Correction: I fell for a folk etymology
Reader Ian M. Slater writes:

My Latin dictionaries and grammars may be out of date, or my memories of them (since they are mostly in storage after a move) may be wrong, but I was under the impression that *propaganda* is "for the extension of...," from *propago,* "to extend, to generate," by way of *propagatio.* The resemblance of the *-anda* ending to *(pa)gani* would be coincidental -- except that they are both permitted under the laws governing sound combinations in Latin.

I am not citing English dictionaries on this, since so many of them persist in repeating dubious etymologies from nineteenth-century sources (try comparing explanations for the Latin root of "person").

Also, although the explanation of *paganus* as "rustic," hence, "not part of urban Christian culture" is generally accepted, there is an alternative explanation as "from beyond the boundary," with the metaphorical implication of "not initiated." This actually fits some contexts from late antiquity much better. Of course, both etymologies may have been current then, and invoked as appropriate.

One of the frustrating problems of philology is how one separates out real etymologies of words from 'folk etymology.' I appear to have fallen prey to this problem here, since it seems like "propagatio" is more plausible.
Now, my error isn't as bad as, say, aruging that the word "therapist" is actually "the" "rapist," but its the kind of thing that drives hard-core philologists crazy. At the last meeting of The International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, one German philologist was particular ferocious to someone who suggested that the word "fulwiht" (baptism) might have meant "full" "white" (i.e., completely pure). There's a German cognate to 'fulwiht', and so the suggested folk-etymology wasn't necessary.

To give myself a little benefit of the doubt, however, I'll point out that the kind of play on words of "for" "the rustics" would be a form of paranomasia, a rhetorical device beloved of the 10th-century, Benedictine Reform writers that are my research focus. The problem with dealing with writers who use paranomasia is that you are never 100% sure when they are using the device and when you are reading too much into a word's physical form.

This is also the case in Tolkien studies, most famously with the word "Moria," which Tolkien created in one of his elvish languages ("Mor" meant 'black' or 'dark'). Some critics read a lot into a putative link between "Moria" and the biblical "Moriah." As can be seen from JRRT's letters, this psuedo-connection (as he saw it) really drove him crazy.

This is a useful point for a larger discussion or authorial intent versus cultural resonance, but I think I've already done a good job of taking the focus off of my error in the etymology of 'propaganda.'

Update

Rose Nunez at No Credentials has an interesting and challenging response to some of my posts below. It's my daughter's fourth birthday today, so I probably won't be responding until tomorrow at the earliest, but I think this is a conversation worth having.

Listen to me speak in 'The Black Speech'
by clicking this link. The producer did a great job, I think, in blending all of the material together, and the piece is pretty neat.

Back in fifth grade, my best friend Chipper and I wrote an adapted play of "The Council of Elrond" (yes, the one chapter in LotR where there's no physical action). I think our version is much better than Peter Jackson's, by the way. But in doing this I ended up memorizing the lines written on the One Ring: ash nazg durbatuluk, etc. This has come in handy many more times than you might expect.

Knowledge Problems and the Value of Academics (and Journalists)

In my last two posts, and in some previous writings, I've asserted that the loss of cultural authority of academics and journalists, although quite likely deserved, is a bad thing for the culture as a whole. Each of those posts was already too long, so I just let the assertion hang and asked my readers to trust me. Now I need to argue for that assertion.

I'll begin by saying that I accept a lot of the critique of contemporary academia and journalism (and I've made some of it myself): I don't think it really can be denied with a straight face that journalists and profs skew heavily toward one end of the political spectrum, that this skew is self-reinforcing and that non-conforming individuals have a very difficult time in both fields. It's a little more controversial to argue that both journalists and academics have tended to present a one-sided view of the world in their work, but I think it's pretty clear from recent journalistic events and simple inspection of the titles of papers at MLA that the bias in these fields extends beyond personnel-selection and into actual scholarship and journalism.

But I don't think that the above is prima facie bad. Bias tends to wash out in the end, and I'm enough of an idealist to believe that the truth of any issue has such a great advantage in the long run that eventually it comes out. If academics and journalists all hold a certain basic set of views, and that set of views includes incorrect views along with correct ones (and obviously many views are normative and can't be broken down to correct/incorrect), I think that the correct ones will ultimately prevail.

No, I don't think the general left-liberalism of the professoriate and the press corps is a terrible tragedy. But I think the abuse of authority that has become so apparent recently is a cultural disaster in the making.

Here's why: if we do live in a 'knowledge society,' it is one in which it can be very, very hard to find out the truth of many issues. For example, between us my wife and I have seven college degrees, including two Ph.D.'s and degrees from MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford and Northwestern. And yet we are completely unable to be sure that we are not making hideous mistakes in a variety of circumstances, including mortgages and fees, life insurance (in fact, I'm sure we've gotten ripped off here), safety issues,local politics, and telecommunications. The problem is, it's nearly impossible to find honest, informed and disinterested advice in these fields. Every piece of advice that you get, unless you're lucky enough to find a family member or a close friend who is knowledgeable, is potentially a trap. And my wife and I can, in fact, do the math.

Journalists and academics are supposed to be disinterested experts whose word you can trust. Seriously. Our students and readers should be able to trust us absolutely. But many people are starting to believe that they no longer can. Right now that lack of trust may only extend to national politics, but the cancer is spreading.

Let me give an example: what is the maximum safe speed to drive on any road? The posted speed limits are obviously bogus, since no one follows them. But is it really safe to take a curve at 80, or should you slow down to 70? Signs with real safety information would be useful, but the culture is such right now that we instead put up a bunch of uniform 65 mph signs. Do traffic engineers expect everyone to go 65? No, they're not idiots. But they assume that if they post the road at 75, everyone will go 90. There's been a breakdown in trust at every level (the drivers don't trust the signs; the traffic engineers don't trust the drivers). Bad information has driven out good information.

I could give another 20 examples easily. How long is medicine really good for? What are the real nutritional/health effects of various foods and drugs? How many pounds can the swing actually hold? How much does the kid really have to weigh before the child seat is no longer safe? How much life insurance do you really need? For many of these, you simply have to play it safe and accept the 'official' advice, but you get the nagging feeling you're being played for a fool.

I think my point is pretty obvious by now: if people stop being able to trust information from experts, if the experts are spinning or skewing the information for their own interests, you're working up to a collapse of, or at least immense damage to, an information-based culture. I know that people are certain that they're on the side of the angels by distorting their data and manipulating their readers. And for any given issue, this may be the case (i.e., it's a least theoretically possible that more social good could come from such a manipulation if it led people to do the 'right' thing more than the unmanipulated data would). But in the long run, once people catch on that they are being manipulated, you end up with the disaster of no one trusting any one except people they know personally. One of the great accomplishments of Western culture was to break free of the bonds of 'I only trust family,' thus allowing people to trust strangers and easily cooperate. Lack of trust of strangers is one of the great stumbling blocks to development in the third world (I speak from experience, as a dual citizen of Jamaica and the US--there is a great lack of honesty and trust in any situation in which one doesn't have personal connections).

