Raghu: To put it simply, Kendzior is only seeing a part of the picture-and in a dichotomy of black and white. Academic publishing and non-academic publishing. She even quotes a professor who is giving up on blogging because it takes too much time away from the 'real' work of an academic. Neither she nor the professor she cites seem to see the changes that have been going on this past decade and more, the expansion of academic publishing into new and vigorous venues along with the shrinking of the importance of traditional academic publishing venues. Scholars in all fields are struggling to find ways of bringing the new publishing possibilities into hiring, tenure, promotion and re-appointment decision-making in a coherent fashion-and most of them are already considering them as valid parts (in many cases-there are problems arising from the changes, too, after all) of scholarship.
--------- This is empty. "Academic publishing" is not, in essence, a pursuit of knowledge (though quite a bit of it is, by accident, such); it is a technique for the granting of tenure and promotions. You cannot make sense of it in abstraction from the Merit System. Publications by adjuncts don't fall under the heading of "academic publishing," since adjuncts are not eligible for tenure. This required publication is creating a quite serious problem of overload. No one can read all of it even in a restricted area; much time is wasted in looking at material that should not have been published; this can also lead to useful publications being 'lost.' Moreover, there are undoubtedly 10s of thousands of men & women who if given leisure would during their lifetime produce several essays of real interest to other scholars, but since they must publish a book to get tenure, they spend way too much time publishing to publish anything useful. Now, at a higher level of abstraction, this (useless or damaging ) activity characterizes the current state of capitalism. The war on drugs fails to control drug use but it does not fail in its actual purpose: it builds up and justifies both repressive structures at home and enables aggressive military action arbroad. The War on Terror has no effect on terror (except perhaps to create new terrorists) but of course it is quite successful because stopping terror is not its purpose: enables the process of war without end needed by the Empire of Capital. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top seriously damage the school system, which of course is their purpose. That purpose needs to be studied carefully, but too many critics would prefer to moan endlessly about the "failure" of those programs, thereby failing to consider their actual purposes. And so forth. Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
