These are the conclusions that we’ve come to at the Convocation on Scholarly Communication, as I hear them:
We, the faculty, have a lot of power. We need to get off our asses and change how we do things.
Tenured faculty have to get off their asses especially. They owe it to their untenured junior colleagues, or they’ll very soon find themselves without any junior colleagues.
We have to actually pay attention to the quality of scholarship & not just quantity.
We have to change how we do things or we’re scrod in the long run. It may not even be very long.
Change isn’t enough: we have to forcibly wrest control from the clenched fist of our corporate overlords.
We’re all a bunch of communists: we believe that what we’re doing is a social good & that what we’re producing should be available for free, for everyone, forever.
We may be communists, but we’re also elitists: we believe that what we’re doing is valuable & that the processes we employ to produce it adds value, & it’s reasonable to charge something for that.
Technology is easy, policy is hard.
All of the above is true as long as it doesn’t interfere with our having conferences in cool places & going to good parties.
Update, later that same evening: Paul has a far better summary of the Convocation on his blog than I do. This was just me being punchy and filtering the conversation in real-time as I was hearing it, at the end of an intellectually exhausting day. Paul’s summary is actually content-ful. Thank goodness one of us was actually taking notes.
2 Comments
Scott Nicholson
Most of these points are fairly obvious as to why they are made.
I’d like to learn more about this one:
“We have to change how we do things or we’re scrod in the long run. It may not even be very long.”
Can you talk more about this? Why is this? What factors are playing into this concern?
PomeRantz
To answer Scott’s question, like most of the points that came out of the convocation, the point about being scrod in the long run had 2 motivations: local and global concerns.
On the local level, this gets back to faculty having to change their behaviors, and also having the power to do so. Either we faculty need to start valuing alternative forms of scholarship for tenure and promotion, or we’ll start losing colleagues to other universities that do. And this will happen in short order, over the span of only a few years, particularly if junior faculty don’t get tenure & consequently move.
On the global level, the demands that the new generation of students will make on our teaching will push change in how universities rewards teaching, or else the new generation of students will go elsewhere for their education. Studies of the Millenials indicates that they’re massive multi-taskers, and adept at searching for information at the point of need. So they can probably teach themselves any content area. But they’re not so good at evaluating info, so it becomes the educational system’s role to teach information literacy. So unless the educational system & universities want to be relegated to becoming a place where you get a credential & not much more, we need to change HOW we teach to appeal to a generation that can teach themselves content.
The other part to this was that, even though many of these issues have been lying just under the surface for a long time, once they got brought out in to the open, there was a sense of, “Oh my god! We have to do something now! Stop rearranging deck chairs!”