Virginia’s attorney general says public colleges and universities in the state with policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation should revoke such policies because they lack the legal authority to name gay state employees as a protected class, The Washington Post reported. The attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, a Republican who took office in January, wrote in a letter to the colleges that only the state’s General Assembly can give legal protections to gay state employees. The legislature has repeatedly declined to take that step.

Connecticut, in contrast, recognizes same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex parents, prevents discrimination because of sexual orientation, and provides benefits for same-sex spouses. Since Griswold v Connecticut in 1965 (the Supreme Court decision, ruling on a law restricting access to birth control, that established a right to privacy), the “Land of Steady Habits” has moved steadily into modernity.

The Virginia AG office has historically been the springboard for those with gubernatorial ambitions, like Bob McDonnell, the recently elected governor whose campaign was successful in part because he was a Right Wing transvestite performing in Centrist drag, and whose 1989 Public Polic master’s degree and Law JD thesis from Pat Robertson’s Regent University (entitled “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family”) includes this gem: “. . . every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators. The cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer”  (p. 65).

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It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the bishops’ collusion in shielding sexual abuser priests and preventing the victims from receiving their rightful pastoral care.

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the bishops’ intractable denial of a rightful place for women in ministry and in positions of leadership, more recently evidenced in the Vatican’s New Inquisition of orders of women religious.

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the Church’s single-minded campaign against the social equality of gay and lesbian people.

Today’s news includes salt on that wound. After the Washington, DC, government decided to recognize same-sex unions as marriages (with all the rights, privileges and duties pertaining thereunto), which included the provision of health benefits for spouses, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, led by Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl (”Oh, her!” I could tell you stories that I’d heard about that girlfriend years ago), has decided that henceforth they will not offer spousal benefits to any new heterosexual employees or to any new spouses of current heterosexual employees, in order not to give even the appearance of condoning same-sex marriages.

The former chief operating officer of the archiocesan Catholic Charities, Tim Sawina, has called upon the archdiocese to change its position. According to a report in the Washington Post:

“Some, including the archbishop, have argued that by providing health care to a gay or lesbian spouse we are somehow legitimizing gay marriage,” said Sawina, a former priest. “Providing health care to a gay or lesbian partner — a basic human right, according to Church teaching — is an end in itself and no more legitimizes that marriage than giving communion to a divorced person legitimizes divorce, or giving food or shelter to an alcoholic legitimizes alcoholism.”

The sound you hear is my shaking the dust off my sandals . . . again.

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(To be prayed for nine days in a row)

Almighty and All Just God, who smites the proud and who protects the weak, hear us as we beseech Thee to deliver us from the pestilence of Pat Robertson. Raise Thy mighty arm and remove this affliction from our midst. May Thou bring him swiftly into Eternity where Thou shalt mete out justice and mercy. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, the soon-coming Just Judge of the quick and the dead. Amen.

(Disclosure: I conducted some research for my book AIDS and American Apocalypticism in the library of Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and was once threatened with arrest on the campus during direct action civil disobedience there to protest Robertson’s anti-gay on-air slanders.)

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While I’d like to think that Google (whose corporate value is Don’t Be Evil, or some such vaccuous nonesense) has discovered a muscle called “courage,” I suspect that the motives are more strategic.

Google sees its future in its cloud computing operations and as the provider of email services for large clients (like major universities that provide email accounts to their students).

The Chinese hacker attacks threaten Google’s credibility as a reliable and secure provider of cloud services. It isn’t personal and it isn’t ethics, it’s just business.

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In an attempt to encourage our guardians, I offer the following policy guidance videos.

Connecting the dots: It’s not just for kids any more.

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Last night the panel that I organized, “Translation and Medicine” (which I originally called “Translational Medicine” until conference organizers prevailed upon me to change it) went well. We were exiled to the gulag of the conference: the last session time slot on the last night of the meeting. However, we had about a dozen and a half audience members. Rishi Goyal, MD, (”The Widening Gyre: Transcription and Translation in the Medical Sciences”) offered a rhetorical analysis of the tropes of codes, language, semiotics, reading, and writing that have been used in medical science over the past half century. Anne Bavier, PhD, RN (”Nursing: In a Language They Can Understand”) provided a historical analysis of the ways in which the nursing profession, nursing education, and nursing science have entailed a variety of forms of translation. Finally, Elizabeth Lee, PhD, RN, (”Challenges of Translation in Instrument Development”) described her research translating the Beck Postpartum Depression Screening Scale into Chinese.

