Building a Better University Press (or UnPress)

Thank you for all of your comments. If we relied on unimpeachable empirical evidence for every assertion we make, we would not get far with our thinking. I won’t generalize about English professors as long as you won’t!

“Second, it presupposes that formal higher education is the single biggest factor in professional and social success. That’s just not true: my plumber, my electrician, and any contractor I’ve ever hired make more money than I do as an associate professor of English at Ohio State; were I more vain I’m sure I could find a hair stylist who would also fit into that category of high earners.”

This isn’t proof that higher education is not a vital (or even the most important factor) influencing a person’s future income.

Comparing one of the least well-paid disciplines in higher ed to some of the highest paid occupations that don’t require a college degree isn’t valid.

You could compare tenured English Professors to the people who work in the aisles at Wal-Mart or Lowes, the people who prepare fast food, or work as hotel maids, etc. (But, that wouldn’t prove anything either.)

Or you could compare tenured professors in accounting, finance, engineering, law, and economics to electricians, plumbers and contractors. (But, that wouldn’t prove anything either.)

Or — you could run a regression using national data to calculate how higher education affects salary controlling for things like college major, occupation, age, etc. That would be data that would actually quantify the effect of higher education on salary.

I’ve only taught the regular semester once, but when I was a grad student I taught several summer classes.  I prefer teaching the summer classes.  The class size is smaller, we meet for longer sessions, and the students actually find the time to do assignments (unless they have a summer job).  Then again, I’m talking about a 10-week summer session compared to maybe 14-week regular.  I’ve done a 4-5-week winter term once and it was too dense for anything but very basic intro classes.

To answer the specific questions – I felt that students were more motivated during the summer (on average) and I was able to cover most (but not all) of the material, mostly because I lose so much time in 50-minute periods during the regular term compared to 90ish-minute summer periods.

Hi,
Good to hear this.I taught  a 6-week summer course for 26 yrs, as also regular courses , and even after 4yrs of retirement have been invited to do so.I just finished the course yesterday, the 2nd after I retired.
Yes, students are more focussed, the library is all theirs, nothing else happens which would make demands on them and they are totally immersed in my teaching and their responses. An excellent programme. I heartily recommend it to all especially for the learning of languages.

Student loans DO cover summer school classes; that’s how I paid for my first summer of graduate school in 2009.

Most of us who are adjuncts do indeed love teaching and do it well; maybe a few of us even do it brilliantly. All of us who do take enormous satisfaction and pride in that and the remarkable relationships with students that grow from teaching. One could also say the same of certain tenured faculty. There is an ocean of difference between our two sets of circumstances. It also sounds as if you work in relatively good conditions. I work in two distinctly different environments–one very good, and one not very good at all due to an abusive and incompetent academic administration. There are many adjuncts who only have the latter, and have no means to improve it and cannot choose to not work in such conditions. It also sounds as if you are fairly new to being an adjunct–a decade or so on the hamster wheel of poor pay and no raises, poor conditions, repetitive courses with no chance of change or development might begin to grate. The problem with your idealism is that it misses the point and plays into the hands of those who need a justification for continued exploitation. You do a disservice to the majority of us who do not have the luxury of being naive.

Overworked? Hm. Try teaching that one less class and instead serving on five committee, advising graduate students, and trying desperately to find the 20 hours/week needed to do quality research.  But underpaid? YES, you’re underpaid, and underappreciated, and without possibilities for advancement or benefits, and all of that.  So *leave.* Stop being the labor force that administrators rely on to keep from opening up tenure-track lines for people like, well, *you.* I am continually astonished by adjuncts: It’s a situation akin to renting a rattrap apartment, or living with an abusive boyfriend–you don’t own it, you’re not married, so why not walk away?  The non-academic work world really is NOT that foreign. And one has to be deluded to enter grad school these days thinking that there is any guaranteed academic job at the end of it. You take your chances. Beyond acknowledging that fact, I wonder what serious “preparation” for the non-academic work world faculty could give. (But it’s really NOT that foreign out there…)  Of course a job search isn’t easy, but every year, thousands and thousands of undergraduates take their academic degrees and go out into the world and begin to turn their skills into (lucrative, meaningful, *appreciated*) careers. When their job is bad, they leave and find another–that’s how one builds a career. Why should graduate students be any different?  And yet there are all these too-smart people hanging on as adjuncts, making less than the custodians and hoping “the institution” will stop abusing them. In what situation in life or history has that *ever* worked?

