But content objects have another quality. To continue with our example, the “body” of a letter may contain a “paragraph,” but a “paragraph” cannot contain a “body.” That is, letters have a hierarchy. That is why this thesis about text is known as the OHCO thesis, which stands for an ordered hierarchy of content objects. The key concept is that the text in one form, input into a computer system, will be the same as the text in another form, print out on a sheet of paper. The “content” is the same, but the “format” is a matter of processing that is unique to an output device. The example that I have chosen, the letter, is in fact DeRose, Durand, Mylonas, and Renear’s example, which appears in two forms as the article’s first figure. Their letter, from Scooter, is encoded in a form of simplified SGML, and Scooter, who has a computer, has apparently also been able to output the encoded letter to a printing device.

Scooter's Letter, Figure 1 in "What is Text, Really"

The authors use Scooter’s letter to illustrate that “it is natural to use this model in helping children understand and create documents” (4). The two versions of Scooter’s letter in * Journal of Computing in Higher Education illustrate the point of this seminal essay, that form and content can be usefully distinguished for the purpose of computer modeling, which aids in data exchange.

But to my knowledge no one has noticed a little problem with the SGML encoding of Scooter’s letter: it’s faulty translation. Either that or Scooter’s sorry little butt is lying, because the “content” of these two letters is NOT the same. In the printed letter, Scooter precedes his signature with “Sincerely,” as a closing. But the SGML-encoded letter has no “closing.” Scooter signs off with only his name. Is our little Scooter more sincere when he writes on paper than when he transmits by electronic message? Computer-Scooter ends his salutation “Hi Mom” with an exclamation point (!). Paper-Scooter is a much smoother dude: his “Hi Mom” has no exclamation.

Either Computer-Scooter was a too juiced about the OHCO text model, or DeRose et al were already predicting that XSLT would alter the content of the text for the publication medium, with one template to add an exclamation point at the conclusion of the greeting when output to paper, another to add a standard closing.

DeRose, S. J., Durand, D. G., Mylonas, E., and Renear A. H. (1990), “What
is Text, Really?’, * Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 1.2: 3-26.

The extensive research on Romney’s business history includes many snippets and quotations from news stories that are no longer available online or have disappeared behind newspaper paywalls, making the file a likely gold mine for Romney’s political rivals this year.

From which we can conclude the following, I suppose, either about Presidential Campaigns or “journalists” at Daily Caller. That one of them has never heard of Lexis-Nexis, or they have not budgeted any money to subscribe to major national newspapers like the Boston Globe. So the first rule of journalistic digging and opposition research at presidential campaigns is the following: Once ya hit the pay-wall, ya gotta stop.


@INCOLLECTION{KelleyBenitoIntro2006,
options = {useauthor=false},
editor = {Kelley, Wyn},
title = {An Introduction to \textit{Benito Cereno}},
booktitle = {Benito Cereno \rm{(1855), by Herman Melville}},
bookauthor = {Melville, Herman},
publisher = {Bedford/St. Martins},
year = {2006},
pages = {5--35},
address = {New York},
}


Though book title is a cluge, when processed with James Clawson’s BibLaTeX MLA, it WORKS.

But now I see the Lord had His time to scourge and chasten me. The portion of some is to have their afflictions by drops, now one drop and then another; but the dregs of the cup, the wine of astonishment, like a sweeping rain that leaveth no food, did the Lord prepare to be my portion. Affliction I wanted, and affliction I had, full measure (I thought), pressed down and running over. Yet I see, when God calls a person to anything, and through never so many difficulties, yet He is fully able to carry them through and make them see, and say they have been gainers thereby. And I hope I can say in some measure, as David did, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted.” The Lord hath showed me the vanity of these outward things. That they are the vanity of vanities, and vexation of spirit, that they are but a shadow, a blast, a bubble, and things of no continuance.

