles me. Wouldn’t the number of citations, reviews, and other responses give as strong an indication of the value of an essay as its original venue? Stronger, I’d say.

Especially since, in a digital environment, even the published essay can be improved in light of comments and criticism. And should be.

In response to an article by Richard Smith in Breast Cancer Research, Developmental Neuropsychologist Deborah Bishop wrote of “the real function of peer review, which should be to offer advice to the editor and the author.”[1] Sure, but why should this not be post-publication, in a milieu where change, unlike in the days of reliance on print, is easy? Bishop’s criticism of peer review is that it is often an easy way for editors to avoid making decisions—and she is right. This is why I prefer writing book chapters: anthology editors are quite focused on their topics and don’t pass things off. The function of any editor, today, should be to help strengthen essays that he or she has selected, for whatever reason. This should be the case in journals as well. Certainly, a peer-review process with this in mind could still start before publication, but there’s no reason it should become a bottleneck or a means for evaluation from the dark.

Journals like Cheryl-Ball edited Kairos have developed open and productive systems of review, in this case a three-tier process revolving around a named editorial board and the clear purpose of working with creators to strengthen their work. But even Kairos, a respected journal presenting the best, most cutting-edge of its field, is sometimes looked at askance by those evaluating careers. It is not, after all, a traditional, blind-reviewed journal. It’s system, though superior to blind peer review, is still sometimes seen as suspect.

My plumbing inspector had made his money, legitimate and otherwise. There’s money in peer review, too—and not only for the relics of the past. Perhaps this is part of the problem. Companies like Sage and Routledge make a great deal off of the peer-reviewed journals they own and continue to protect. Zoë Corbyn asks:

have these gatekeepers for what counts as acceptable… become too powerful? Is the system of reward that has developed around them the best?...

Unpicking the power of academic and scholarly journals, with their estimated global turnover of at least $5 billion (£3 billion) a year, is a complex business. There are an estimated 25,000 scholarly peer-reviewed journals in existence….

It is these - particularly the elite titles… - that are at the heart of the recognition-and-reward system…. From career progression to grant income, "wealth" within the academy is determined by the production of… knowledge as recorded in peer-reviewed scholarly journals.[2]

The owners of the journals make their money from the fact that scholars are beholden to them for creation of that “’wealth’ within the academy.” Those with that “wealth” have too little incentive to give it up—and they are generally the ones evaluating the advancement of others.

On the other hand, as Richard Smith writes:

what happens after publication can also be called peer review, and that, I believe, is the peer review that really matters - the process whereby the world decides the importance and place of a piece of research…. Many studies are never cited once, most disappear within a few years, and very few have real, continuing importance.

And the correlation between what is judged important in pre-publication peer review and what has lasting value seems to be small…. Many papers get very high marks from their peer reviewers but have little effect on the field. And on the other hand, many papers get average ratings but have a big impact'[3]

So what to do? Well, we’re already doing it. Joe Pickrell suggests we aim for:

1. Immediate publication without peer review….

2. One-click recommendation of papers….

3. Connection to a social network….

4. Effective search based on the collective opinion on a paper.[4]

I would add in a number of modifications, such as something akin to the political blog Daily Kos’s “trusted user” status for readers of any particular journal. And I would spotlight social-networking sites like Academia.edu, where scholars can post their own work, connect, and search keywords for pieces that might interest them.

For anyone still wondering why blind peer-review should be jettisoned, Smith provides a list of reasons:

Firstly, it is very expensive in terms of money and academic time….

Secondly, peer review is slow….

Thirdly, peer review is largely a lottery.....

A fourth problem with peer reviews is that it does not detect errors….

The fifth problem with pre-publication peer review is bias….

Finally, peer review can be all too easily abused…. [5]

Frankly, I find it odd that reliance on blind peer-review continues, especially in career evaluation—but it does. My own institution has recently instituted a third-year deans’ review where one of the benchmarks is at least one peer-reviewed publication.