The mass media and the professoriate had, in our culture, built up a huge reservoir of trust. But now, and this is what I meant by 'eating their seed corn,' that trust is being eroded. Each distortion or manipulation eats a little bit more, and eventually there will be none left, and we'll have to rebuild. That process will be very, very painful.

Why Some Journalists *And Academics* Do What They Do

A term from literary theory might actually be useful here [hey! stop laughing! I'm serious...].

Theory people often talk about praxis, a term right on the border between useful terminology and alienating jargon. "Praxis," in this context, means how the theory gets put into practice, or what actually get done if you accept the theory.

This is a sore spot for many literary theoreticians, because the praxis of their earth-shaking theories often ends up being banal or even invisible. What good, one might ask, is your theory of the deconstruction of everything if the only praxis turns out to be that your books gets some good reviews and you get chatted up at MLA? The larger the claims for the theory, the more problematic the praxis.
The real, practical praxis (i.e., what academics actually do) always seems to be 'vote the straight democratc-party ticket and donate to various causes.' Nothing wrong with that, but it's a bit of embarrassment for theory, since about 100 million other people in America manage to do the same exact thing without the benefit of the deep theoretical analysis. Old-school cultural materialists (i.e., honest Marxists and 'Old Left' folks), often make younger theory-people profoundly uncomfortable by pointing out that, from a materialist perspective, there's no difference in praxis from the college professor who votes the straight ticket after an exhausting Foucaultian analysis of late-capitalistic discourses and the 92-year-old retired welder who votes the straight ticket because he always has and always will.

Faced with the praxis problem, theoretically minded folks go in either of two directions: the first is what we can call "Trickle-Down Theory." The idea is that the rarified, complex analysis of the academy will eventually end up influencing policy. Thus you may have written a book about masculinist discourse in 10th-century Latin Saints' Lives that only 30 people on earth will read, but eventually you'll be helping to overturn the social order.
There are, of course, some examples of theoretical ideas being taken up by the culture--Catherine McKinnon's feminist scholarship, for example, led to a lot of sexual harrassment law. But it's hard for the average scholar to argue with a straight face that the best way to end racism is to write a hard-to-read book about William Faulkner. (That's probably why people have gotten so angry at me when I've used the "Trickle-Down Theory" description in public). If the theories are as complex and difficult to understand as they are (given the current state of theoretical discourse conventions), it's hard to believe that the bits of theory that do trickle out are as influential on the social order as, say, volunteering at a literacy center one night per week.


The second approach is to use the insights gained from theory to influence one's teaching and thus one's students. But the complexity problem rears its ugly head here as well. If theory is complex enough to require whole books written for very specialized audiences, then how are students going to master it at the same time they have to deal with difficult sources, unfamiliar concepts, etc.? Teachers try, but students often aren't ready to put the theory in context yet. That doesn't mean that they are stupid, just that there's a lot of background that has to be absorbed.

And so, frustrated professors (and journalists), end up trying to push the praxis on the students. That is, students can't necessarily engage with the theory at its highest levels, but they can at least be coaxed, even forced, to adopted the practical outcome of the theory: and that praxis is, usually, limited to having a certain set of opinions and voting the straight ticket.

So, yes, we are back in a loop. And we can give a clear label to what happens when profs and journalists get frustrated and rush to the short-cut: Propaganda. I'm going to be a pedant [oh, that's a surprise], and note that "Propaganda" means "for the pagani," "for the country people." The original idea of propaganda was to get the country people to believe the right thing -- to enact the correct praxis -- even if they weren't capable of following the argument.

I think that a great many journalists and academics have decided that the pagani really aren't ready for all of the information. Corporate knowledge-manufacture or government manipulation have, in the minds of many people, become so powerful that the pagani believe the wrong things. The only way to set them straight is to fight fire with fire, distortion with distortion and manipulation with manipulation. I don't think that academics and journalists are doing this in bad faith. Quite the opposite. Based on my personal experience I think that journalists and academics really and truly believe that the praxis they want to enact is the right thing for society and therefore the ends are worth the means.

This explains why journalists are not simply reporting the news, but figuring out how to report the news so that the pagani will draw the 'correct' conclusions. In this case, the 'correct' conclusion is to vote a certain way in November.

I have great sympathy for the honest concern for the society and culture that is, in my view, at the heart of this behavior. But I think it is a terrible mistake: the pagani aren't as stupid as they appear to be, and they resent being manipulated. The end result may be that the pagani still don't adopt the preferred praxis, but they do end up rejecting the academics and journalists who have tried to manipulate them. Furthermore the actual causes, for which there are in fact reasoned, non-propagandistic arguments, end up being tarnished by association. When people automatically discount what is said by a journalist or a professor, the culture has a real problem. Because it is often--although not universally--the case that journalists and professors actually do have a greater depth of knowledge in their specialities than do members of the general public. In these cases it is worth listening to what they (we) have to say. But if you abuse your position of trust too much, no one will believe you even when there actually is a crisis and when you (we) are telling an important truth.

Why Some Journalists Do What They Do
Or, why the blogosphere seems to be better at digging for facts

Glenn Reynolds collects a bunch of information on Senator Tom Harkin's fake Vietnam stories, and several readers wonder what has gone wrong with journalists/journalism. One writes to Glenn: "Newspaper reporters used to know this - and they used to look for those facts. They used to check sources. They used to search for the truth in a way that would make any skeptic proud. But now they just read the press releases and change a word here or there."

I thought that maybe I could give a bit of an explanation that wasn't quite as simple as 'they are all in the tank for John Kerry' (which is probably 65% true, but doesn't explain everything).
Readers of this blog will remember that I have a journalism degree from (M.A., Stanford, 1991) that I don't use (I don't regret the time spent at The Farm, because I met my wife there, but I've never been a full-time, paid journalist).

Based on my experience at J-school, I can generalize a couple things about journalists around my age that could explain some of the problems. First, nearly all of us were in J-school not because we wanted to be reporters, but because we wanted to write. Most of us who were together at Stanford have also either gotten out of journalism or never really got in, probably because we didn't really like reporting very much. I personally hated it, and I was lucky that I learned this so soon and didn't waste a big chunk of my life trying to be a reporter.

I think a lot of reporters feel the same way, which is why they all want to become columnists. Writing is fun and gratifying. Reporting is a lot of drudgery and leg-work. Thus reporters are ripe for the temptation of press-releases: and most press-release-writing flacks are people with journalism degrees who know exactly how to write a release so that the reporter can edit out obvious promotion but still buy the overall spin.

Second, almost all of the J-school program at Stanford was spent trying to get us to think about the implications of journalism, the politics of reporting, the influence of journalists, etc. Stanford is on tri-mesters, and you take three or four courses per trimester in grad school. We had a total of 3 mandatory classes that were on reporting. Two of these, taught by two-time Pullitzer winner James Risser and then city-editor of the San Jose Mercury News, Jerry Lanson, were brilliant. The other wasn't. But the great majority of the classes we all took were about Journalism and Law, Journalism and Politics, etc. (It almost goes without saying that these classes slanted very left-liberal. And it wasn't just professors indoctrinating us: we all wanted to be crusading, Woodward and Bernstein reporters, bringing down the powerful and helping the little guy. I don't think this is automatically a bad thing, by the way)

But when you focus all your attention on the implications, you're likely to spend more time and intellectual energy trying to control those implications (via spin, etc.) than you do in unearthing the details behind the story. And when your training is in recognizing political implications rather than in leg-work, sourcing and background, you're less able to automatically do what good, non-J-school, cynical, old-school reporters used to do.