Rowlandson, Mary. The Sovereignty and the Goodness of God (1682). Bedford Anthology of American Literature: Vol. One: Beginnings to 1865. Eds. Susan Belasco and Linck Johnson. Boston: Bedford, 2008. 190-228. Print.

I am comparing multiple copies of five printings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin using collation and transcribing individual copies of the following texts: newspaper, manuscript fragments, two-volume Jewett edition, one-volume paperback Jewett “Edition for the Million” (1852/1853) the Jewett Illustrated Edition (1853), and the Houghton Osgood New Edition (1879). In the past few months I have transcribed four selected chapters from all three Jewett editions, and I have found a significant alteration to the Topsy character in the one-volume “Edition for the Million.”

I did not anticipate that Stowe had revised for this cheap edition–I did not anticipate that she had not either–but I am not aware that another scholar has noticed Stowe’s revision of the Edition for the Million. Because the edition was printed in double columns, in small type, without illustrations, and sold cheap (37 1/2 cents), it appealed to readers from a lower social class than would the two-volume leather-bound first book edition or the lavishly illustrated one-volume edition. The passage discussed below offers nearly indisputable proof that Stowe revised her work for the paperback edition, but whether she revised for considerations of audience, in the moment because she was an inveterate reviser of proof, or in response to certain criticism, I don’t know. I’ve queried a number of Stowe scholars, and they are not aware that the revision of this passage has been previously noted.

Topsy in chapter XX informs the other children that they are sinners but celebrates her special achievement: “I ‘s the wickedest critter in the world…” In the paperback edition, this paragraph, which concludes “plumed herself on the distinction” is followed by a passage that, as far as I can presently determine, is unique to this edition.

  “But I ’s boun’ to go to heaven, for all that,
though,” she said, one day, after an exposé of this
kind.
  “Why, how ’s that, Tops?” said her master,
who had been listening, quite amused.
  “Why, Miss Feely ’s boun’ to go, any way; so
they ’ll have me thar. Laws! Miss Feely ‘s so
curous they won’t none of ‘em know how to wait
on her.”
(pg. 96)

The passage does not appear on page 50 of the first Jewett edition (on Early American Fiction site).

Nor does it appear in the National Era version (see pg. 178, column A (top) in my dissertation edition).

Although I qualify my statement with “as far as I know,” I have checked—in addition to the National Era newspaper the two-volume first book edition—the illustrated edition and the Houghton Osgood New Edition. Not one of those editions has this passage, so I surmise for now that it is unique to the paperback Edition for the Million. (Note: I need to get hold of Opperman’s dissertation to check British editions). As for why no one has noticed, the paperback editions are relatively rare and a bit frustrating to locate given the variety of cataloging methods (post on identified copies coming soon). The passage is followed with Miss Ophelia’s effort to teach Topsy the catechism, which directly follows Topsy’s pluming of herself in the other versions. This alteration, to me, is stunning.

Since finding the alteration during the first week in November, I’ve been attempting to think about what it means in context. One thing it means is that in this edition Topsy first imagines a route to heaven through her service to Miss Ophelia. Topsy’s doctrine for salvation has taken its cue from Miss Ophelia’s emphasis on order and neatness, and Topsy assumes that her mistress’s obsessions must represent a path to heaven. Topsy reasons that Miss Ophelia’s eternal happiness must depends on service that respects the woman’s peculiarities, and Topsy believes confidently that only she can provide the requisite level of service. Indispensable service to a heaven-bound mistress is thus Topsy’s first plan for heaven. This plan is Topsy’s own invention, and in the paperback version it precedes Little Eva’s intercession. This step (in this paperback version only) precedes Topsy’s move toward Christian redemption on the basis of Eva’s unconditional love.

In this version of the text, Topsy is a reasoning being, whose interpretation of Christian doctrine is subversive and a biting critique of Miss Ophelia’s faults. The passage offers an alternate perspective on Topsy’s point of view, and her adoption of a Christian doctrine–that even the mass readers would imagine is theologically faulty–marks the failure of Miss Ophelia’s effort to teach Topsy the way that she should go.