Indeed the Industrial Revolution may well be an apt analogy–and how did change come about then? Not by the workers wishing that industry would treat them better but by strikes, organized labor, etc.  How did serfs (to which it seems hsigur might be closer to comparing adjuncts, in the sense that they are unable to leave) get a better life? Not by wishing the landed gentry treated them better but by being able to sell their suddenly in-demand services to a higher bidder.  (I am not recommending the Black Death, but as long as adjuncts continue to flood this one market, of course the institutions will treat them as expendable.)  As for the ad hominem comment that I must be too pampered to know the world, the *reason* I believe that adjuncts must be in something like an abusive relationship is because I *have* worked, for over a dozen years, outside academia, and so I do, in fact, know what the non-academic workplace can be like–a good-and-bad but overall decent and meaningful place to work normal hours, with benefits and salary, where your degree is impressive rather than a marker of wasted time. Is this every job? *Of course not.*  And it’s probably not the first job (it wasn’t mine).  But my point remains that all the other college graduates go out, find something, find something else, etc., etc., building toward better situations, while adjuncts continue to stay and be abused.  And there is no rational reason to stay in such an exploitative, self-denigrating situation hoping that the abuser (the institution) will see your hard work and dedication, and change itself.  (It won’t.)  It is easy to say, gosh in this economy…but you have advanced degrees, training, skills, experiences, and the luxury of having a job while you look for the new job.  Until adjuncts recognize their own value, use their mobility to their advantage, and stop accepting these working conditions as somehow “the only job out there,” nothing will change. 

Muleprof,

I’ll make you a deal: I’ll stop “threatening” you and your tenured buddies if you find me a job outside of academics paying what yours does and having the same benefits. However, if you stay in your tower, merely farting in our general direction, then we adjuncts have the right to take you down.

The Adjunct Mafia

I agree that if adjuncts (and I am one) feel they are being abused, they can seek different employment.  However, Muleprof seems to suggest that the departure of some adjuncts will impact the system that supports the use (and abuse?) of contingent faculty.  In fact, if Muleprof and other tenured faculty desire change in the academy (i.e., the reduction of the use of adjuncts) then they should use the power they have to implement change.  Surely, the adjuncts do not have that power.

Issaac, you have again summarized the situation well.  
This isn’t a fight between FT and Adjunct. Folks we are in it together! The more teachers fight, the less they can work together to address the issue. In-fighting is a valuable situation for administration.

No word seems to fit those non-TT. Ever look up the official meaning of adjunct?… inconsequential add-on…

…but how, exactly, is it wrong?

There are a lot of grouchy old haters on the discussion forum… funny that they all probably advocate socialism in real life but behind the anonymity of the Internet they tell exploited workers to suffer-in-silence or quit.

As is so often the case, it depends.

If you want to get one of the very best jobs you have to come from a first-tier university, Ivy League or equivalent. Many of the top employers don’t even consider other graduates:

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/Oracle-Aims-at-BrandName-Schools-for-Recruits/

“According to the e-mail, Oracle recruits “top candidates” for product
development from MIT, Stanford, CMU (likely Carnegie Mellon
University), Princeton, Wisconsin, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Caltech,
Berkeley, Harvard and Cornell”

“In addition, the e-mail continues, Oracle will consider “top
candidates” from the University of Texas Austin, Duke, Penn, Georgia
Institute of Technology (grad students) and “any top international
schools,” it reads.”

And we all know what graduate admissions committees at the top universities are looking for. I don’t know how easy it is to transfer from community college to a top university, but I think that if you can get into one right out of high school, you should probably go.

Of course I’m not trying to discourage anyone. The most important thing is to have your priorities in order, be smart, and work hard. I’m just saying that the only path to a lot of good jobs and graduate programs is to get into a first-tier university.

I would not characterize my view as “more traditional,”  Myemphasis is on business strategy.  That’s very different from productstrategy.  If you don’t have to worry about finding a market, you cando just about anything.  All of the stuff on Mark Sample’s blog iscongenial to me.  One of the virtues of the old-fashioned books andjournals is that people are willing to pay for them.  One of theproblems with Web 2.0 scholarship is that virtually no one is willingto pay for it.  So this is not traditional vs. the new.  This is twodifferent elements of the matrix, both of which must be resolved.

I fully agree with Esposito’s reaction: where does the money come from in an Open Access environment? To our opinion, the guiding principles for scholarly communication should be: 1. research and the dissemination of results belong together. 2. Funders’ OA policies should include OA publishing and 3. publishers should develop OA publishing as a service to the scholarly community. This last principle is already evolving in the STM journals/articles world, where an author can chose for OA after his/her publication is accepted through peer-review, if he/she pays for it up front. This ‘authors pay system’ used in STM for the publication of journals and articles should also be introduced in the HSS, where the monograph is the most common way of disseminating the results of the research. Special attention is recommended for Open Access for scholarly monographs, in particular in relation to the Humanities and Social Sciences. There is a clear need for Open Access publishing and funding models for monographs to bridge the gap with OA articles, but also because the traditional business model for books is losing its sustainability. Finally, not the author, but the funders of research should take care of the costs for the Open Access edition as the dissemination of research should be seen as part of the research, but also because they are already taking care of most of the costs of scientific publications through the library budgets. This is the way our major scientific funding organisation NWO looks at it since 2009, and I believe it is also the way the EU is moving. Amsterdam University Press/ Saskia C.J. de Vries
Finally, not the author, but the funders of research should take care of the costs for the Open Access edition as the dissemination of research should be seen as part of the research, but also because they are already taking care of most of the costs of scientific publications through the library budgets. This is the way our major scientific funding organisation NWO looks at it since 2009, and I believe it is also the way the EU is moving. Amsterdam University Press/ Saskia C.J. de Vries
 

Whatever happened to the NCAA “death penalty.” Ohio State deserves it.  Gee should be fired, if he hasn’t the decency to resign in disgrace.

I have suggested before that elite level athletes tend really to be professionals hoping to cash in at the next level (which most will never reach).  They should be paid for their efforts at the college level (maybe by cutting back the hugely inflated salaries of head coaches), with an option of a education at the end of their eligibility. The NCAA certainly could choose to mandate this rather than the present corrupting system.

Depends on what you think “the mission”  (is there only one?) of higher education is. 

Right. We tend to forget that part of the mission of big public universities is to provide entertainment spectacles (formerly, on, as I recall Prof. Foster’s paean, “crisp autumn Satuday afternoons,” but now every day and night of the week) to a bunch of beer-sodden potbellied people who can’t spell “bachelor’s degree” but who live in the area of the college stadium and like to dress up in the school’s colors, to millions of people with cable TV who watch sports 24-7, and, last but not least, the bookmakers in Las Vegas and elsewhere. Ooops! I forgot that another part of the mission of these schools is to provide admission to college for underqualified students, burden them with 40+  hours a week spent on their sport, furnish them with multiple concussions (not just those “He jus’ got his bell rung” causes of time outs, but the ordinary occurence in line play) and wreck their knees, and then turn them loose in the world ungraduated or with diplomas in such as “Recreation Administration” and “Leisure Studies.”

In  light of so many recent atrocious decisions by the NCAA, this is an opportunity to demonstrate it is serious about large-scale transgressions.  However, the NCAA seems to have unlimited abiolity to snatch defe3at from the jaws of victory in situations like this.

