Scattered Academic Musings
- Er...remember that neo-Victorian graduate seminar I was going to teach in the Spring? Not teaching it. I put on my Director of Graduate Studies hat and realized that there were no graduate courses in 19th c. British Lit currently slated for this year, which struck me as a bit of a problem. (Whereas someone is teaching another contemporary British lit seminar this semester.) Ergo, back to the Victorians. Specifically, I'm going to break out the big loose baggy monster course I've been thinking about for a few years: Vanity Fair, Bleak House, Middlemarch, and The Way We Live Now.
- For someone like myself, who works on non-canonical texts and interdisciplinary prospects, open peer review potentially sounds very interesting: it would greatly increase the chances that somebody would actually have read some of the novels or poems I write about, and might bring in comments from more scholars outside literature proper (the occasional religious studies person or theologian might be awfully nice, for example). I wonder, though, if this approach will have vitriolic infighting as one of its downsides. (Presumably, the comments section wouldn't be wiki-ish enough to generate peer review edit wars ["Professor X needs to quit deleting my comment about Professor Burstein's use of "Indeed!"].) Granted, blind peer review generates its own vitriol, but public attacks register very differently from private ones--especially, I would think, on junior faculty. Commenter #4 at the CoHE similarly points out the potential dangers for those who write on heavily-politicized hot topics.
- The Tenured Radical's suggestion that "Journals should not accept articles they are not ready to put into production in the next year" reminded me of the close of my tenure at Modern Philology, when we were in the position of accepting articles that we were going to publish almost immediately. That was a cause for panic, not jubilation: having no backfile was not, as I recall, a particularly reassuring feeling. The journal was never swamped with submissions when I was there, although things may have changed in the meantime.
- While part of me wishes to sympathize with the guy hanging out in the sand, the rest of me notes that a) s/he has a two-two teaching load and b) the proper way to protest the situation is, as some commenters pointed out, to make the case for additional pay to the administration while taking his or her "turn." It would be one thing if the department was inequitably dumping this mysterious service commitment on only the unpopular folks, or if they suddenly decided to quit compensating for it when they got to the sandy professor. But refusing to take on a rotating service commitment, no matter how unwelcome, just burdens the rest of the department (and, quite possibly, is forcing someone else to do more than their fair share of the work).