This post is an effort to interpret the significance of what I believe is an authorially revised version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the paperback edition. I welcome feedback from anyone who would reject, question, or enrich my perspective on this alteration. Readers are also advised to consider Les Harrison’s comment below, which addresses Stowe’s response to Lyman Beecher’s religious doctrine.

UPDATE: After posting this, I thought in my mind that this surely does not end the story. So I decided to do a little follow-up. A version of the passage appears in Stowe’s dramatic adaptation for Mary Webb, The Christian Slave. Jake tells Topsy she’s bound to go to torment. Topsy insists that she’s bound to heaven, but Amanda joins in and seconds Jake’s assertion. Topsy’s responds:

Shall too! Miss Feely ‘s bound to go thar, and they ‘ll have to let me come too; cors she ‘s so curus they won’t nobody else know how to wait on her dar!

See Christian Slave, Act II, Scene VIII, on Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture at

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/uncletom/xianslav/utplhbsaII8t.html

The Uncle Tom to which I refer comes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, perhaps the most widely read novel of the 19th century. One of the work’s most resilient public legacies is the name “Uncle Tom” as an insult, a byword for a black man who chooses subservience rather than resistance to white oppression. Though this motif is well-known, it has gradually faded from general public consciousness even if it remains salient in Black communities. The fictional Uncle Tom’s subservience is a simplified popular-culture reading of Stowe’s work, and many readers have noted that in Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s subservience is a principled resistance and an effort to protect others. Nonetheless, the work’s more enduring and insidious cultural legacy is the racist belief that the lives of black or dark-skinned people serve to provide meaning for the lives of white people. Stowe presumes that her reader is white, and her recognition that slavery is evil served not to offer fulfillment to the black person but to redeem the white person and the American nation from the sin of slavery. This is a just criticism of Stowe’s imaginative limitations: Uncle Tom sacrifices himself so that his first master can escape debt (though Tom also hopes that his family will be safer) and offers to remain with a second master until that second master can find Christian redemption with Tom’s assistance. Though Stowe was able to imagine that black people would prefer freedom to slavery, her ability to imagine free black people on equal footing, legal and social, in the American nation was quite limited when she wrote the novel. Black critics like Martin DeLaney were forceful in their condemnation. As Stephen Railton points out, Stowe’s theme has been a favorite American motif throughout the history of cinema. American movies often have dark-skinned people as secondary characters, who serve to provide a dollop of spiritual authenticity to the troubled primary character, always a white person. The reason that the fictional dark-skinned characters do these things (in these later movie retellings of the Uncle Tom myth) has nothing to do with the personal wants or desires of the black person—nobody ever bothers to ask in these movies what the black character wants—but entirely with Christ-like self-sacrifice for someone else’s spiritual redemption.

There are echoes of Stowe’s Uncle Tom character in the public discourse around James. Stowe’s character is first described as his master’s “best hand” and runs the farm. LeBron James is easily the best player on his team. Another perhaps relevant parallel is James’s unusually selfless play on the court. Among superstar players I’ve watch on a basketball court, and he is unquestionably one of the most gifted players of his generation, he is unusually selfless and willing to pass to an open team-mate, a quality for which he has been criticized. But I don’t think either status as the “best hand” or the selfless play explains why James is perceived as an Uncle Tom. Ervin “Magic” Johnson, a player similar in selflessness and skill, was not regarded as an Uncle Tom. One reason that the public may have expected LeBron James to act like an Uncle Tom and sacrifice for his home town is that Nike marketed his image that way, as a Christ-like savior for Cleveland, a city starved of championships.