When you factor in these two things--reporters would rather write than report, and those who have gone to J-school are more likely to have spent their time thinking about 'implications' rather than actually reporting--you see how avoiding research and fact-checking is the path of least resistance. And journalist are, contra some people's beliefs, very overworked and very underpaid. Really (I had a job offer, which would have required me to live in downtown Atlanta and work 50-60 hour weeks, that paid $14,000 per year. I made more money managing a pet store in Columbia, MO).

I think this is a long-term big problem for Journalism, the profession. It has been eating its seed corn for a decade or more, and so much of its cultural authority is used up. This can be good, in that it reduces the influence of unaccountable institutions, like the big daily papers. But it's also bad, because once everyone stops believing the newspapers, you have a huge problem of vetting and evaluating information. I really hope that up-and-coming reporters, and J-schools, realize that they also have a huge opportunity: if there were a media outlet that really did hard-core research and fought to avoid bias and 'spin' (as impossible as it is to be completely unbiased), it would overcome many of its competitors: there is a real thirst for true information about a huge variety of topics [future post on this]. 'Spinning', even when done with the best of intentions (which I think is often the case), just further weakens a really important democratic institution.

Current Project

If I had to keep one of those dreadful time sheets that my wife does for her work (where you document every six minutes of your time), surely this summer would seem unproductive, with most entries reading "changed Mitch's diaper," "carried Mitch around outside until he stopped crying." "changed Mitch's diaper again." But somehow I managed to finish off a whole bunch of lingering projects:

1. Article on Anglo-Saxon Medicine, co-written with biology professor, submitted to Anglo-Saxon England.

2. Long article on 20th century fantasy's use of medieval materials: "The Problem of Transformation: The Use of Medieval Sources in Fantasy Literature," for Blackwell's Literature Compass.

3. Long article on Beowulf: "Blood and Deeds: The Inheritance Systems in Beowulf” submitted to Review of English Studies.

4. Short (hopefully humorous) piece for Old English Newsletter: An Anglo-Saxonist Gets His Fifteen Minutes (or, what happens when the media briefly pay attention). There may be a web version here

5. And, what took the longest time, the penultimate version of the Table of Contents for the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. The lists of entries and possible contributors is being finished by the press, as is the project website, and I'll post details when I have them.

It's not really that bad. If you count either Tolkien Studies volume I (which we finished editing in 2003 but was published in 2004), or you count TS vol II (which we're editing in 2004 but will be published in 2005), I've had a book and four articles published thus far this year and I've written a few more articles (including one in a collection coming out in Italy) and have two more guaranteed articles (in Rob Eaglestone's Tolkien book from Continuum and in the collection that will come out of the Marquette conference. So I shouldn't feel unproductive, but, in fact, I do.

That's because I want to get back to doing reseach rather than just writing. I feel weird saying it, because obviously when I wrote all of the above, I did a lot of research, but it's not quite the same. For most of what I wrote/published, I didn't do new primary source work. Rather, I used my existing knowledge of texts to pull different threads of argument together. In the case of the Beowulf article, I'd been teaching the ideas for seven years or so, so they were quite refined (thanks to good student questions), but I hadn't put it all down on paper. That was hard, and fun, and mentally good.

But now I'm starting on a quasi-new project (only quasi, because I dealt with some of the background in my dissertation). I'm researching and writing an article about Albert S. Cook, possibly the most powerful American Anglo-Saxonist who ever lived. Cook founded the English department at Johns Hopkins and re-organized that at Berkeley before becoming a prof. at Yale. His published articles take up a gigantic, three-inch-thick binder in photocopies. He did editions of most major OE texts, and these were used for about 50 years and were the 'standard' editions even as late as the early 1980s.

But almost no one knows who Cook was or why he was important. And people who do mention him, like Gerald Graff, in Professing Literature get him hideously wrong (one reason I'm writing this article is to have the fun of showing how wrong Graff gets Cook). I've got all the pieces of the Cook side of the article, but I need to find, for want of a better word, a "hook" to link up my ideas about Cook and the history of scholarship and his particular beliefs with Cook's great achievement: his edition of The Christ of Cynewulf, which was the standard edition until Fred Biggs did one in the 1980's. I want to find a place in Christ of Cynewulf where I can argue that Cook's ideas about authorship and authority, particularly his construction of a biography and identity for Cynewulf, influenced his edition. This means working through and translating all of the three Christ poems and comparing my translation to Cook's, trying to figure out why Cook made the decisions that he made.

It's a fun project, and more importantly, it gets me back in touch with the primary material (reading and translating OE). Who knows what I'll find? My big Chrodegang article (which I think is my best piece of scholarship thus far) came out of digging into the text, translating it, and all of a sudden noticing a pattern. We'll see if that's what happens here.

Cool Thing I Got to Do

On Friday I got to go see this exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science before it opened to the public. I was invited to do some commentary for WBUR, the local public radio station. I'll put up a link when the piece is broadcast in a couple of weeks.

The exhibit was surprisingly good. I've seen lot of movie props (my roomate at Carnegie Mellon was a drama production major and used to bring work home), and they're usually crappy: just good enough to look ok on film is the rule (and it makes sense, since you don't want to waste a lot of money). But these are really impressive: beautifully crafted and presented as if they were 'real' artifacts in a 'real' museum.

I was inwardly amused because I remember that back in sixth grade we had been given the assignment of designing a museum or something like that, and I'd done The Museum of Middle-earth, with orc skulls and palantiri on display. I'd forgotten that until just as I was walking out of the exhibit

There are also some very interesting displays that let you do interactive stuff to see how the characters, etc. were made. You can re-create the Gandalf and Frodo on the cart scene (two separate benches, different sizes, melded together on one screen), or move a plastic sword and shield to make a computer-generated warrior follow you moves. Pretty neat stuff, whether you were disappointed in aspects of the films or not.

Arms Races, Graduate Studies and the Academy, Oh my!

I'm not usually one to write "Read the Whole Thing" (tm), but I have to say that about this post by Conscientious Objector. And also see this post, too. Objector identifies some of the problems with my position that the 'arms race' between applicants for professor jobs has led to a great improvement in the quality of younger faculty, with beneficial results for students, the academy, and society as a whole. I also mentioned that the applicants themselves suffer for this arms race, being caught up in a 'Red Queen effect," where they have to keep running faster and faster just to stand still. Objector points out a crucial point that I missed: although the arms race may create great benefits, the penalty is not only paid by the aspiring professors, but also by society as a whole, as effort that could have been put to more socially-useful projects is expended on, say, graduate studies that don't turn into careers. It's so refreshing that someone in this debate recognizes the problems of trade-offs and sees how real economic analysis (instead of crypto-marxist special pleading) could be used in social analysis, that I'm tempted to just stop there and say, "he's right," but (I'm from New Jersey; I can't resist the urge to argue), let me add a couple of things.