Still, blind peer review is dead. It just doesn’t know it yet. It certainly doesn’t warrant renovation; the structure is collapsing. The bottleneck it once created is no longer necessary. It The situation in this regard is much like that of journalism, just five or six years ago, when the blogs were first seriously challenging a profession that had become almost terminally inward-looking and almost completely averse to change or innovation. Though I saw—and still occasionally see—old-style journalism’s stalwarts pounding the podium, red-faced, claiming that the lack of gatekeeping they imagined in the challenge of the blogs would destroy journalism forever, that has not happened. If anything, the profession is much more vigorous today, more varied and experimental—even though many of its older structures have collapsed. The plumber I used a couple of years ago said much the same thing about the state of his profession, post paid inspectors.

Kairos and Academia.edu are only two examples of what will replace those 25,000 peer-reviewed journals if those journals don’t begin to change. The money and other wealth generated by peer review will dwindle, as will the numbers. What is now 25,000 will soon be 2,500, and those will be the one that have changed, that have embraced openness and digital possibilities and the new sorts of post-publication review that seem to pop up every day. As journalism has found, gatekeeping does not die when new venues can be established cheaply and by anyone. It simply changes. Aggregators funnel the best or the selected, citations rise in import, and choice, such as that represented on WorldCat.org of library inclusions, becomes a significant benchmark. A deliberate and controlled editorial bottleneck becomes irrelevant.

This is probably the last year a panel like this will seem necessary. No matter how much we try, academics cannot hold the fort any more than journalists were able to. What we have to do is adapt, or we will be superseded—and there are few of us who, like my plumbing inspector, are willing to be pulled down that route. Whether we like it or not, we are going to have to bear the light of openness—and quite soon, now.

---

[1] Deborah Bishop, “Comment on ‘Classical Peer Review: An Empty Gun’ by Richard Smith,’ Breast Cancer Research, Volume 12, Supplement 4: Controversies in Breast Cancer Research 2010, http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/12/S4/S13/comments.

[2] Zoë Corbyn, “A threat to scientific communication,” The Times Higher Education, August 13, 2009, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=407705.

[3] Richard Smith, “Classical Peer Review: An Empty Gun,” Breast Cancer Research, Volume 12, Supplement 4: Controversies in Breast Cancer Research 2010, http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/12/S4/S13.

[4] Joe Pickrell, “Why publish science in peer-reviewed journals?” Genomes Unzipped: Public Personal Genomics, July 13, 2011, http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2011/07/why-publish-science-in-peer-reviewed-journals.php.

[5] Richard Smith, “Classical Peer Review: An Empty Gun,” Breast Cancer Research, Volume 12, Supplement 4: Controversies in Breast Cancer Research 2010, http://breast-cancer-research.com/content/12/S4/S13.

Field of Dreams: Academic Edition

One of the impacts of the digital revolution should be the breaking down of barriers even in academia, making it more and more possible for scholars to move out beyond their specialties, to collaborate, and to bring into their own concentrations work by others that might, at first, seem far removed from one's own area of study.  To some degree, this is happening.  In my own case, my original specialties were science fiction, genre literatures, and American literature more generally.  Because of the new exploration possibilities, I have been able to enter into specialized conversations beyond those areas more readily than once was possible.  This has allowed me to expand my brief to include cultural studies, film studies, and a great deal more.

A quarter or a century ago, I attended a meeting of radical behaviorists, almost all of whom were quite familiar with the jargon developed by B. F. Skinner (Skinner himself was there).  One heard phrases like "contingencies of reinforcement" batted around constantly and, in a smaller grouping, "mand," "tact," and "autoclitic."  No one, without having read Skinner's Verbal Behavior, could have made any sense of these last bits.  Today, on any smartphone, one can identify them in seconds and, if not participate in the discussions, at least understand a bit of them.  And, perhaps, even add to them from the outsider perspective that is always worth considering.

For a variety of reasons, the concept of disciplines (as we know them today) was established in universities in the later half of the 19th century.  The number of these has grown as time has passed with new departments being established with frequency.  Each of these centers around its own vision of an increasingly narrow "field," sometimes based on the "seminal" work of a particular scholar (Skinner for the radical behaviorists, for example) or even on a geographic area (Appalachian Studies, for instance) and the people who, though from diverse perspectives, produce work relevant to that region.  To establish a place for themselves with the university structure, groups must provide clear delineation between themselves and whatever department (or departments) they are coming out of.  One result of this is the pitched internecine battles between departments who feel that another has stepped on their prerogatives. 

The attitudes of separation this necessity engendered continue today as people insist on establishing new "fields."  This maneuvering, though perhaps necessary in the past because of the structures of academia, really has nothing to do with scholarly activity itself.  It simply provides a convenient place for a particular scholar to hang her or his hat.  Oh--and for those more interested in promoting careers rather than scholarship, it provides a whole new vista of positions, journals, and conferences, places where, at the beginning, competition is light--and where who you know or if you got there first is often more important than what you do.

To me, there's a great irony, today, in the claims for a "digital humanities" field, in demands for its 'place at the table.'  This is exactly the opposite of what I had imaged happening in academia as a result of the digital revolution.  Rather than continuing to limit conversations to certain in-groups, certain cognoscenti, I was hoping to see all sorts of barriers in academia start to crumble, from classroom walls to the fences around fields.

In a digital age, we have less need for division, for we can rely on digital tools to provide us greater connection instead, allowing for increased knowledge of both subject areas and those working within them.  We no longer need the restrictions of "field."  In fact, we should be promoting just the opposite, a revolutionary approach to academia, one that dispenses with disciplinary boundaries rather than creating more of them.  None of us needs to be in a department any longer, not if we are willing to rely on our digital tools for keeping track of who is doing what, where, and when.  In terms of our scholarship, digital tools allow us to evaluate ourselves and each other, and to see how even people across the world view the work, in a matter of moments.

One advantage of teaching at New York City College of Technology is that the school lacks, for the moment, any sort of English major.  That means that the vast majority of our classes in the English department are composition classes, and at a low level.  It also means that we don't have to "cover" as many specialties as do departments with their own majors.  It means I am able to write about journalism, about new media, about academic freedom, about popular culture, about film... about whatever I please... without being accused of stepping beyond what I was hired to do.

Until the other day, I didn't realize what a privilege this is.  In talking to someone teaching in a university where the English department recently split into two, into a Literature department and a Composition department, I learned that, in the Composition department, publication outside the "field" of Rhetoric/Composition does not count for tenure or promotion.  I was appalled.  Scholarship is only scholarship, to me, if you follow where it leads--even if that is far beyond your original goal or in a different direction completely.

We can "unfence" our academic fields today but, too often, we do not, but continue to follow patterns that, though they might have once been necessary, are no longer needed in this digital world.

Academic Commons [Updated]

Via Blogging Brande, I discovered Nick Montfort’s post on Grand Text Auto concerning open access and academic journals.

Let me start with a sober and analytic reaction: “Yippee!”

That out of the way, the battle between those of us who believe that the “commons” benefits everyone (in part, through what I call “the Grateful Dead effect,” from the impact of the band’s decision to encourage taping of shows and the trading of tapes—Steve Gimbel expands on this a bit on his blog) and those who believe the same about “ownership” extends well beyond academia. It has a particularly pressing and important connection to education, however, for decisions about ownership have an immediate and fundamental impact on what we can do in the classroom. And on the place of our research in the wider society (Montfort's immediate concern).

Montfort writes:

I think there must be a few things that those of us who are part of the scholarly publishing process can do to foster an open-access future. The easiest thing that I’m able to think of is simply not volunteering our labor to lock academic writing away from the public.

It’s ironic: We who most need unfettered access to knowledge are sometimes the most protective of it. Or, as Montfort describes, allow ourselves to be used by a process that results in what he calls “anti-publication”:

It may serve some credentialing purposes and help universities assess tenure and promotion cases, but it ends up restricting access to scholarly work rather than helping to publish that work, that is, helping to make it available to the public.

Yet many of us, even proponents of what Brad DeLong calls ”The Invisible College”, continue to support this process through continued writing and reviewing. With that in mind, Montfort sent this email to one journal requesting he act as a reviewer:

With regard to your request, I cannot agree to review for your journal right now. If [it] becomes an open access journal, I will be very glad to review articles for the journal.

“Bowerr” of Blogging Brande extends Montfort’s call a little bit:

I've grown more and more irritated by big journals, and I will be making subscription changes this year.

Montfort ends with this:

I was also thinking that those of us who are academics dealing with digital media have the chance now to determine whether we’re going to become one of those public-irrelevant fields where anti-publication is the norm and we speak only to ourselves, or whether we want to speak to and learn from those creating and encountering poems, games, art, drama, writing, and other sorts of digital work outside the university.

For us to speak effectively outside the narrow confines of educational institutions, we in academia need to start moving publication of our work online and into venues we create ourselves (without institutional backing), developing a web of reference and insistence that evaluation for promotion no longer rest on the “quality” of the publication venue but on the work itself. We can even help establish the value of particular works through our links and comments. This is already going on, of course (even this post is part of it--in a very small way), but we've yet to reach the 'tipping point' that will bring us to academic respectability.

Idealistic? Yes. Difficult? Yes. But it is happening--on blogs and on new types of open-source online journals. As Montfort says, without it we will never establish the dynamism and relevancy in the wider world that so many of us want. Even as scholars, after all, we desire to be of the world, not simply about it.

[Update: Sherman Dorn makes the point that what Montfort is advocating is simply divisive, setting up a dichotomy where a spectrum would be preferable. While I agree, I also see that Montfort's position is one in need of loud expression, if it is going to have any impact at all.]

An Old Plaint, Renewed

There's a real lack of professionalism alive in our academic departments, an atittude that cares more for the nicety of bureaucracy and its rewards than for our academic goals.

So?

What's so startling about that?

Nothing.

But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be fought, or that it doesn't deserve the pointing out.

Two of the problem areas, release time and department service, should remind us of how we professors ought to be viewing what we do, as opposed to the way we are actually looking at things. Or, rather, as some among us are actually seeing our activies (the majority of professors are conscientious and caring--but I'm not talking about them).

There's a grant program at CUNY that provides release time for research. A good idea... a necessary signal of support for scholarship, aside from the real help it gives. Yet faculty members are encouraged to apply not because it can really aid their efforts, but because it gives release time from teaching. That is, the goal becomes the lessening of the teaching load, not the assist to research. People are actually advised to create project proposals so they can get the release time. “If you do this,” people are told about many, many campus activities, “you can get release time.”

That's backwards. The release time should be granted to support activities that real professional academics would be doing anyway.

Another way that CUNY supports faculty scholarship is through generous release time over the first years of employment. I used six hours last spring to finish Blogging America and will use three this coming spring so that I can work on the conference Ann Seaton and I are organizing, “Race and New Media.” Thing is, I am taking the release time to help me do better what I would do, no matter what, not simply because I can.

The emphasis on release time also makes teaching seem a burden, not one of the dual centers of our professional activity. 'One should do anything to get out of teaching' seems to be the the underlying assumption. Following from this, release time comes to be some sort of perk, frequently doled out by department chairs as reward, the tasks sparking the release proving far less than onerous.

In some instances, people turn release time into private fiefdoms, making a sketchy yearly show of activity for what is really a way to reduce their workload. As a result, things that should get done don't get done, the release time actually becoming a roadblock where it was supposed to provide smoother pavement.

One of the side-effects of release time is that quite a number of more senior faculty are able to withdraw from intense involvement with their departments. Well, the actual number of these people may be small, but the impact can be large—for these people sit in judgment on promotion of their juniors. On people some of them hardly know at all.

This is one of the factors that has led to the ridiculously bloated reports on activities needed for promotion—some of them running to 600 pages or more. If the “peers” don't see one every day, don't know what one has been doing, they have to be informed somehow.

The reports, unfortunately, have become the driving force behind activity in many departments. “Do this, and you can put it down as department service.” “Save every piece of paper; you'll need them for promotion.” Here again, the cart is put before the horse. The report is supposed to be documentation of professional activities that should be a natural part of academic life. Instead, too often, the report becomes the end, the goal—and not simply a description.

This, coupled with the fact that some senior faculty members are so removed from departmental activities that they know little about their junior colleagues, can have tragic consequences.