In support of my James-as-Christ reading, take a look at how Nike marketed James in Cleveland:

Nike's LeBron James Witness Poster from basketwallpapers.com

This poster is obsessed with Christian iconography, with King James as a basketball savior. The player is in the pose of Jesus crucified on the cross, and the viewer is invited to a sports cult in which we “witness” James. He promises to bring “Nike”—shoes of course—but also the goddess who personifies Victory, a salvation to Cleveland as a title-starved town. And doubters who cannot quite accept what they see are offered further encouragement: “believe at nikebasketball.com.” So the iconography of the cross, the encouragement to believe, the challenge to witness, the promise of victory, and the offer of basketball salvation rest on a chosen one, King LeBron James, a basketball Christ. He is an Uncle Tom not in the insulting sense of subservience to white people but in the other sense, of being willing to sacrifice his own hopes and dreams to, in the fictional Uncle Tom’s words, “stay with Mas’r as long as he wants me,–so as I can be any use.”

When James the man, who may not have realized he had been marketed as a fictional character, chose not to “stay with Mas’r as long as he wants me,” he became an anti-Tom. He chose not to play to type, the Uncle Tom and Christ that Nike marketed him as, and that I think is a major reason that northeast Ohio basketball fans (white fans moreso) were viscerally angry when he departed from Cleveland. If we accept as essential to the competitiveness of sport teams in league play that the draft allows teams to force a player to accept a job in that league only with that team, we ought also to accept that in return after a defined initial contract period the employee ought to be granted the freedom to choose a place of employment at his or her own discretion. If you are angry at James for leaving Cleveland and any element of your anger is his failure to live up to this old American stereotype of the Uncle Tom, then you ought to be look closely at yourself. Why does a player on a basketball court owe you redemption?

Though I had to look up that sophisticated phrase, I now assume that the department desires malicious proofreading with its Joycean sense of lacking generosity. The more commonplace definitions for meanness include inferior quality or commonness and selfishness. Synonyms for meanness include pettiness, baseness, and low-mindedness.

If a student who is ignorant of the Joycean allusion proofreads in petty and low-minded fashion—but really works at it—could the student mount a serviceable defense on the basis of our policy document?

Procedural documents were not so entertaining when I worked in the corporate world.

Enjoyed keynotes (David Stork and Will Noel) on light, math, and reading paintings and Archimedes. And attended presentation of Jason Rhody of (ODH and NEH). From tweets on Rhody, a new implementation grant planned for NEH on 2012, Feb, 50K-300K, 2 to 5 offered, competitive, after Startup (or not), depends on budget. (Write your congressperson). What DH startups can do: research, tools, impact of, scholarly communication. See scripto.org for transcribing historical papers (a crowdsource project) which my students in Civil War memory course might be interested in). Maybe that’s a way to edit all eleventy-seven editions of UTC. What the heck, guess I’ll write Scripto contact and imagine.

After lunch, with Andrew Jewell who filled me in on progress with Scholarly Editing (forthcoming remixed journal of Association for Documentary Editing), yes, Andy Jewell, he who in presentation co-written with Amanda Gailey yesterday confessed to preferring a 5-year old technology called TEI to the new stuff. Andy once told me that nothing in world of scholarship is as tough as working at Wal-Mart. And I was able to agree and think in my mind—but not tell him because it’s an old story—that nothing in scholarship is as bad as working in a chicken processing plant freezer, as extruding foam box inserts, as using an inverted pipe to put up barbed wire fence posts, as painting a house, as working as Mcdonald’s fry cook. Pass silently by as you wipe a tear.

After lunch to presentation by Natalie Kalich and Russell McDonald. Kalich offered a neat reading of Woolf and British Vogue but also turned to Corravubias, who also illustrated Stowe, and in Vogue published type-sketches entitled “Enter the New Negro” (1925) and “Negro de Nos Jours” (1927) Fascinating stuff (to me) because Thomas Kemble, illustrator of Huckleberry Finn (and later Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin) is criticized for racism of Twain images but praised for for Stowe images. What is this “type” thing that illustrators were doing in the 1920s? Fascinating because of my own other work about type and stereotype.

