The first bad thing I’ve read about the new Kindle.

From Slate (and the writer actually loves the device nonetheless):

The Kindle won’t let you resell or share your books. Anything you buy through the reader is fixed to your Amazon account, readable only on the Kindle or other devices that Amazon may one day deem appropriate. (The company has hinted that it’ll build an iPhone app that can read Kindle books.) Even worse, you can buy books for your Kindle only from Amazon’s store. Indeed, the device makes it difficult to read anything that’s not somehow routed through Amazon first—you can surf the Web on the Kindle, and you can convert some of your personal Microsoft Word or text files to the device’s format, but doing so is slow and not very reliable. In order to read blogs, magazines, newspapers, and books, you’ve really got to go through Amazon’s store first.

You can see where this is going: Kindle owners buy a lot of stuff, and the more stuff they buy, the more likely they are to stick with the Kindle in the future, even when/if someone else invents a better, more open e-book service. This restriction makes Amazon the prime market for book publishers. How can they resist giving over their entire catalog to a store that attracts so many eager, captive shoppers? Publishers’ acquiescence in turn increases the Kindle’s appeal to new buyers. If you’re in the market for an e-book reader, you’ll probably choose the one that offers the most books, and that means Kindle. (At the moment, there are about 240,000 titles available for the Kindle; the Sony Reader, its closest rival, has fewer than 100,000.) Taken together, these trends all point in one direction—Amazon will come to rule the market for e-books. And as the master of the e-book universe, Amazon will eventually call the shots on pricing, marketing, and everything else associated with the new medium.

I’m sympathetic to the argument. In fact, it reminds me about a point I’ve made about Walmart for years. Lower prices now do not necessarily mean lower prices later. Once the purveyor has a virtual monopoly, the sky can safely be the limit. [I know that's illegal, but I always made that argument during the Bush years so that didn't really matter.]

There’s one thing missing here, however. E-books will always, and I mean always, have to compete against real books. Paper might lose popularity over coming years, but it’s not going anywhere because casual readers will be unlikely to pony up $359 for a reading device. If an e-book’s cost runs into that of a real book, buyers can just buy the actual paper book. Indeed, if the cost even approaches that of a real book, people will probably go for the paper book anyways because they can resell it.

And by the way, if you see my wife around, remind her again that I want a Kindle 2 for my birthday, OK?

Without the humanities, the students you graduate will be functionally illiterate.

Via UD, I see that the same reporter who facilitated the slander of Stanley Kutler is wondering if the humanities can justify their existence during a recession:

[I]n this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

Here’s my answer: Without the humanities, the students you graduate will be functionally illiterate. After all, it’s not like the written word is going the way of the dinosaur. It might simply all be in pixels.

And by the way, I’m wondering if my favorite newspaper has hired an education reporter who knows nothing about education. After all, lean times in higher education are nothing new and the humanities are still here. Besides, hasn’t she ever heard of distribution requirements?

Pure and simple character assassination.

Thanks to HNN, I see that the Public Editor took on that Stan Kutler story yesterday. Here’s the meat of his review:

Frederick J. Graboske, who was in charge of the Nixon tapes at the National Archives when Kutler was researching his book, accused Kutler of deliberately mixing up two tapes, but there was no evidence in the article to back that up.

Cohen [the reporter] said she made sure that Kutler’s denial got on the front page, and she quoted another scholar who has worked with the Nixon tapes saying that any mistakes were honest and predictable. Cohen, who listened to the tapes and studied the transcripts, said she thought Graboske was a “completely straight, honest broker.”

I asked Graboske how he was certain Kutler mixed the two tapes on purpose. To have done it, he said, “would have been the height of sloppiness, and Stanley is a sloppy researcher or he did it deliberately.” That is a different answer than he gave Cohen. If plain error was a possibility, I do not think The Times should have printed the charge without strong evidence. Journalistic balance, giving both sides, did not produce fairness here.

Go back to the original story for a moment. Here was Kutler explaining his research process:

“Are you aware under what conditions I worked in 1996?” he said by telephone from Mexico. “It’s only because of my lawsuit that you or anybody else can pick up a tape. In those days, I could not leave the archives with that material. I used state-of-the-lost-art equipment. I brought in a team of court reporters to help me with the first drafts.

You’d think the guy in charge of the tapes at the time would know this, wouldn’t you? This is character assassination, pure and simple. Graboske knew better when he made those charges, and that would explain why he’s backpedaling now.

Unfortunately for my friend Stan, this might be the closest thing to an apology he gets. He deserves more.

The Brandeis Brief…

…is the subject of a new post by me at the Milestone Documents Blog. I, not surprisingly, approach it from a labor history rather than a strictly legal history angle.

Adjuncts and tenure-track faculty have more in common than you might think.

Among the magical appearing/disappearing links showing up on my WordPress dashboard this morning was this one from Burnt-out Adjunct:

The structure is not in place that will allow adjuncts to move out of their Untouchable position in this caste. Institutions have melted (I hate to say evolve here) into the current position because it pays the best for them. Farm out the overflow or the inconsistently enrolled to contingent faculty, freeing up the tenured to persue their passions. If you are one of the few Chosen Ones, then feel complacent and safe–which I know you do–knowing that you need not worry too much except for a system-wide implosion (see California right now).