I know one young professor, a leader of the junior faculty in his (very large) department, an informal mentor to all of the people who have followed him into the department, a man who has made a significant contribution to the way lower-level courses in the department are taught through his (often unseen) contribution to pedagogy, who was recently turned down for promotion, putatively because of a lack of department service.

His service, you see, could not be so easily documented. It was personal, and the personal doesn't fit into the bureaucratic, for it cannot be reduced to a form.

The tragedy is that his department may well lose one of its most dynamic younger members, making him a victim of bureaucracy where professionalism should have reigned.

On Learning the Value of Protocol

As one returning to academic life after several decades away, I've had a lot of fast learning to do. One recent lesson has been on the importance of protocol.

From a different perspective, that is.

When you're the boss, when the company is one you've created and run yourself, you do put procedures in place—and hope that your employees will follow them. But you are taking a holistic approach—and are developing means to achieve specific and clear goals,or to solve immediate problems. There's no “institutional memory” involved... hell, you are the institution.

In a huge university system like CUNY (with 19 campuses) and a history going back some 160 years, the situation is... how can I say it... slightly different. Things that seem arcane and simply there to confuse can actually turn out to have a certain amount of merit. So, I am finding, it is useful to go along with the system (though, as a good leftist, I can't believe I'm saying that) until you have seen its effect and can judge its utility through full knowledge of the situation.

A year ago, during my first tenure-track semester at New York City College of Technology, I met with the colleague who had observed my class for the obligatory post-observation conference. He sat me down and handed me his report. I immediately pulled out a pen and made to sign it.

He stopped me. “Read it first.”

“Oh, I'll read your suggestions for improvement, but I know I'm fine with whatever you say.”

“Read the whole thing. That's how it's done. Just do it to humor me. After all, I had to write it. And if I can follow procedure, so can you.”

And so I did, and we talked for a bit about the class... and then I signed. The whole thing was relatively painless and, I have to admit, I got something from it.

A year later, my fictional friend Sam Stamper had a rather peculiar observation conference that he worried might have a negative impact on his career. He didn't keep quiet about it, though, and asked a number of people what to do, including his union representative.

The union person told him that any observation report by Professor Fayles concerning that particular class and conference would be grounds for a grievance if it ended up in his personnel file.

Why? Because Fayles had not done what the man who observed me had: she had not written up her report before the conference, violating the protocol set forth in our union agreement. The Collective Bargaining Agreement that governs many of our professional actions is quite explicit:

Each observer shall submit, through the department chair, a written observation report... within one week of the observation....

The department chairperson shall schedule the post-observation conference for the employee within two weeks after receipt of the written observation report. The post-observation conference shall include the employee and the observer. (Article 18, 2.a and 2.b)

Stamper, of course, immediately arranged for a second observation by another observer—one that followed protocol exactly.

When I was so cavalier about protocol last year, I was brushing aside as merely bureaucratic nicety what I now realize is important protection for both parties in an observation. The man who insisted we follow the rules, a veteran CUNY professor, knew exactly what he was doing and why.

By forcing the observer to write a report (and a report whose parts are clearly spelled out on the required form) before the post-observation conference, and by inserting another person (the chair), a brake is placed on the process, if needed. When we write, we edit ourselves, trying words out and seeing, sometimes, that what we had intended to say is inappropriate. Fayles would have benefited by writing first, most certainly. During the conference, she would have had something to refer to and probably would have stuck to it, never getting angry or accusatory.

Even if her writing had carried in it her frustration with what Stamper represented to her (a change in the department that threatens to leave her behind), the chair would have been able to intercept her report, keeping her from presenting it to Stamper. Fayles and the chair could have talked privately, giving her a chance to air her grievances and the chair an opportunity to try to bring her in line with what he is trying to do to create a broader and more dynamic department.

But Fayles, like I would have before this incident, decided to ignore protocol and do things her own way. The result was a meeting that did no one any good and an observation report that, when finally written, alit in no file but that classic circular one.

“Discussion” in a Faculty Office

Fiction? Yes. But….