It is important to note that as more information surfaces, pieces of the puzzle begin to come together, and we ask, “Why didn’t Coach Tressel just come forward from the beginning?”  It all seems very cut and dry.  But anybody who has ever been faced with the decision of whether to self-report knows the anguish and soul-searching that goes on in an effort to be honest and best serve the University and student-athlete.  The fact is, despite the NCAA’s efforts to address each and every situation, some areas may seem gray–especially when not all the facts are known.  Self-reporting begins a process that cannot be reversed; it must play out till the end. I dare say more than one coach or administrator has paused, hoping that a situation will right itself.  This, however, flies in the face of the concept of “compliance,” where there is little or no room for acting in the “spirit of the law.”  To this, the NCAA would say that’s why we have rules, because we cannot rely on all individuals’ perceptions to be the same.

So is punishment due the University and the Coach?  Of course–the Coach, a representative of the University, who must pass a rules exam each year, violated compliance regulations.  Should we pause and consider Coach Tressel’s initial intentions?  I say yes.

To
address the first four Mr. Kantrowitz’s myths: (for 15 years, I taught SAT Prep at
two Georgia high schools)

1.
“Only straight- “A” students win scholarships”.
Obviously: any recruited athlete, many with barely passing HS grades,
gets a complete college scholarship.

2.
“…White students are actually disproportionately likely to win
awards”. “Disproportionately” by what criterion?
Population percentage? How about SAT + GPA, the usual requirement for
(non-athletic, aka academic) financial aid? If whites are, say, 40%
of the population, but 75% of applicants with over 3.5 GPA and 2000
SAT, and receive three of four scholarships, is that result
“disproportionate”?

3.
“My child will get a full-ride scholarship” Not if you make
too much $$. Scholarships independent of/from family income are few.

4.
“Only athletes win scholarships: Only a small fraction of
institutional aid is awarded based on athletics”. Two questions.
(1) If 75 football players receive $50,000/ yr. free rides, and,
let’s say, the other 10,000 scholarship students receive their $2500,
then yes: the football players, with their lower academic numbers,
get about one-eighth in this hypothetical example. (2) “Institutional aid”.
Many colleges’ athletic departments’ finances are completely
separate, from donations, ticket receipts, alumni giving to salaries,
scholarships, and facilities. By the way, The University of
Georgia, for example, has 26,000 undergrads – and the Athletic
Department has its own website.

This list was going well until we hit #9. From the answer given, “…most try to ensure..at least some…” it is clear that in fact this “myth” is quite true that other aid is indeed “reduced” at least somewhat.  It’s too bad that authors of lists seem to think that every interesting list of anything has to have exactly 10 entries (“the top ten xyz”), even if you don’t really have 10 of your topic.

Hey, OldNassau’67, even Princeton University Athletics has its own website, and they are hardly a sports powerhouse. I’m not quite sure why that last sentence is even there. It’s irrelevant.

This whole article comes off as an extended ad for Mr. Kantrowitz’s website.

And on that note – I was really hoping for some good news with number 6: that scholarships are not just for high school seniors.  Evidently they’re just for high school seniors and younger, and maybe some college freshmen.  I was really hoping to hear about a “starting-over” scholarship for the non-traditional adult students. 

Scholarship are not only merit based, but having a good GPA and academic background is a must to getting in school and paying for it. However, you don’t have to be a 3.0-4.0 student to receive a scholarship. I received several scholarships during my undergraduate and kept a 2.5. to maintain them. I think some people also over think academics, if you are a well rounded student; involved in school activities, sports and so on, it also make you look like a better candidate because you have to posse structure to be involved with school activities. Some of these people comments below are broken down by what the article said, however, I still agree with most of their tips and don’t think their is one straight narrow path to getting and keeping a scholarship And I have worked in financial aid and scholarship for seven years.

These are not the important myths about scholarships. The real myth is that outside scholarship money is even an appreciable fraction of all financial assistance! It definitely is not! Parents need to stop pressuring their teens to spend any time searching out and applying for scholarships. It prevents them from achieving the grades and doing the extracurric activities that will earn them the real aid to the places they want to get into.