Although I recognize the trade-off, I'm not sure that the calculation of much traded-off effort is very straightforward. As the correspondent whom I previously paraphrased wrote, people can be better off simply from having done graduate study. That is, spending a lot of time examining Beowulf can serve to make a person wiser, smarter, or simply a happier and better person. Think of the hours people put into studying history, or science outside formal graduate studies (as an example, some of my friends in Missouri, who didn't have college degrees, knew an incredible amount of marine biology because of the effort they spent on fishtanks. Their lives were definitely enriched by this study; why wouldn't graduate work be just as good?). It's hard to know how to value this enrichment vis a vis the cost in years and dollars of a graduate degree that doesn't lead to a job, but I think that there's a lot of value for many people.

That leads me to the John Bruce, who is much less sanguine.

I do disagree with the notion that both Michael and Jay seem to agree on, that the intense competition produces a higher level of faculty even at the lowest-tier institutions. I think there's increasing recognition that when the job market is so overcrowded, it's almost impossible for institutions to make rational choices. Among other things, the perceived value of a tenure track job is so great to the applicant -- and its value as something to award is so great to the hiring authority -- that corruption is bound to enter the system, the same way it does in the "third world", where there's a greater oversupply of qualified applicants for middle-class jobs.

and

My own sense is that the social and institutional impacts of the graduate student oversupply include a tolerance in universities for petty corruption, especially nepotism and other back-scratching deals among faculty and administrators, which often center on hiring, retention, and promotion. The faculty oversupply can also be seen (a couple of lectures later in Econ 101) as a student shortage. The forms of price discounting now offered to students certainly include the tacit tolerance of cheating and the strategic unwillingness of faculties and administrations to enforce honor codes. The power of student evaluations (I never got to do these as an undergraduate myself, back in the baby boom when there was a student oversupply) has an impact on how rigorously professors feel they can teach or grade. What's the use of a highly qualified new professor if she can't give below an A-minus?

This is a very intelligently put version of the "lottery winners like the system" argument that some overheated commenters on Elizabeth Carnell's blog and Tim Burke's blog have made. I can only argue from experience, not from statistics or some kind of overall view of the job market, but in my experience, both in job searching and in being on a number of hiring committees, the job market doesn't seem to work this way.

There are lottery elements. If there are 150 applicants for a total of 25 jobs (the situation in medieval lit when I went on the market), then there are all kinds of things that get you bounced into the reject box that, upon closer reading of an application letter, shouldn't be disqualifications (i.e., one of my rules of thumb is that if someone applying to Wheaton doesn't mention teaching in the first paragraph of the letter, I stop reading; like all rules of thumb, it's a way of saving time at the expense of accuracy: the person who doesn't mention teaching may actually be a great teacher but didn't write a good letter, etc.). But I'm not sure it's a lottery: when you look at the people who have gotten jobs in Old English over the past five years (choosing that interval to leave myself out), for example, it's pretty meritocratic: I would have identified all of the people who got the good Anglo-Saxon jobs as the smartest, most capable graduate students. It's much more like a Darwinian competition: some luck, some inherent qualities.

There is, however, a big problem with the system the isn't cured by the 'arms race,' and that is the tendency of trendy of hot-sounding projects to stand out to a hiring committee that has no expert in the sub-discipline. The feedback from this problem tends to draw savvy graduate students towards trendy work that may or may not be what the student really wants to do or what the discipline needs. For example, it's very hard to get hired as a metricist, but we could use some young blood in that field. And on the other side, studies of violence in Saint's lives are starting to seem a little played out and tedious (though there's good work that recently published). This problem is a version of John's "corruption" argument in that hiring committees will often rely on dissertation directors making personal appeals, pulling strings, etc.

Also, again due to lack of sub-discipline expertise, hiring committees can be too easily distracted by superficial things, like overall reputation of institution. For example, Princeton hasn't produced a decent Anglo-Saxonist in a generation. Maybe the new Anglo-Saxonist will change that, but I wouldn't even consider candidates from Princeton, Northwestern, University of Chicago or Penn (just to name a few respected schools that have either lame or non-existent programs in Anglo-Saxon). And I would look closely at candidates from, say, Loyola-Chicago and Missouri (of course), Wisconsin, Arizona State, Illinois, Ohio State and Notre Dame (in fact, I'd prefer them to graduates of any ivy except, maybe, for Cornell). I agree with Objector to a certain extent that it's silly to think of one school as necessarily "better" than another in terms of general reputation. And that's true of students as well, which is why I so strongly oppose attempts to restrict the "supply" of graduate students by further restricting entry into programs. I think that the real-world application of that theory will be to eliminate students from less prestigious institutions or students with a less-than-perfect backgrounds (i.e., got a D in philosophy sophomore year). My best students at Wheaton are as good as the best students at any other school. The difference is, the ivies and other, more prestigious schools don't have matches to the bottom 50% of the students I teach (but even then, some of my best students have risen out of that bottom half).

The "oversupply" of graduate students also seems to me (and here I'm going on gut instinct) rather more upsetting to people associated with 'elite' universities, that is, people who are heavily invested in their ivy connections. In my experience, students with Yale or Harvard or Brown degrees who don't get academic jobs are much more convinced that the market is unfair or unbalanced than are students from, say, Loyola Chicago or Wayne State. It goes back to my very early post about the idea that following a particular path (A's in undergrad courses to an ivy Ph.D. program to a tenure-track job at an elite school) is no longer an entitlement to the job one wants. In that sense, the academy is just catching up to the larger society, in which credentials don't mean as much as they used to. That's not an unalloyed good, but there are some very good aspects to this change.

Arms Races and Graduate Studies

Well, that must have been confusing. A couple of days ago I linked to a blog I've been reading for a while In The Shadow of Mt Hollywood, but I got confused and thought that John Bruce, the author (and you should read his serialized novel on the blog if you don't mind getting sucked in), had made a comment about graduate students engaging in an 'arms race.'

John was understandably confused. The comment to which I was referring was by Conscientious Objector, whose blog I can't get to tonight, and I'd attributed it to John because I've kept reading Mt. Hollywood and thus assumed that was where I'd read the comment.

Ok, with that prologue, I'd better try to come up with something good. Objector had replied to one of my earlier posts where I'd discussed the problems with "the academic labor situation" (which, simply put, is that there are not enough tenure-track professor jobs for all the people who want to be tenure track professors). I had given some suggestions to graduate students who were seeking one of those elusive tenure-track jobs. Objector noted (kindly) that my advice was good, but there was a larger, structural problem: if every graduate student took my advice (to prep very early and very hard for the future job, to market themselves, to have article ready to publish the year you go on the market, etc.), then those graduate students would be engaging in what evolutionary biologists call an 'arms race.' As the competition between graduate students increased, positive feedback would ensure that more and more and more would be required of them. Thus following Drout's advice might work for any individual, but for the population as a whole it would generate more effort just to stay in place (this has also been called the Red Queen phenomenon).

I think this analysis is correct, and that the arms race has already been going on for quite a while. If, for instance, you look at the qualifications of the people who went on the job market in 1977, 1987 and 1997 (when I went on the market), I'm certain that you'd find a lot of people in the 70's whose dissertations weren't even done. In the 80's, the dissertations might be completed, and maybe one article would be in 'writing sample' stage. By the time you get to the 90's, you'd have people with multiple published articles in addition to the dissertation. Likewise with teaching experience. People in the 70's often had never actually taught a full semester before being dropped in front of a class. In the 80's, they'd probably taught one or two classes. When I started at Wheaton I'd taught more than 12 full-semester classes.

From the point of view of the creature caught in an arms race, it sucks. You're working as hard as you can to survive, and each year the goalposts move, making it harder. But (and here's where I think arms races are good), the population of people outside the arms race benefit a great deal from that race.

How can this be? Simple: more and more knowledge is getting produced from the same inputs of money (funding, student tuition, scholarships)and human capital (graduate students). In the 1970s, 20 graduate students might produce 20 dissertations and 1 article. In the 1990s 20 graduate students might produce 20 dissertations and 25 articles. That's a big improvement.

[Obviously I believe that articles are good things to produce. If you don't agree, and think that published articles are not a benefit to society, then this argument isn't for
you.]

The improvement in teaching is even better. In Anglo-Saxon, for instance there are simply no bad teachers left under 40 years old. It used to be that search committees often had to chose between a good teacher and a good researcher. No longer. You can now hire someone like Steve Harris, or Stacy Klein, or Drew Jones (to name just a few from my scholarly generation) who are excellent in the classroom and have major publications.

So everything is good, right? Well, not for the overworked graduate students who are running just to keep place. Not for the young assistant professors who now need more than just one book for tenure. Not for the young associate professors who have been so conditioned to the arms race that we still keep putting in ungodly hours so as to display amazing productivity. But for society as a whole, we're getting more stuff for the same price. That's the beauty created by the ruthlessness of competition.

And there are other problems. One is a little bit sad. Academia used to be a refuge for smart, unworldly people who wanted to spend their lives, say, trying to sort out the layers of scratch glosses in a group of Psalters. They didn't want to have to be "dynamic teachers", and media outreach people for their fields, and political operatives and tireless advocates. These people are getting pushed out. Academia is no longer a nice place where someone can have a quiet, not particularly well-paid but fulfilling career if you are too shy of lacking in social skills for other places. I honestly think this is unfortunate. Smart, shy people need somewhere to go, after all.

Even more significantly, there is a real question whether we're now producing too much scholarship and if it is of lesser quality. I don't know. There is a problem of fragmentation: sub-specialities becoming so specialized that no-one reads anyone else's work. I have to confess I have little interest in what's in PMLA anymore, though I read Anglo-Saxon England like the Bible. Web-publishing, etc. has led to such an increase in scholarship that it's getting harder and harder to keep up with. On the other hand, I think what's being published in Anglo-Saxon studies right now is so much better than a lot of the general literary studies published in the 70's and 80's, that there does seem to have been a general improvement.

Finally, I want to refer to an email that I received when this discussion was hot back in the winter. I don't have permission to quote or post, so I'll summarize: the emailer wrote: aren't I better off having become educated in the search for a Ph.D., whether or not I get a job as a professor? Isn't the real goal to learn more? Isn't that why you're supposed to be getting the privilege of spending your time studying?

I basically agree, though I also see where the critics are coming from, since the economists might say that all the brainpower could be put to better use. I don't know: a lot of brainpower is put into a lot of activities with possibly less social utility than graduate studies in English. And actually I begrudge none of it.

So that's my response to the 'arms race' idea and an explanation for John Bruce, who was wondering what the heck I was talking about.


P.S.: The previous post was edited to eliminate all those stupid errors, but I can't get Blogger to replace the post. Stupid Blogger!

Inside / Outside

A very good blog, to which I've linked before, In the Shadow of Mt Hollywood, has an interesting discussion of rejections of various kinds -- and also follow the links. (And someday I will get around to explaining why I think John Bruce is right in identifying an 'arms race' among graduate students, and why I -- contra him -- think this is a good thing).

I've received my share of rejections, for both fiction and non-fiction. One of my novels made it part way up the agent/publisher chain, only to die suddenly. I got a lovely personal rejection from the Ed-in-Chief at one of the two most respected magazine publishers of fiction. But I also got many, many form slip rejections.
For my scholarship there haven't been quite as many. Beowulf and the Critics got a form letter rejection from Oxford UP (suckers!), and I got an article rejected from Anglo-Saxon England with a one-sentence email (the article was published in another respected journal), and I got the harshest ever rejection from Anglia when the great Helmut Gneuss (and I'm not saying that sarcastically; he really is a giant in the field) hand-typed a list, in German, of all the stupid mistakes I'd made in an article (I learned that you don't want anyone describing any part of your work as a "mangel" -- trust me on this).

But the biggest difference between academic rejections and fiction rejections was that the academic ones almost always give you things to fix. So, due to Helmut Gneuss' generosity, especially given how stupid some of my errors were, I was able to make all the changes he and the other reviewer suggested and get the article accepted at an equally prestigious journal: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. And here's a link to the Table of Contents for this month, when my article, my most technical piece ever, will be published. Considering how much I sweated blood over this article (On Re-Dating the Old English Translation of the Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang), I (almost) feel like I deserve to be in the company I'm keeping in this issue.

But now that I'm on the inside, as an editor of Tolkien Studies, I of course think that editors aren't as evil and stupid as I used to. There's a strange paradox in editing: you're swamped with submissions and at the same time you have a lot of trouble finding what you're looking for. It's not that all the pieces are bad (not at all, actually), but many don't necessarily fit. One of the three editors doesn't agree that the piece is methodologically sound, or the piece wasn't written for a specialist audience, or the author doesn't seem up-to-date on relevant debates, or (and this has happened a couple times) something that looks fine to the editors gets nixed by the anonymous outside reader.

Now Tolkien Studies doesn't get as many submission as the Atlantic Monthly (thank God!), but it's still a struggle to search through to find the kinds of pieces that will make for an exciting issue: not too much overlap, a range of works considered, a blend of "big picture" discussion and technical things. I now have a new appreciation for what the editors at other publications are doing. I know I'm never trying to be cruel or discouraging (and I mean that; even if a piece isn't right for us at all, that's no guarantee that the next thing the author writes might not be perfect; I want to encourage him or her to submit that piece), but I have screwed up, and I can see how easy it is to damage someone unwittingly.

Writing: you slit your wrists, pour the blood on the page, and then strangers say it's not red enough. Crazy profession.

Long time no blog

You'd think that with the semester over, things would be slower around here and I'd have more time for fun things like blogging.
But you'd be wrong.
Life has been much busier these past few weeks, not only because my two wonderful monsters are such fun, but also because we lazy academics often end up doing more work in the summer than during the school year.

Let me put that another way: we end up putting in more hours over the course of a day during the summer.

The big reason? Guilt. When I teach a full day of classes, have office hours and independent studies with students, meetings with colleagues and just general 'face time' from 9 to 5, then come home and grade papers and answer emails after the kids have gone to bed, I don't begrudge myself an hour to relax or blog or watch America's Next Top Model. But in the summer, there's none of the scheduled things, so you feel like you should just be working all day. That work is pleasantly interrupted by playing with the kids, doing yard work, repairing things around the house, and so on, but the overall hours spent keep creeping up.

Luckily, I have only three more major deadlines in the next month: an article for Literature Compass called "The Problem of Transformation: The Use of Medieval Sources in Fantasy Literature," a short, and hopefully humorous piece for Old English Newsletter called "An Anglo-Saxonist Gets His Fifteen Minutes, or, what happens when the media pays attention" (hint: they simplify the argument over the dating of Beowulf; imagine!), and an NEH Grant Proposal for the Tolkien Encyclopedia under their Reference Materials category (hell on earth). All of this will be done by July 15.



One quick thing: Close to final version of the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia Table of Contents is being reviewed by editor, editorial board, etc. Hopefully people will start getting letters requesting contributions. I'll keep you posted via this space.

Web Chat on Thursday

I'll be doing a live web chat about Tolkien scholarship for the Chronicle of Higher Education at noon on Thursday. Here's the link:The Chronicle: Colloquy Live: Frodo Lives! And So Does Tolkien Scholarship

Note that you can log on and ask questions in advance, and I'll try to answer as many as I can.

Update on Journalistic Practices

Just a quick update to this post to answer a few emailed questions:

Back in journalism school, it was drummed into us that you never, never, never try to give the reader the impression that you interviewed someone when you hadn't. I remember getting reamed out for quoting a researcher on elephant seals both from his interview with me and also from his published work and not being clear enough distinguishing the two. (By the way, this reaming was done by an excellent journalist and teacher, Jerry Lanson, then the city editor of the San Jose Mercury News, now the head of the journalism department at Emerson College. Jerry helped to convince me that I wasn't going to be a good journalist; I'll be forever grateful for that).

It's not necessary to go into detail on sources (as it would be in an academic paper), but you need to give your reader a clue: "in a web-published essay" or "in a recently published essay," or "X also wrote that." More importantly, you simply aren't supposed to pass off other people's work as your own.

I have a lot of criticism for my journalism education, and in retrospect it was a waste of a year except that I got to hang out at Stanford, where I met my wife (so going to Stanford was actually the second-best decision I ever made). But for all the attempted political indoctrination and the pervasive unconscious biases in the program, there was a deep committment to journalistic integrity. While my professors all argued that one can't be objective and one shouldn't even try, etc., they never would have stood for the kinds of manipulations and dishonest work on display in so many places. Whether this behavior -- from Jason Blair, to Dowdification, down to recycled quotes -- is the fruit of any specific policies that were adopted during that time period, I can't really tell. But journalism as a whole needs to do a much better job of policing itself and punishing those who violate the canons. I'd like to see journalism schools and editors really emphasize the basics of getting facts straight. But if my experience as a teacher is any guide, the students who are currently going into journalism just want to write opinion any way they can (too be fair, we did too, back in 1990-91, but our teachers and editors seemed to be somewhat better at forcing us to focus on the facts).

Journalistic practices

Jason Van Steenwyk via Glenn Reynolds points out that quite a number of high-profile journalists seem to be recycling the same quote from each other rather than going to the source. As a medievalist, I'd point out that Jason has identified descent due to shared error, exactly the way that we trace manuscript histories.

I'm someone who was going to be a journalist, and who has some training in the area (M.A., Stanford, 1991), so I know that this is a huge failure on the part of reporters (at least as far as their training goes).

I'm also someone who had exactly the same thing happen to me in January 2003, so I'm not at all surprised that so many big-time journalists are violating good-practice rules. It seems very common.

Back in 2003, there was a story in the London Sunday Times about my work on J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf translations. There were a lot of inaccuracies and problems with the story, but at least the reporter actually interviewed me. But after that, the story just took off. There were so many articles that I couldn't track them all down, and they invariably cobbled together quotations from the Sunday Times interview and from a piece of mine that had been published on the web, "Wrong About Almost Everything: Editing J.R.R. Tolkien". Of all the stories that came out, in many languages and formats, I'd say less than 2% of the reporters actually contacted me. I certainly was never interviewed in all the German papers that quoted me, nor in the Australian. But only 30% of the time did the reporters refer specifically to the Sunday Times story, and they never stated that they were quoting my published work without attribution, rather than interviewing me directly.

It may be that the specific case Jason mentions has to do with ideology rather than simple bad practice. It was my experience in journalism school and right afterwards that people at least acted as if they took attribution, getting the interview yourself, etc., very seriously. But there were no ideological reasons for reporters to do what they did in my case, and yet the same sloppy, dishonest practices were followed.

Housekeeping / Graduation Speakers

I've enabled comments using the new Blogger tools, and I've also turned on the Atom Feed, if anyone cares. I'm worried that I'll have to delete comments due to comment spam, but so far, no 'bots.

Tomorrow is Wheaton's graduation, one of the most beautiful ceremonies in academia, I think. It starts out with the students lining the path to where the ceremonies are held (a hollow in the center of campus called the Dimple). Faculty process through the students, and they clap for us. At the end of the ceremonies, we reverse things, and the faculty lines up on the path and the students process between us. We clap for them. It's very simple, but very powerful. I love ritual anyway, but so many of my own graduations felt like empty ritual. Wheaton's isn't, because it's so personal. I know a big chunk of the senior class by name, and so I'll be cheering for a lot of different students as they get their degrees. And as they process out many of them will reach over to shake hands with or hug particular professors. It really illustrates the way that the faculty and students here feel like we've made a difference in each other's lives.

So the deep emotional content of the ceremony is the exact opposite of the ersatz profundity of the graduation speakers. We are scheduled to have Mary Robinson, and I've already been warned to bring a good book under my robe (and I will). I can't critique her yet, but I thought it might be funny to discuss some of the previous speakers we've had:

Surprisingly Excellent:

Of all people, Robert Reich, whom I just have never been able to stand when I've seen him on television, read his OpEds, etc., was the best of the speakers we've had. To my enormous surprise, he made the whole speach about the students, not about himself. He was funny, he teased them a little, made excellent jokes, and was genuinely warm. I couldn't believe it.

David McCullough, author of those gigantic John Adams books. He dug into his database and found a connection between an Adams descendant and Wheaton. She was actually in attendence, to his surprise, since she was 94 years old or so, and he interrupted his speach to lead the crowd in applause for her. He also made the speech about the students and encouraged and applauded them sincerely. Classy guy.

David Whittaker (sp?), Newsweek editor and son of retired professor. Nice guy. Knew the campus and the culture; told stories. Students loved him.

Director of the Getty Museum (sorry, can't remember name). Short and sweet, funny, personable, didn't take himself too seriously.

Truly Awful:

Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist. I remember turning to one of my friends in the faculty and saying "I can't believe any educated human being could give a speech this shallow." His deep advice: "turn off your cellphone and your Blackberry." Wow. I mean, he had nothing to say, and now that I've heard him speak, I can never take any of his NYT stuff seriously again because, while he may have travelled the world, etc., he just spoke in one cliche after another. Ugh.