The art and science of health care are fundamentally semiotic and hermeneutic activities. The healthcare practitioner reads the body’s signs, attends to and interprets the patient’s narrative of symptoms, and interprets visual representations via imaging technologies or quantitative data from empirical tests. In a reading of Plato, Hans-Georg Gadamer in The Enigma of Health notes the congruence between rhetoric and health care: “Just as the apparently specific tasks of rhetoric must be integrated into the whole philosophical way of life, so too something similar is the case with all those means of treatment which medicine applies to the human body in the hope of restoring its health.”

And as the philosopher of science and the formulator of the concepts of “paradigm shifts” and “scientific revolution,” Thomas S. Kuhn, observed in his essay “Objectivity, Value Judgment, and Theory Choice,” even the supposedly common language of science entails interpretation: “Proponents of different theories are . . . like native speakers of different languages. Communication between them goes on by translation, and it raises all translation’s familiar difficulties.”

Afterward, I attended the reception hosted by Rosemary Feal, MLA’s executive director, held on the 31st floor of the Loews Hotel with spectacular views of the city. Hardly knew anyone there, but wandered around a bit to take in the vistas until I decided to stand with my cranberry juice (I avoid alcohol later in the evening) by the elevator. Standing in one place looking amused, serene, and mildly enigmatic is effective at parties where you don’t know anyone. In short order, Richard Kopley (Penn State), whom I’d seen and chatted with briefly the first day, stopped to chat and we ended up in a lengthy conversation. I first met Richard, who is co-editor of Resources for American Literary Study, several years ago at MLA when he complimented a paper that I’d presented to the Emily Dickinson Society on nineteenth-century verse manuscripts in friendship albums and manuscript anthologies. A scholar in the American Renaissance with a focus on Poet, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville, Richard exemplifies some of what is best about our profession: passion for his work, curiosity, willingness to encourage and promote the work of others. He has had a particularly productive year, after which he is looking forward to some new and very different creative endeavors.

Later this afternoon I will present my position paper (“In Media Res: Browsing, Grazing, and Googleizing Scholarly Knowledge”) at the final CELJ panel, “Ranks, Brands, and Editorial Process.”

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Many spontaneous reunions occur at MLA, some planned, most serendipitous. I bump into Bob and Sylvia Scholnick (College of William & Mary) on the train. Attending Bob’s session that night, I catch up with John Miller (Longwood University) whose dissertation director was Bob Scholnick. I stop to say “Hi” to Richard Dellamora outside the Loews Hotel (where I’m staying because I visited his room there a couple of years ago when we both had recently published chapters in a book and liked the setting). I catch up with former community college colleague Miles McCrimmon who chairs a panel (see below). Two longtime colleagues re-discover each other on a hotel elevator, one informing the other that she is preparing to retire. Old friends talk over breakfast, one lamenting that his post-retirement part-time position has been eliminated in cost-saving measures.

Genealogies

In Candide, Voltaire satirizes the pretensions of Europe aristocrats’ genealogies (including the bastard Candide’s noble but illegitimate descent) with their multiple heraldic quarterings, at one point providing a genealogy of Dr. Pangloss’s venereal disease. Higher education frequently appears as hierarchical and genealogical. If your PhD is from an Ivy League ranked institution, you studied with So-and-son. If your PhD is from a state flagship university, you studied with a student of So-and-so. If your PhD is from a lesser state university, you just studied.

Community Colleges

After making my second pass at the book publishers’ exhibits, I stopped in the far end of the exhibit hall where a food and beverage concession sustains (and robs: $3 for a bottle of tap water) scholars exhausted by words. I chatted with the cashier, a South Asian man whose son, I learned is at a Catholic high school and is now considering colleges and universities. “Why do colleges costs so much?” he asked me. “As much as $40,000 a year!” I explained that this conversation would take some time, but that only private colleges would be likely cost that much; if his son attended a public college or university it would cost much less, probably less than $40,000 for a full four years. And, I offered, if he attended a two-year community college, he would earn an associate’s degree and could transfer as a junior into a bachelor’s degree program at a university. “No, no one wants a community college student.”

The Rodney Dangerfield of higher education, community colleges offer affordable higher education, smaller class sizes, and learning support services. State supported community colleges offer transferable degrees permitting students to complete their general education requirements.

I sit in a session (“Intergenerational Teaching and Learning in Community Colleges”) sponsored by the MLA Committee on Community Colleges, a relatively new unit in professional organization top heavy with literary critics and scholars, including superstars of the cultural professoriate, a class that has, even at their most genial, not been quite sure what to do with general education of undergraduates, much less with the hoi polloi. The presider for the session is a former Virginia Community College System colleague, Miles McCrimmon (J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Richmond, Virginia). Maybe it’s the schedule (mid-afternoon, day three), but the attendance is disappointingly small (maybe about 30 people). Community college faculty are not likely to be members of the MLA; for the twenty years that I taught at a community college, I was the only MLA member in my department, and I knew only a few others at fellow Virginia community colleges. Community college English faculty members are more likely to be members of the National Council of Teachers of English (which includes language arts teachers in K-12) and the Council on College Composition and Communication.

Research and theoretical labor (like literary criticism) frequently trumps practice-based labor (like teaching composition). Teaching (the primary mission of the community college professor) is lower down the hierarchy among many of the denizens at MLA. Ask a professor here, “What are you working on these days?” (a guaranteed conversation starter at any gathering of university professors), and you will rarely hear, “Well, I’m teaching this course and that one, and this is what my students are up to.”

Ranks

A viral epidemic has been a frequent preoccupation of this year’s MLA meeting: The infection of humanities publishing with science-derived journal rankings and “impact factor” bibliometrics.

In addition to two panels of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Structure of the Annual Convention organized the session “Journal Ranking, Reviewing, and Promotion in the Age of New Media.” Journal rankings allegedly have accuracy but their lack of accountability (who is ranking, by what criteria, and with what opportunities for appeal?) is critical, particularly when ranking systems may be used for hiring, tenure and promotion decisions.

Questions posed to this panel: What challenges, opportunities and obstacles to scholarly journals in the age of digital media? What are the effects on journals in the Americas of the new externally performed European Reference Index in Humanities (ERIH)? What benchmarking guidelines might be employed? How are factors related to identity (race, &c) and international culture affected?

The varied panelists made divergent observations. Digital divides exist between northern and southern hemispheres, East and West, but also between scholars at large universities (which can afford to subscribe to digital aggregators) and at small colleges (which cannot afford aggregated digital subscriptions). The question of accessibility dovetails with demographics and culture. In a context of diminishing resources and raised expectations, how do we define (and document) faculty productivity? How do we evaluate quality and effect in the humanities?

Protection may be as important as access: Open access may undermine scholarly journals (which cost to review, edit and publish). Controlled access is necessary in order to continue to subsidize scholarly publication. Clone Web sites (that look like a scholarly journal) may be threaten the credibility of journal. Universities’ open access repositories (“scholarly commons” increasingly required by universities) undermine the economics of scholarly journals. Perhaps the iTunes model would work: You can preview the first page or two of the article but you have to pay $.99 to download the whole article. New media shrink the distance and time of scholarly communication.

A November 2008 report by the Association of Research Libraries and the Ithaka group, “Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication,” identifies eight forms of digital scholarly communication: e-journals in electronic format only; reviews of scholarly works; preprints and working papers; encyclopedias and annotated content; data resources; blogs; discussion forums like e-mail lists; and professional and scholarly Web hubs. Peer review and revision are time consuming, whether they are for a print or a digital journal. Faculty need to be trained to evaluate digital scholarship.

In European universities a faculty member’s funding level will depend on ERIH ratings, which are established without clearly identified evaluators or criteria; it is an administrator’s dream but a scholar’s nightmare. Moreover, metrics can be manipulated. Academic editors are unpaid and see themselves as serving scholarship, so editing could be distributed via digital media, but we have been outsourcing judgments about quality often without recognizing it. Members of tenure and promotion committees, for example, may not read all of the applicant’s publications, relying instead on external reviews. We don’t train people for peer review; a declining number of people seem willing to conduct peer review, which may be the last vestige of the old boy network, noblesse oblige. Journals will no longer exist as a product, but as a process: technologies of colloquy. It would be best if academia developed (and made available for free) the best technologies for us to do value peer review, value editing and value colloquy.