I can’t disagree with the assessment of adjuncts here, but I think Dan Hamermesh (who actually co-wrote the later versions of my father’s textbook, but that’s a story for another time), writing this morning in Freakonomics, pretty much blows this “complacent and safe” business out of the water:

There are at least four ways of meeting a decline in labor demand: laying off workers, cutting nominal annual salaries, cutting hires, or reducing hours. It is difficult to lay off tenured faculty; but in this recession, universities are using two other methods of cutting payroll.

Some schools have imposed faculty hiring freezes. Others are furloughing faculty: Arizona State, for example, has imposed 15 days of furlough over the next six months. Many years ago, Michigan State met a budget crisis by postponing the implementation of a previously agreed salary increase, essentially a wage cut.

Despite tenure, senior university faculty members are not immune to recession-induced budget crises. Our only consolation is that layoffs are rare.

Of course this is a better economic position to be in than that of the typical adjunct, but we are all in this together to at least some degree. Solidarity means reaching out across caste lines, whether up or down.

Every college professor in America should read this article.

With a title like “Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes,” you’d expect it to be a dog bites man story, but then you get to quotes like this:

Jason Greenwood, a senior kinesiology major at the University of Maryland echoed that view.

“I think putting in a lot of effort should merit a high grade,” Mr. Greenwood said. “What else is there really than the effort that you put in?”

“If you put in all the effort you have and get a C, what is the point?” he added. “If someone goes to every class and reads every chapter in the book and does everything the teacher asks of them and more, then they should be getting an A like their effort deserves. If your maximum effort can only be average in a teacher’s mind, then something is wrong.”

America has become Lake Wobegon.

“Give a man a job!”

This is my absolute favorite video clip for class use of all time. I originally got it from the Prelinger Archive, but it’s nice to see it up on YouTube now so that I can share it here:

David Attenborough celebrates Darwin’s birthday.

Natural history is not my usual kind of history, but since I had a very good high school biology teacher (thank you again, Ms. Sprague) I have a great fondness for evolutionary studies. So I urge you to go to “The Dispersal of Darwin,” and watch David Attenborough’s BBC Documentary “Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life,” which beautifully sums up not only Darwin’s career, but Attenborough’s as well.

In which Stanley Fish teaches all us academics a lesson.

I didn’t spend much time discussing Stanley Fish’s now second-to-last blog post about the abuse of academic freedom. While you can read it here, I think Margaret Soltan took care of it quickly and well:

Stanley Fish, in his New York Times column, reviews this case – Rancourt’s a political fanatic who refused to teach what he was assigned, or to grade his students – with care, which is fine.

Fish, however, tries to make Rancourt paradigmatic of academic freedom gone bad. He claims that some academics see Rancourt as “a brave nonconformist, a tilter against orthodoxies…”

No one feels this way about him. He’s a jerk, and everyone, as far as UD can tell, has been clear about that from the start.

Now Fish is back defending that earlier piece in a post called “Are Academics Different?,” and in doing so I think he teaches all of us academics a good lesson. Of course, it’s not the lesson he intended but let me try not to get too far ahead of myself. Fish:

The criticism most often voiced was that by holding Rancourt up as an example of the excesses indulged in by those who invoke academic freedom, I had committed the fallacy of generalizing from a single outlier case to the behavior of an entire class “Is the Rancourt case one of a thousand such findings this year, or it the most outlandish in 10 years?” (Jack, No. 88).

It may be outlandish because it is so theatrical, but one could argue, as one reader seemed to, that Rancourt carries out to its logical extreme a form of behavior many display in less dramatic ways. “How about a look at the class of professors who … duck their responsibilities ranging from the simple courtesies (arrival on time, prepared for meetings … ) to the essentials (“lack of rigor in teaching and standards … )” (h.c.. ecco, No. 142). What links Rancourt and these milder versions of academic acting-out is a conviction that academic freedom confers on professors the right to order (or disorder) the workplace in any way they see fit, irrespective of the requirements of the university that employs them.

And where exactly are the academics defending the right of professors to duck out on their professional responsibilities? Only someone who knows nothing about tenure and academic freedom would suggest that it is an excuse to order the workplace any way you see fit, including very badly. Anyone who is stupid enough to think that tenure means you can’t get fired no matter how obnoxious you happen to be probably didn’t deserve to get it in the first place.

But then, in the same sense that stopped clock is right twice a day, Fish writes something I agree with heartily:

Saying that higher education has a job to do (and that the norms and standards of that job should control professorial behavior) is not the same as saying that its job is business. It is just to say that it is a job and not a sacred vocation, and that while it may differ in many ways from other jobs — there is no discernible product and projects may remain uncompleted for years without negative consequences for researchers — its configurations can still be ascertained (it is not something ineffable) and serve as the basis of both expectations and discipline.

Indeed, if the professoriate has one failing in my mind it is its collective failure to be job conscious. Professors are workers, in the same sense that secondary school teachers, custodial staff and even Walmart employees are.

But while Fish wishes to remind us this in order to remind everyone of the limitations upon what we can do in our capacity as professors, I would remind him that expectations are a two-way street. If our employers expect us to do our jobs in a certain way, we have a right to expect certain things from them. Take, for example, a living wage for adjunct faculty, who often work harder and under worse conditions than anyone else on campus with no expectation of the academic freedom that Fish somehow finds so offensive.

So if Stanley Fish wants to talk about expectations, I say let’s do so in every sense of the word. After all, the notion that professors operate under certain limitations should hardly be news to any professor worth their supposedly exalted positions.

“8 Ball Bunny (1950).”

“Say, pardon me, but could you help out a fellow American who’s down on his luck?”: