Ebooks are here to stay, but how will you read them?

As sales suggest, dedicated reading devices -- Kindles, Nooks, etc. -- have begun to meet the expectations of leisure readers and business travelers. (Those expectations have been changing as well, after the socialization represented by a quarter-century of reading on screen.)

Providing fast, inexpensive and even free access to many titles, portability, adjustable type, searchable text, and a growing list of other functions, these devices meet many readers' needs on both airplanes and nightstands. 

But these dedicated devices just aren't ready for the prime time of academic and professional use. Limitations and glitches in their annotation functions, difficulties with copying text, and even the need to mimic the paperback book experience present real issues for the scholar, student, lawyer, and engineer.

Also, rather than remedy...

The stark contrast between recent imaginative actions by students and the decades of poor data, bad analysis, and foot-dragging by most academic institutions suggests a possibility. Could AAUP and the disciplinary associations become the next target for the more radical students?

For today's grads, socially conscious unionism no longer represents the left wing of political possibility. Instead it's a launching pad from which they can surpass the limits to the imagination of a previous generation.

Take the AAUP. I believe we represent low-hanging fruit for the rising generation of students and contingent faculty. We are a democratic association with simple procedures. Occupying the slate with insurgent graduate student candidates can be accomplished using a simple petition process. A few thousand votes -- the graduate employees on two or three campuses -- could shape the AAUP's...

OK, let's imagine the impossible of total supply-side control. Clamp off admissions to every doctoral program in history immediately and what happens?

They all keep pumping out new Ph.D.'s at contemporary levels for 10 years. Scratch that. They actually pump out higher levels, because fewer of those enrolled will drop out, believing that they have better chances. So that keeps the "supply" at status quo rates for, say, 13 to 15 years. Then of course there's all the underemployed circling the drain. They're good for at least another five years' supply.

Another thing. Young people being so clever, they'll find ways around that job czar and the gerontocracy, enrolling -- as so many already do -- in American Studies, cultural studies, women's and ethnic studies. So while history is choking off "supply," the "competition" will continue merrily.

So even after total lockdown on admissions,...

My piece questioning the supply-side bent to the American Historical Association's 2010 job report has gotten thoughtful replies by historiann, Alan Baumler, Jonathan Rees, Ellen Schrecker, Sandy Thatcher and others, both at my home blog and here at Brainstorm.

I really appreciate these thoughts, and want to emphasize how much I respect Townsend's work for AHA over the years, including his parsing of the data on many fronts-especially "privilege," which I believe informs his diss as well -- or I'd probably have come on a bit stronger on the supply-side orientation.

It seems one part of the problem is the relationship of history faculty at smaller schools and community colleges to the discipline, and to the AHA as a disciplinary organization. As Alan wrote in response to my discussion of the many faculty literally off the AHA's chart: 

Ph.D programs don't want that. They judge...

A funny thing happened on the way to the AHA this year -- American Historical Association staffer Robert B. Townsend issued his annual report on tenure-track employment in the field. Unsurprisingly, he concluded that holders of freshly minted doctorates face grim prospects. What raised my eyebrows -- and those of many others doing scholarship in academic labor -- was his insistence that the labor market for faculty in history is a matter of an "oversupply" of persons holding doctorates, and that the profession needs to control "the supply side of the market," i.e., "cut the number of students" in doctoral programs. 

This is the sort of thing that used to get said all the time by disciplinary-association staffers -- as what I call part of a "second wave" of thinking about academic labor, emerging out of discredited supply-side thought dating back to the Reagan administration. Thanks to...

Bérubé How many submissions did you receive for The Institution of Literature?
Williams 385, not counting the nine essays you submitted, eight of which sucked, if you don't mind my saying so.
Bérubé Not at all. I totally respect your opinion when it comes to essays of mine that suck.
Williams Well, they did. As did many of the 65 essays I accepted, 38 of which I had to rewrite.
Lyon That sounds like a lot.
Williams Yeah. I take editing seriously.
Bérubé Well, how much rewriting did you do? We're talking line edits, right?
Williams F--k no. I rewrote those motherf--kers from scratch.
Bérubé Really? What did their authors say about that?
Williams I didn't ask them. Why?
Bérubé Well, because most of the time, when editors make substantial changes to a manuscript, they run them by the authors, that's why.
Williams F--k that. If I ran things by people, do you know long it would take me to produce an...

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Several hundred students gathered at the Oakland courthouse Monday to protest the filing of felony burglary charges against protesters last week, then began an impromptu march over to the University of California's Office of the President (UCOP), the building from which Mark Yudof directs the entire UC system. About 70 members of the crowd pushed past police and gained entry by a rear door of the building, according to at least one report, including photographs taken from a cellphone. 

During the ensuing sit-in, students demanded to meet with Yudof, and eventually were met by two staffers who apparently admitted earning salaries of between $250,000 and $350,000.

"The most important thing was the occupation of the building itself and the students' defiant mood," wrote one participant. "They were not going to be stopped by a few cops."

Follow the...

Follow the Berkeley standoff via microblog. Best updates on California occupations here; best strike and breaking media from UPTE; and all other UC news at Newfield et al's place here. Update 5pm PST: Berkeley police turned off the campus wireless and sent in the SWAT team: the last transmission was the microblogger recording SWAT smashing the hinges off the doors. Image of the cops bursting in can be found here.

Latest: reports of 40 UC-B students arrested, 1 seriously injured. Update 530 pm: it appears that UC Davis is reoccupied, with as many as 100 students occupying Dutton Hall. No blog source yet, but follow this DailyKos diary and this microblog aggregation.

For those keeping journalistic score: the NY Times, LA Times and CNN utterly whupped the trade press on covering the occupations. Best image, LA Times. Second best image: SFChronicle.

To the disobedient ones: thank you.

If...

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Arrests of 52 students at UC Davis and others at UCLA ended one-day occupations at both places, and at San Francisco State, but a new occupation has begun at Berkeley, where the occupiers report that police beat and pepper-sprayed students to re-take the building's first floor. Students appear to hold the second floor at this time. Two buildings remain occupied by hundreds of students at UC-Santa Cruz, which has been the epicenter of the California occupation movement. Update: follow the Berkeley standoff via microblog, and see this video of a unionized campus worker taking the mike before hundreds of students on the third day of occupation at UCSC.

Since the first UCSC occupation featuring only a few dozen students earlier this term, their rhetoric and tactics have spread across the state: Even the the more respectable "UC solidarity" movement...

x-posted: howtheuniversityworks.com

Yesterday the University of California Regents walked into a room packed with gasoline and nonchalantly lit their cigars -- handing down tuition increases that will hike 2010 rates 44 percent over 2008, turning higher ed into a gated community for the offspring of California's "Real Housewives" class. Their bet is the usual bet made by the comfortable: Someone else will get scorched.  

Why wouldn't they feel safe? We live in an upside-down world where bankers -- not the capitalists, just their paid lackeys -- get bonuses larger than the deficits of entire states, and the money pimps at The Wall Street Journal are saying, yeah, take it, citizens, take it, ha-ha! And say thank you, too!

The misery of tens of millions in every sector of the public -- in education, health, income security, could be swept away if we forced more bankers and ...