The primary source of financial aid is when the college itself offers you a price reduction in its full-price sticker tuition rate. Increasingly, the basis for such aid is student quality or particular needs of the college to balance its incoming class. My daughter was once offered a huge amount to attend Sarah Lawrence — a college noted for low financial aid offers — because they wanted her badly (and it wasn’t because of her class standing). On the other hand, needs based aid is declining rapidly.

Now the other big myth is that student loans is financial aid. Can you imagine a slimy used car dealer telling you he’ll get you financial aid, and it turns out to be a loan?! Only colleges can get away with such double speak.

I could not help reading these remarks by these 2 scholars and wonder if they could actually be so devoid of any self-reflection or insight. I am not sure if I should point to their irony or hypocrisy. Tell me did either of you object to the the imperial, unlawful, and raw abuse of power by the UK, France, and US that resulted in the most bloody display of inhumanity that has been so publicly on display in recent memory. Now the western powers most responsible for this most unlawful of recent conflicts now want to clean up the bloody mess they have made. No doubt there is a word to be used to decribe such arrogance but I would rather not repeat it. I think the West has done enough harm to Libya and what has all our bombing and bloodlust achieve: that those the CIA and US have  put in power are already engaged in actions that are far worse than those they have replaced Women are likely to have fewer rights and the civil war is likely to linger for many years. Both of you need an ethics reality check or maybe you just need to start using them for the first time because there seem little compassion or understanding in anything you have written here. Or is self-promotion the only reason for your comments.

Male philosophers discussing women’s reproductive issues.  Where are the female philosophers? Why do males always insert themselves into this conversation?  Pun intended. 

I suggest that one pro-life argument that argues this point, based on reason, can be found here: 
http://180movie.com/

I think Singer’s being disingenuous here. He characterizes the reactions to this article as the work of anti-abortion activists, ignoring the fact that the article is about infanticide. Many people who support abortion rights would find the argument presented in the article appalling — I certainly do, and I’ve voted Democratic for 40 years. For many of us, the idea that “merely existing as an innocent living human being is enough to give a being a right to life” is a basic premise of our ethical thinking. To dismiss the horror evoked by this article as an irrational reaction by unthinking conservatives is an act of deliberate ethical blindness. 

Be careful of context – Singer was not arguing for this position (nor would he), rather he was merely pointing out the point of contention.

Singer is right to point out that the article in question is possibly more interesting as an attempted reductio of certain arguments in favour of abortion rather than as an actual argument for infanticide on grounds of parental interests. That is also the line I take in my response to the article:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2016772

I do think it is a shame though that Singer has not taken this opportunity to at least sketch his own position on the issue: I would guess that Singer would think that, even though general parental interests such as the one discussed by Giubilini and Minerva may not be enough to justify killing a healthy newborn, killing an healthy newborn is morally preferable, other things being equal, to killing an heathly child or adult. 

You will find out otherwise eventually. 

Read it again — Singer does acknowledge that the unborn and newborn infants he’s discussing are “human.”  The question is, do they, or should they, have rights?

Children under 18 are human — indeed, we call them “persons” — but we deny them many rights.  They may even be subjected to force and painful physical punishment, within limits, without due process or legal recourse.  Few people argue against denying rights to children, despite the lack of evidence that reaching the age of 18 (or 21) brings about a significant change in a person, either.  I might argue that this demonstrates our “hatred” toward children, but would most people? Would you?

So there is certainly a precedent for choosing an essentially arbitrary age at which we grant people certain particular human rights.

It’s hard to say or do anything much, lately, that (once it gets around on the web) WON’T inspire some death threats.  A mom painting her son’s nails pink, or entering her toddler in a beauty pageant?  A dad shooting his daughter’s laptop?  A young woman arguing for contraception to be covered by insurance  …. ? They should be killed!  Die horribly!  Rot in hell! Wish I were there, I’d kill ‘em!

Which, like the overused “F-word,” kinda waters down the impact of death threats.