Worst Ever:

The historian from last year, whose name I'll update in here when I find it, who went on some kind of whacko, super-extreme, leftist rant. "You are graduating into the worst economy since the Great Depression." Huh? Not only a horrible thing to say to graduating seniors, but also a lie (unemployment rate was, what, 6.1% last year; I'm no economist or historian, but I think the Great Depression's was just a tad bit higher). The faculty kept clapping and clapping and giving standing ovations, etc., for what was like something you'd read on Democratic Underground. Again, I am not exactly a conservative (though I'm much less partisan -- I hate both parties -- than my colleagues), and I know that my colleagues say lots of stupid stuff about politics in the faculty dining room, but this guy was talking in front of students. And it seemed like he believed all of what he was saying. Somebody needed to adjust his meds.

Legendarily bad:

I was not at Wheaton when Connie Chung gave the most infamous of all graduation speeches, but the legend has it that she told a long, rambling story about having a dream that included her defecating in a dry-cleaning bag. I am not making this up. No one to this day has any explanation, but it's always fun to ask the older faculty to talk about that one speech, which in sheer awfulness has, apparently, never been surpassed.

"Overproduction" of Ph.D.'s, redux

I've received a surprising amount of email and a few web comments about the post just below, but I haven't been able to respond due to grades being due and baby not sleeping through the night (though he slept from 12 to 6:30 last night, so that was good; we're making progress).

One of the contributors to the comments on Elisabeth Carnell's blog, Dorothea Salo, wrote:

"I also think Drout mischaracterizes what the dream *is*. The Ph.D is NOT NOT NOT the terminal goal for (I would argue) 95+% of those who enter Ph.D programs. THE TENURED JOB IS THE TERMINAL GOAL. If that goal is out of reach for a substantial percentage of those who try for and/or achieve Ph.Ds, then Drout and his ilk are doing them a hell of a disservice, wasting a lot of their lives on a lie."

Carnell has already pointed out that it's not quite true to generalize so much. I can point to three friends out of my fairly small circle of close friends who are also Ph.D.s who got their degrees with no interest in a tenure-track job at a research institution. One wants to be a University President and needs to do the Prof. thing as a stepping stone, one wants to head the English dept at a community college, and the other is already Dean of the Graduate school and will almost certainly continue to move up in administration (and said friend is my age!).

But that's not really my point. I'm more concerned with this:

If that goal is out of reach for a substantial percentage of those who try for and/or achieve Ph.Ds, then Drout and his ilk are doing them a hell of a disservice, wasting a lot of their lives on a lie."

Setting aside the erroneous personal approach (I'm not sure what my "ilk" are, but if they teach at teaching colleges like Wheaton, have no graduate students of their own, and don't rely on any graduate students to teach classes in their departments, I'm not sure that the condemnation really holds water), I think there are real intellectual problems embedded in this statement.

"That goal is out of reach for a substantial percentage of those who try for..." Yes, it is, numerically. But we don't know which students it will be out of reach for. All the proposals I've read -- eliminating Ph.D. programs if they don't place 40% of graduates in tenure track jobs, etc.--assume that one can tell very early on who is good enough. But that's silly, given how much dumb luck is involved in the job search. For instance, you'd think candidates at the Ivies would be "better" than those elsewhere. That hasn't been our experience at Wheaton. While it's true that someone with an Ivy Ph.D. will probably get more consideration at a research-oriented school, such a person is actually at a disadvantage for us, since he or she is probably too specialized, lacks teaching experience, lacks ability to wear many hats (though this may be the way said candidates put together their vitae and letters; personal I reject all Ivy candidates who don't mention teaching in the first paragraphs of their letters.). So in terms of applying for jobs at small liberal arts colleges that are teaching-focused, a person from a "marginal" institution (like my own degree from Loyola-Chicago), has at least as good a chance as one of the more privileged.

More importantly, I'm not sure how it is a "lie" to allow people to continue in a Ph.D. when the job market is bad. Everyone in graduate school knows the job market realities--we talked about it constantly, from the day I arrived in my second M.A. program (my first M.A., in journalism, was different because no one in the program wanted to go into academia). The sound-bite was: "I can't believe you're specializing in medieval. To get a job in that field you have to wait for someone to die." To which I replied: "But a lot of medievalists are ancient, and maybe there will be a plague or something." This was on the first day of graduate orientation.

Now In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood argues that graduate students mentally overvalue their chances of success, and he may be right, but I think that's no different from people who want to go into medicine, law, art, music, acting, tv, film, or publishing. In every case, when you know something about the inside of the field, you quickly learn that there are trade-offs between the enjoyment of the job, the difficulty of getting one, the money, the hours, the politics, etc., that make the grass greener somewhere else. For really desireable jobs, in any field, the competition is fierce, as you'd expect it to be, since the reward can be so great.

I object to the idea that people have to be forcibly prevented from entering that competition for their own good, and so that they don't 'waste' their lives. Our sorting mechanisms at every stage are inefficient and unjust, but there is somewhat less inefficiency and injustice at later stages -- when the person has a publication record, teaching experience, etc. -- than simply trying to judge a person's potential based on an undergraduate transcript. Perseverence, bullheadedness and desire, sustained over a long period of time, are in my mind better indicators than a bunch of A's in undergraduate courses.

"Overproduction" of Ph.D.s.

[Now that's an exciting title for a blog post. People who don't care about the insider stuff of academia and only come here for the Tolkien stuff will probably want to scroll down or come back tomorrow]

Erin O'Connor, whose blog I've read regularly and enjoyed a great deal for quite some time, has a long, semi-angry post in which she discusses perceived problems in academia, including but not limited to the use of adjunct faculty, the difficulties of the job market and the problems of properly rewarding good teaching. In earlier posts I've addressed some of these issues previously (treatment of adjuncts
; exploitation of graduate students ), and given the foot-high stack of papers to grade (35 annotated translations in Anglo-Saxon, 25 15-page Chaucer papers, with final essay exams from both classes and final objective exams in Anglo-Saxon still yet to come in), this isn't going to be as long or detailed a post. But I wanted to address something that I believed for a long time that I've only realized lately is a morally and ethically problematic position.

Prof. O'Connor states

It is agreed that there is a massive overproduction of Ph.D.'s, and that departments that are contributing to this massive overproduction of Ph.D.'s are grossly irresponsible toward grad students even as they serve their own needs very well (they get the cheap labor they need to get freshman comp taught, and they get a pool of smart, interesting students to whom faculty can administer narcissistically gratifying graduate courses). Usually, the solutions offered to this problem run along the lines of suggesting that fewer Ph.D.'s should be produced, that those that are produced should be better supported, and that "The Profession," as comprised of hundreds of discrete departments, should renew its commitment to the tenure track by, well, being very committed to it (this commitment in turn is organized around an ideal of hiring as many TT faculty as possible, cutting back on adjunct labor as much as possible, and placing as many newly minted Ph.D.'s as possible in TT jobs). It doesn't work, and it can't.

.
Note the passive voice in "it is agreed." I used to agree, and I'm pretty sure that most people in the profession would agree. And I now think that they are and I was wrong.

