1) What to make of this news from the University of Michigan Press? It will "shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital." As someone who one day hopes to publish a book through a university press, I like anything that makes that process easier. A significant passage:
Because digital publishing is so much less expensive -- with savings both in printing and distribution -- the press expects to be able to publish more books, and to distribute them electronically to a much broader audience. Michigan officials said that they don't plan to cut the budget of the press -- but to devote resources to peer review and other costs of publishing that won't change with the new model. Significantly, they said, the press would no longer have to reject books deemed worthy from a scholarly perspective, but viewed as unable to sell.
2) Speaking of academic writing, there were lots of sessions at this past 4Cs that I wish I had attended, but after reading this piece at Insiderhighered.com, I am really regretting missing “Empty Rhetoric and Academic Bullshit: Strategies for Composition’s Self-Representation in National Arenas.”
Since my 4Cs presentation was on teaching working-class students and our whole panel, in fact, was about shifting classroom demographics, this section really caught my eye:
Bauerlein started by noting that many of the reports issued by the composition group and panels at the meeting deal with issues of race, class, gender and so forth, and he said that this would make no sense to the “man in the street.” Such a person would say “it’s just writing” and wonder why “politically charged subjects” capture such attention.
While Bauerlein is critical of what he sees as a political one-sidedness on humanities faculties, he was careful to say that he was not arguing that the man in the street was “right” and that in fact this man might have a “simplistic” view of teaching writing. But Bauerlein said that the gap between the public understanding of what composition is about and the discipline’s understanding of itself is “not healthy for anyone.”
A key source of this problem, Bauerlein said, is the “publish or perish” system of academic advancement. The “extraordinary burden” on scholars in composition and rhetoric to come up with something new to say, he said, results in work becoming more specialized, with “every narrower niches,” language that can only be understood by other experts, and a “progressive departure from popular understandings” of what writing is about.
3) Finally, a bit about my own current attempts to make further contributions to the over-crowded, uber-competitive world of academic publishing.: Some of you might remember that I am working on project on the idea of pet-keeping (and domesticity) in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat." One of my main goals for this summer is to take that paper from conference-length to article-length and send it out. Anyway, I'll be doing lots more research on the history of pet-keeping and that's why this blog post caught my eye: See One of the World's Oldest Pet Portraits.
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