Tried to be too fancy for afternoon session and split between Daphna Atias, Meg Meiman, and H Wayne Story (had to switch sessions twice) and thus made door noises. Atias fascinating on authorial selection rather than intention (derived from Schulze on Moore), and on natural selection. Time to go back and read Mays on Coleridge, McGann on Mays (doing what reads to me—when I began it—as a riff on what Patterson did to Kane-Donaldson) and Schulze’s introduction to Moore), because Stowe, I think, was working “local fitness to environment, not fixing” (Schulze by way of Atias). Meiman reminds us that what scholars do differs from what they say, but I’m happy I just send students straight to JSTOR and ProjectMuse, because that’s what scholars do. Storey confirms same type of work that Atias illustrates with Dickinson goes on with Dante and Boccaccio. Regret missing Bornstein, Schulze, and West, and so toss a little disgruntled under-my-breath grrrh at Matthew Kirshenbaum, who schedules three of my favorite sessions at the same time. He didn’t even ask me. I’m really not complaining because he has done a phenomenal job of re-mixing STS. Learned later from Peter S. that I had reason to regret missing Schulze’s presentation, but what’s one to do?

Get grumpy and skip out the late session, and thus offering permission tomorrow for anyone who needs to skip mine for same reason. Fortunately, one of the great scholars of typography, T. H. Howard-Hill, was reading the newspaper in a too-sunny chair, and I wanted to ask him about ways to think about typographical space. Was schooled, and humbled. Told George Bornstein a little story about spacing and typography, which he appreciated. I owe him more than one story for what he’s done on Gates edition of UTC. Had dinner and nice chat with Barbara Bordalejo and Alex Gils. Regret that I have not yet talked to Jessica De Spain, who is working on another great sentimental text, Wide Wide World. Back to my room to call home, say Hi to family, and prepare this post. Wonder why I signed up for DH Day, because it looks like a lot of work.

He put me in mind of Borges’s Funes the Memorious. Funes is cursed by perfect memory, the ability to remember every leaf on every tree. To manage, to calm the chaos in his mind, which denies him the ability to abstract and think, he catalogs every sensation. To sleep he imagines the interior of houses that he only knows by their exterior, ones in which he has never set foot.

The conference is being tweeted (or twittered), and I dutifully set out to tweet and be twittered at—to watch the fluttery waves of 160-character commentary. When I began reflecting this morning on Morris’s talk, I had a fantasy that I remembered the title of Blake’s lost work, the one that Morris imagined could be edited in its absence. As I began writing, I discovered that I didn’t. And so I thought—well, there’s Twitter—and so I learned that Twitter too has forgotten, its traces older than eleven hours now consigned to worshipful oblivion—unless retweeted. I’ll have to rediscover memory the old-fashioned way, by shared social context.

Morris said that editors live more in a stated of anxiety or panic than melancholy, and I think I agree. But the appeal of melancholy is strong. Two weeks ago, I visited the Digital Imaging Lab at Kent State to snap pictures of an edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After I finished, I tried to copy the pictures to a hard drive. For some reason, that hard drive only connects to some PCs. And it would not connect to the one in the lab. Therefore, I decided to copy the 15 scans to an SD card. While waiting for it to copy, I had no signal from PC that it was working. So I decided to remove the SD card. Then I was warned that data could be lost. The data was still on the hard drive, and I had to rush to lunch before another class. So I decided to save this transfer for another day. When I contacted a faculty member who runs the lab, she informed me that my pictures, if saved to my user account, would be obliterated when I signed out. So the only evidence that I have is my memory. But I am not melancholy about that. The book that I was taking pictures of is a beautiful edition, with gilt-edge pages. In order to take pictures, I open it. I flatten not so much to damage the spine, but enough to flatten the pages so they are clear. After taking the images now gone, I glanced at the top of the gilt-edge pages, and a line in the gold leaf now appears. As Hanno Biber reminded us, before he began his discussion of the sadness of the digitization of books, this is no sadness as compared with events in Japan. But it is a loss.