Full Professor Irma Fayles has been teaching at the inner-city institution since its days as a community college a quarter of a century ago. Never having published a book, let alone an article, she became a full professor at a time when the college had not re-envisioned itself as a four-year school with scholarship an important focus. Assistant Professor Sam Stamper is new to the college, but arriving with one book out already and another about to go to press. He doesn’t yet know the “traditions” of the school and has no preconceptions about its student population.

Fayles was recently assigned to observe Stamper and has decided that it is her job to put this tyro in his place, to teach him how things really are. He had asked her to attend his sophomore literature class where the students, over the semester, were reading four novels, four plays, and a number of works of poetry. The observation took place the day Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize. This conversation followed a week later:

Fayles: First of all, I must admit that you have a strong presence in the classroom. And you’re clearly a good and dynamic actor. But I must caution you: beginning with a mention of Lessing is going to do nothing for these students. You’ve got to consider who they are and what their backgrounds have been. They haven’t heard of Lessing, and aren’t likely to. This is just a bit of advice: work with things they know or will need to know; leave out irrelevancies.

Stamper keeps his mouth shut, though he cannot bring himself to nod any agreement. His chances of promotion and even retention, he knows, could be affected by Fayles’ evaluation of his class. Behind his straight lips, however, he bristles: the students, as he is well aware after even his short time at the school, know a lot more than many of his older colleagues believe, and have experienced a good deal in their short lives. Their world is no more limited than that of their professors. Doris Lessing might or might not ever again appear as a name before them, but now they could make some connection if she did. Furthermore, he thinks, there is something essentially classist, if not racist, about what Fayles is saying. The implication is that, at a “better” school, one with fewer blacks and immigrants, speaking of Lessing might be OK. But not here. He silently rejects Fayles’ implied thesis that, because the students come from what seems to her to be a limited background, their teachers cannot expect them to move beyond it, and should not even encourage them to try.

Fayles: I saw a lot of teaching in your class, a lot of pyrotechnics, but little learning was going on. Too much performance by you and too little activity on the part of the students. As a result, much of your class was wasted. You need to have different tasks, each an activity for the students, each lasting fifteen minutes or so. Otherwise you will lose them. Maybe have them read aloud, a paragraph each, and then write for a few minutes.

Here again, Stamper keeps his mouth shut, and once more can’t bring himself to nod. He simply sits and waits, looking at Fayles. Did Fayles see no difference between the needs of a remedial (or even first-year composition) classroom and a more advanced literature one? Or does she really believe that the only sort of learning possible for these students lies in mastery of a series of small tasks? In the context of this course, he is not interested in developing skills, but in encouraging students to think and to develop enthusiasm for reading and ideas—and he does not feel that reading a paragraph aloud or writing short paragraphs would contribute to that. He wants to bring his students into a more sophisticated dialog rather than falling into the simplistic thinking fostered by the sort of program Fayles had described. His class is themed around questions of generation of knowledge and his students are beginning to grasp and argue about the distinction between the believed and the demonstrable. Neither five nor fifteen minutes of writing—or of small-group discussion—is going to further that. In fact, any success that he has achieved would be lost.

And little learning? No, he had seen a great deal exhibited in the papers he had just returned to the students—book proposals, following the standard professional model, for works of fiction exhibiting some aspect of the problem of belief. Some of these students, whom Fayles believed couldn’t manage a task exceeding a quarter of an hour, had turned in creative and sophisticated ten-page proposals, some of which would actually make intriguing novels.

Fayles, he thinks to himself, mistakes activity for learning, one of the side effects of the “student centered” pedagogies of the 1970s. Though there is much to be said for Paolo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it is essentially a political statement, and one that moves classroom pedagogy in one particular direction for reasons that have as much to do with desire for cultural change as with the real needs of teaching and the learning implied by the act of teaching. It has led to the confusion of learning and doing, placing (for example) an undue emphasis on small groups, short writings, and other in-class exercises. These have their place, of course, but they need not dominate every classroom. In fact, they should not. What Fayles is promoting, furthermore, is actually a perversion of Freire, for she is turning his methodology into a means for furthering oppression rather than stopping it.

Fayles: Really, I don’t see why you should do the reading aloud, though you are very good at it. Have the students do it. It’s good for them.

How patronizing, thinks Stamper, still silent. Anyway, I am not teaching reading, but am trying to show a group of students who have never seen it the beauty prose can rise to. The passage I read was short, no more than a page or two, and my purpose was for the students to hear the skill of the author and the beauty of the phrasing without my telling them. There are times when it is appropriate and useful for students to read aloud (I use play cuttings read by students, for example, when teaching drama), but this was not one of them. Fayles, why have you put such a blanket rule in place, stating categorically that, if text is to be read, students should read it. I prefer a much more expansive and flexible view of the classroom. There are, one might say, more arrows than one in my quiver—and I choose the one best for the situation.

Now that I think on it, I wonder if she has actually read Freire, or had simply heard tell of his describing and debunking what he called the banking model of education, where passive students just give back interest on what they had been given—or worse, simply regurgitate what they have taken in. This was part of a simplistic concept of audience present from the 1950s through the 1980s, and not only in regards to the classroom. Watchers of television and movies were also considered passive receptacles. However, readers of books, for some reason, were not. It was rarely recognized that watching could be just as active and intellectually stimulating as reading. We are beyond that now, most of us, and realize that lack of physical motion is not lack of intellectual activity. Fayles wants me to go backwards; it’s not going to happen.

The movement towards “student-centered” classrooms was a response, in part, to what was seen as a patronizing, paternal system of education that, in many eyes, amounted to indoctrination, not education. The irony is that, today, it is people like Fayles, insisting on the Freire-influenced classroom, who are being accused (by critics on the political right) of indoctrinating rather than educating. The accusers, though I hate to admit it, are right to this extent: any attempt to enforce a cookie-cutter model does lead to conformity and not to thought. And the older models of education were not nearly as indoctrinating as many, in the heat of a political moment, came to believe.

Teaching by example of knowledge and enthusiasm, as the best lecturers have always done, amounts to something quite different from indoctrination. And it is a necessary element in a good education—though never the only one. Not every course should be a lecture/discussion of the sort Fayles observed, just as her model, while admittedly useful in certain contexts, should not be universal. Many of us, when we think back to the teachers who influenced us most, find that they were the ones who lectured and discussed—with fervor and finesse. We weren’t indoctrinated by these teachers, but were led by their passion to explore on our own. When we decide that such leaps into our own learning are not possible by our own students, we demean those students and block access to an important element of education. It was good enough for us, we are showing, but is beyond what they can handle. That is unacceptable.

Since I began teaching, Stamper thinks, trying to be patient, observations have been my bane. The checklist of small groups, exercises, and constant shifts in activity that has become the observation staple (to the point where students make jokes about their professors adding these things to the class only when being observed) has become quite stale. I will not lower myself any longer—as well I could—to playing this particular game, certainly not for an observer who does not recognize that both times and students have changed.

Small groups were new and unusual in the 1970s, and students saw them as a refreshing shift from the teacher-centric classroom they had been familiar with. To many of today's students, however, the small group is something they “suffered” all the way through high school. In fact, Stamper knows, all of the parts of that checklist are things now more common to high school than to college. Today, if students are to move beyond their high-school behavior, they have to be treated as something other than high-school students, utilizing methodology other than what they earlier experienced, methodology more demanding upon them. Methodology moving them forward in their education, not simply providing the same thing over and over again, class after class.

There's that other factor, of course: the computer. In a year or two, more than a quarter of students nationally will be taking classes that are at least partially online. Such classes are necessarily task oriented and many of them have to follow the Fayles model. Simply to survive, on-campus classes are going to have to be offering things online classes cannot. We need, Stamper believes, to accent the instructor in the classroom today, not further reduce her or him to the "facilitator" that some online programs actively promote. The leadership, the broad knowledge, and the enthusiasm that a professor can show in the classroom does not come through so well (at least, not in the same way) in online situations, so should be emphasized if the "real" classroom is to survive.