Why is there seen to be an "overproduction" of Ph.D.s? Because there are only X number of jobs available in the academic system, and there are some number greater than X people who want those positions.
Thus the competition for those positions is particularly fierce. And, given the laws of supply and demand, the pay for the positions will be lower and the work demands higher than they would be in other circumstances. Thus, the reasoning goes, if there were fewer Ph.D.s looking for jobs, those people both in the jobs and looking for jobs would be better off. Reduce the number of people getting Ph.D.s and everyone would be better off.

Well, except for the kids who want to get Ph.D.s and would now be blocked from doing so due to the planned reduction in the size of the labor force. Thus 22-year-olds who want to go to graduate school and study would have to be locked out, not for their own good, but for the good of others -- either those already in the system or those who would somehow be deemed to be more deserving.

In practice this would mean that a very few, "elite" programs would produce the next generation of professors. After all, if you're going to reduce supply, then you'd logically cut the programs that are "lesser" in some way. (Unless there were an across the board cut--i.e., each school agreed, cartel-like, to reduce their acceptance of Ph.D. students by, say, 10%--almost impossible to imagine; and if it did happen, it would lead to no school being able to create or build a new Ph.D. program).

Because I am not personally invested in the myth of the superiority of, say, the students who go to ivy-league schools, I am not very confident that such a restriction of supply would be good for the profession intellectually. But it would be an even greater moral disaster, since it would create even more of a "rich get richer" system than already exists. Furthermore, such a restriction of Ph.D. slots would lead to earlier and earlier decisions having greater and greater effects. For instance, now a person could start as an un-funded student in a Ph.D. program, still earn a Ph.D., do a great dissertation and get a job. Since under a regime necessary to significantly reduce the number of Ph.D. students, the un-funded students would be the first to go (since they would be, presumably, less capable -- on paper, at least -- than their funded counterparts), you would have very early "lock-in": screw up one class your junior year of college and that's it.

To me the biggest problem in the elite side of the American educational system is this too-early lock-in. Students are tapped as capable or not way too early in their development. Med schools now in some cases are judging applicants based on the second decimal place in their GPA (because so many applicants are 3.8x or 3.9x). This is ridiculous in that it shows nothing about the different abilities of the students except, maybe, who had a little dumb luck on a final exam in a sophomore organic chemistry class. It just as stupid when the process is applied in other fields.

Prof. O'Connor believes, as I believed while I was in graduate school, that schools produce Ph.D. students to solve labor problems. I am not so sure. I think schools produce Ph.D. students because there is a demand, by students, to become Ph.D.s, and teachers want to grant that demand. If you restrict the number of students who can attempt the Ph.D., you are doing an injustice to those students who are capable of doing the work, who might prove themselves later on, but who, at the time of admission to the program, don't look as good on paper.

A quick illustrative story:

A friend from graduate school came to my institution as part of a relationship (i.e., partner was accepted, my friend moved to the city due to partner). Friend was never deemed worthy of funding for a variety of what seem to me to be trivial reasons. Friend persevered. Friend ended up with the consensus #1 job in Anglo-Saxon his second year on the market. Friend has a book out, another under contract, and is on glide-path to tenure at Research 1 school. If Ph.D.s were restricted, I doubt friend would have been allowed to continue. Also, at the same time friend was continuing to be refused funding, another acquaintance was getting the "gold-plated" funding package: a named scholarship, no teaching requirement, extra research money. Said acquaintance never finished. Suggests that early identification of who is or isn't good enough is pretty haphazard.

Sometimes we should be a little Foucaultian about ourselves: reducing the "overproduction" of Ph.D.s makes guiltless 22-25 year-olds suffer the loss of their dreams for the benefit of other people. Fewer Ph.D.s would make for better lives and better remuneration and better prospects for those who already have them: as Foucault points out, self-interest dressed up as humanitarianism has a particularly bad record, historically.

The End of the Semester
Classes at Wheaton end on Friday, and the collective insanity of the campus is in full career. It's both a good and a frustrating time to be a professor. Good, because for many students, only the pressure of the looming final deadline will motivate them to do their best work. And it really can be their best work, because they've had a semester of preparation under their belts. At this point in Anglo-Saxon, the students are mostly (I think) cursing me for assigning too much work. But we translated fifty lines of Beowulf in class today and they got it. They just rolled through syntactic constructions that would have baffled them two weeks ago. Because they're tired, frustrated and a little surly they didn't recognize how well they'd done, and because I was trying to push as hard as possible for one more day, I didn't yet let on how proud of I am of them. But my take is that out of the 35 students in the class, there are a good 25 who could successfully complete a Beowulf seminar (i.e., translate all 3181 lines in a semester).

Of course this time of the semester is frustrating when you're dealing with students who have let things slip too long and now want to try to overcome the handicaps they've set for themselves. And there's also the rash of illnesses (most probably real, due to stress levels) and family emergencies (most probably faked, but I don't push it; I give students the benefit of the doubt) that comes with the end of the semester. Add the fact that there are so many students at even super-extended office hours that you pretty much don't get ten minutes to think in the course of day, and it's tiring (add the often-waking, always-hungry one-month-old and it's really tiring).

But there's such a heady air on campus among the students that your pulse quickens: they are excited, scared, energized, spring-fevered. It's the end of the year, and so much life must be crammed into a couple of weeks. A great feeling.

Why so Expensive?

Welcome "One Ring" readers. I hope you are interested enough to look into the rest of the blog, and I certainly hope you're interested in Tolkien Studies.

I've received a few emails about the price of the text (and a link from BAW, whose toddler seems to be about a year younger than mine: don't despair, it gets much easier very soon; so much easier that you'll go insane and decide to have another one... which is what we just did)

But, yes, Tolkien Studies is quite an expensive book. There are a few reasons. First, the fewer copies you make, the more each has to cost. We are only guessing at the audience for a serious scholarly journal about Tolkien, and WVU Press is taking a real risk, but they're not going to print a huge number of copies and then have to warehouse them. Hence, a high price per copy.
Second, we decided to print the journal as a hard-bound annual to further differentiate it from Mallorn and Mythlore and other paper-bound journals. Mallorn and Mythlore both publish excellent work, but we wanted to occupy a different niche, and 'look and feel' is part of that niche -- but it costs.

Finally, Tolkien Studies is, in the words of someone who has held up a copy (I haven't gotten mine yet) "an absolutely beautiful book." I'm really proud of not only the content, which is great, but of the style and the look. I spent a huge amount of time examining old, beautiful books published by Oxford, Cambridge, etc. and trying to abstract their best features while still retaining the readability of more modern books. I think (if I do say so myself) that it worked, and I think that JRRT would be pleased by the look of the journal.

My contact, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that he's going to buy five or six of the issue and stockpile it: "in ten years this issue #1 will be going for $300 on eBay." That would be cool.

And one last thing: I've learned that if you need out-of-US postage, it's an additional $25 (ouch; try to find some way to get around that, like having a friend buy it for you or something), but if you subscribe rather than just buying an issue, and if you're domestic shipping, you don't have to pay the approx $6 shipping.