I begin to believe that we are more attuned to melancholy as we age. As a literary scholar, we lament works unwritten, manuscripts lost, unique copies burned, the fading of vigorous minds. We lament less the losses of youth, though these are more acute, and Morris did remind us of Thomas Gray’s “mute inglorious Milton.” In one’s 20s or 30s, undone things have the future’s promise. In one’s 60s or 70s, undone things have the promise of never being done. Yet in social terms, when Medicare and Social Security and tenure and pensions are protected, we preserve and protect those marching closer to oblivion, based on society’s solemn obligation, while—at least in my home state of Ohio—we piously burden the current and future generation with higher contributions to retirement, the austerity of cutbacks in social services, higher taxes, higher tuition, school debt, higher levels of unemployment. Can we manufacture a motivating melancholy for the future’s losses? One generation must be protected from tax increases and loss of social services at all costs, another must pay the bill. Can we manufacture melancholy for them—or is youth better served when its seething anger motivates others to fear?

Whitman, during the Civil War, made a pleasure trip to Montauk, out on the edge of Paumanock, which I would be near were we in Manhattan. In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” Clementine and Joel promise to meet again at Montauk. Clementine’s attempt to reach beyond the oblivion, as the doctors at Lacuna are about to succeed at erasing her from his memory, allows Joel and Clem to reunite, where they can repeat the past, but wiser. Joel’s attempt to hide her in memory, where the Lacuna doctors could never expect her, fails. I fear that digital editorial work is more like the latter, but I hope that it is more like the former.

One of the most hated provisions of Senate Bill 5 may have a bright side, because I doubt that the members who wrote the bill have a clear sense of the duties of a member of a university faculty, though this 8 March article in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that I may be wrong in my original inference. The Senate Bill includes the following provision, which seeks to define the duties that would classify one as management-level employee and thus not eligible to be represented by the union.

“Management level employee” means an individual who formulates policy on behalf of the public employer, who responsibly directs the implementation of policy, or who may reasonably be required on behalf of the public employer to assist in the preparation for the conduct of collective negotiations, administer collectively negotiated agreements, or have a major role in personnel administration. [....] With respect to members of a faculty of a state institution of higher education, any faculty who, individually or through a faculty senate or like organization, participate in the governance of the institution, are involved in personnel decisions, selection or review of administrators, planning and use of physical resources, budget preparation, and determination of educational policies related to admissions, curriculum, subject matter, and methods of instruction and research are management level employees.
(Section 4117.08 K)

Since I serve on departmental committees, one of which is the Graduate Literature Program Subcommittee (GLP-SC), some of my responsibilities including reviewing applications to the KSU doctoral and master’s programs in English literature and to assess or refine programmatic requirement for the degrees. Because members of the committee contribute to decisions related to “admissions” and “curriculum,” by the logic of Senate Bill 5 I have become a “management level employee.” I suppose one could quibble about the meaning of a “like organization,” but I would think a departmental committee is a “like organization.” This leads to a strange quandary. If Senate Bill 5 becomes law, could faculty members remain in the union if they did not serve on committees?

I should inform members of the legislature that a major task of faculty on GLP-SC is to read some 40 or so graduate applications, which consist of 2-page applicant statements, 3 letters of recommendation 20-page writing sample, transcripts, GRE scores. The work is tedious in general but has its rewards. Faculty members do the tedious as “service” even while they enjoy the moments of encountering promising young scholars. The decision of the committee is better than the opinion of a single administrator because different members of the committee bring different expertise. Academic disciplines are broad. Because each member of committee contributes a portion of their expertise, the committee can do a better job of ranking candidates than a single administrator. Sometimes the opinions of committee members are widely divergent, and we have meetings to discuss (that’s fun too).

Members of the university faculty generally do not relish committee work. By reputation, we would prefer to reside in the ivory tower, doing obscure research tasks, like this, instead of teaching or service tasks. Because such work as “admissions, curriculum, subject matter, and methods of instruction and research” is spread over the membership of committees with rotating membership, the department has a relatively flat administrative staff. Were the state to micro-manage union membership (or worse, to legally prescribe rotating membership according to whether a service-related task was defined as management-level work) I suspect it would subtly undermine a system that generally achieves the goal of responding to changes in the profession and changes in the public expectation for university education with an ordered process. It defies common sense that the legislature would want to be in the business of micromanaging the job description of a university professor.