Yet we must be careful, Stamper warns himself, in what we “say” to students in our classrooms in other ways. Tasks of the sort Fayles wants utilized in the classroom are seen, more often than not, as onerous by the students. These do not engender a love of the art being studied, but can even lead in the opposite direction. In a course where a skill (such as writing) is the central focus, task-oriented classrooms are essential. In a course where the goal is much broader, tasks of the sort Fayles insists on can deaden student enthusiasm for, and appreciation of, the art. Certainly, they do little to enhance it.

Fayles: One of the basic rules of teaching is that students must be engaged at all times. I saw students drifting in and out of the discussion. You need to draw them all in.

What, she wants me to work down to the lowest rather than challenging the highest, doing so in a way allowing the lowest to rise as well? Either way we do it, we risk losing some of our students. I’d rather, in this class, that risk be at the bottom than at the top. Yes, I like teaching remedial classes, too, bringing the struggling students to the point where they can attempt college work… but not every class should be like that, focusing on the lowest common denominator.

Fayles: You need to be careful with the things you say, or you will lose the students. You should have explained the “butterfly effect” when that came up. Some of the students probably don’t know what it is.

More dumbing down, she wants? No thanks. What she is asking, again, is that I stoop to what she believes is the level of my students, not demanding more from them than they are used to giving—any of them can find out what the “butterfly effect” is quite easily by asking others in the class or looking it up online. After all, the mention wasn't mine, nor was understanding of it essential to the point being made. The students don't need to be spoon-fed such things, anyway. My feeling, again, is that more can be gained by demanding the students rise than by lowering myself. Sure, a few students will be lost—but as many (if not more) will disappear if I dumb things down—and all of them will be poorly served.

As she talks and Stamper does not respond, Fayles becomes angry, more and more so with each stony lack of response to each comment. When her officemate comes in and starts puttering around, she stops, waiting for the other to leave. Stamper finally speaks, telling her it is OK if the other overhears. Fayles, trying to smile, says it is not OK with her—and asks her colleague to withdraw. Once they are again alone, she continues, her frustration with Stamper clearer than before.

Fayles: During the class, you brought up World War II a number of times. That was a mistake. Our students have little knowledge of history; some confuse the Civil War and World War II. It’s best to avoid history unless you are going to teach it.

Understanding history, Stamper believes, is necessary for understanding literature. He has been laying out the basics necessary for the texts being covered since the beginning of the semester. If he were to follow Fayles’ advice, he would have to teach different texts, probably much simpler ones. And that would not suit his purpose. We serve our students poorly, he believes, when we don’t open up the unknown country.

This, he tells himself, is getting ridiculous. But, boy, is she steamed!

Fayles: And bringing in 9/11? That was gratuitous, facile, and unnecessary. There is no reason to talk about something like that in a literature class.

What are you talking about, thinks Stamper, forcing himself not to respond. 9/11 was the most significant common event of the lives of today’s students. I wonder if she would have said the same in 1969 about the assassination of JFK, same number of years earlier. 9/11 needs to be a part of our teaching for quite a number of reasons, including the simple fact that it can be used to open all sorts of doors. Our students, quite naturally, are interested in it; they perk up and listen, making 9/11 an effective entry into any number of topics.

This isn’t ridiculous… it’s stupid. He stifles a sigh.

Fayles’ anger is now clear in just about everything she says, her words becoming more and more accusatory in face of Stamper’s determined lack of response. This young man just isn't listening, she realizes, isn't respecting the experience that she brings to interaction with these students. But she goes on anyway.

Fayles: Another problem was that you didn’t ask the students enough questions, and did not call on specific ones. You need to drag them into the conversation, sometimes! And you should never answer the questions yourself. You did that at least twice.

My goodness, more high school? It becomes like high school if I force students to squirm under my eye as I put them on the spot. And I don't believe that is effective pedagogy. All it does is embarrass the student. The last thing I want is for the classroom experience to be actively painful. I try to build a comfort zone into the classroom… which is one of the reasons my students show up. Maybe you didn’t notice, Fayles, but all 30 of them were there.

What time is it? Five minutes to the hour. Ah, good! I’ve an excuse for getting out of here and I had better use it—or I’ll end up saying what I think, and that won’t get us anywhere. Though it has to be said, this is not the place.

Stamper: I’ve got to go teach.

He stands and leaves without another word.