Do remember that tenured and tenure-track faculty receive little recognition or reward for committee work, because promotion is based mostly on research and teaching. Our faculty peers (again on committees) evaluate us almost exclusively on the basis of the quality of our research (how it is received the field) and our teaching. If you work in the private sector, as I did for about a decade, you know what happens to the little jobs that need to be done, that have no reward associated with doing them, and that can be blamed on others if not done. But in fact, the union strongly encourages the consideration of such service as an essential part of our work. A self-interested faculty member, who knows that research is the most ready path to professional success, would be dumb to devote significant time to committee work. After Senate Bill 5, one would have to border on near idiocy—or suffer from enlightened altruism—to devote one’s self to committee work.

Could an unintended effect of Senate Bill 5 be the end of committee work for faculty members? I doubt it, because the actual purpose is to redefine faculty into management such that faculty could be ordered to fulfill administrative duties. Rather than contributing on the basis of shared interest and dedication to departmental or school governance, committees will probably be appointed, doing committee work as a duty. I can honestly think of no more powerful way to reduce the quality of committee work than by making it compulsory. The naive ask, what would committees possibly do? In addition to the above, hire faculty (though not so much in recent years), alter major requirements to reflect changes in a field or budget, review and approve courses proposed by faculty, request purchases of research books and journals, to name a few.

For example, in a week or two I have to meet to discuss allocations for library purchases for titles related to research in English. Why? Because the library anticipates budget cuts in coming fiscal year, the department’s allocation for library purchases needs to be trimmed. It’s committee work. Does anyone really believe that the university would be better served if an administrator (instead of a faculty committee) made these decision? Should an administrator decide which books to purchase? Or should I and the committee of other members of the faculty make the decision based on their own specialty fields? I’d have a difficult time telling you which books are worth purchasing in linguistics, another part of English department. For nineteenth-century American literature, I can do OK.

For example, in response to state budget cuts, our department (in work by another committee) recently reduced the number of prerequisites for many course, in order to attract students from other disciplines to take our courses for electives. How does department decide which courses could drop pre-requisites? Committee work. Faculty members who had actually taught the courses were much better able to judge which courses could handle open enrollment and which build on previously required courses. And in fact, the decision to change requirements was an administration-driven change. The administration, faced with its own demands trimming budgets, was quite able, with financial incentives and disincentives, to compel the department to re-think its prerequisite requirements.

The members of the Ohio legislature should know that universities are political environments. My department is scheming to attract undergraduates to take our courses, when many might be equally as interested in philosophy or history or journalism or another field. Academics, like other people, respond to incentives and disincentives. When committee work becomes compulsory rather than by service, the public can count on less thorough and conscientious work. There’s a difference between doing the minimum that needs to be done and doing what’s right—did you read each bill in its entirety before you voted on it?—and it is regrettable that the Ohio Senate would systematically encourage the former over the latter in pursuit of its Machiavellian interest in neutering public employee unions. But if the neutered AAUP survives legislative horsetrading, might being a union member become a way to avoid committee work?

The members of the faculty that I know do their best to be conscientious in all of their duties—even committee work. So I doubt that it would suffer considerably. But think about it, members of the legislature, should Senate Bill 5 provide a genuine incentive for lower-quality work on committees composed of the university faculty? But turning faculty into managers, you’re likely to lower the quality of the managerial work that we’re already doing. As you’re political beings, I trust you can figure out whether that’s wise.

This post updated to reflect my decision to decline a nomination to my department’s AAUP representative ballot and to link to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which identifies the source of the Senate language cited above with the Inter-University Council. I had never heard of it before reading this article, but they look a lot like “committee work" for university presidents.