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At the conclusion of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) awards ceremony today, outgoing (in both senses of that term) CELJ president, Bonnie Wheeler (editor of Arthuriana), addressed several recurring questions of journal editors in recent years, particularly related to ownership and credentialing.

What constitutes a “learned journal,” she noted is “ontologically perplexing” with varied periods of publication. Some journals are also published as books (with both ISSN and ISBN numbers). There are also diverse business models in learned journals: some are independently funded, others owned by universities or scholarly organizations, still others commercially published.

The much vaunted po-mo “death of the author” is only the first gambit in a game that may lead to the “death of the editor,” and with it the value of scholarly publishing. Not all scholarly journal editors are scholars. Editorial work is not credited as scholarly activity but only as a community service activity (whose presence won’t earn you tenure and whose absence won’t prevent your earning tenure). Scholarly editing is a distinct class of academic work.

In examining the two pressing matters of ownership and credentialing, Wheeler recommended Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, to be published in book form by NYU Press but available on line in an open access version through Media Commons Press.

Who owns the scholarship? Does the funder own the scholarship? The National Institutes of Health require open access for federally funded research. However, the briefer the interval between the acceptance for publication and its open access, the greater the erosion in library subscriptions to journals, a model that is likely to migrate from medical and nursing research to the humanities. Author ownership is also compromised. Increasingly squeezed financially university presses are selling their entire journal lists to digital aggregators in order to subsidize book publication (whose sales numbers are declining).  A rebirth of the author may mark the death of the editor.

Peer review, Wheeler noted, is the bedrock value-added of scholarly publishing. In sciences peer review begins at an initial stage (reviews of applications for research funding), but in humanities it occurs only after the scholarly article has been composed. In the humanities, peer reviewers are unpaid and often unacknowledged or professionally unrewarded (not contributing toward tenure or promotion, and indeed taking up time and effort that might be spent more profitably in advancing one’s own research and publication). As a result, there is an increasing unwillingness on the part of specialists to serve as peer reviewers.  It is also difficult to secure reviewers to write book reviews, despite the longstanding value that reviews add to scholarly conversations (not to mention, to scholars’ books’ sales).  Wheeler also suggested a generation gap: Junior scholars, whom we have shielded from unrewarded work while they develop their tenure portfolios, may now be less likely to accept these professional duties once they have been tenured.  Lost is a professionalism that transcends personal professional gain.

Wheeler concluded her address with several questions: How can we remake our systems to encourage the younger scholar to accept these responsibilities? If, as Fitzpatrick suggests, our current modes of peer review will hobble us, should we adopt post-publication review (the emerging model of the sciences)? And what about the significant scholarly work of reading, which is time consuming (and competes with other professional work)? Are we witnessing the disappearance of our scholarly capacity to read?

Following Wheeler’s address, a discussion with audience ensued that raised other questions and concerns. How can junior scholars learn to write if published articles are not peer reviewed exemplars of scholarly writing?  Might we institute as part of earning scholarly credentials in order to publish a requirement to participate in the peer review process?

The monetizing economy of the natural and applied sciences is now driving all institutional decisions about scholarship. To make matters worse, tenure committees often only read evaluations of the scholar’s work, not read the scholarship itself.

This discussion continued after the session during the annual business meeting of the CELJ. On the final day of the MLA meeting, CELJ will host a panel discussion on the related topic, Ranks, Brands and the Editorial Process, on which my contribution, “In Media Res: Browsing, Grazing, and Googleizing Scholarly Knowledge,” is available here.

Later this day . . .

No attendance at MLA is complete without a pilgrimage to the exhibit hall of book publishers. Alas, this year it is much diminished, held in the Marriott’s cozy exhibit hall instead of the Philadelphia Convention Center’s vast exhibition arena. Fewer publishers, perhaps, but also clearly smaller exhibit booths for even the major publishers, who typically in the past would have occupied considerable landscape. A reflection of the recession, perhaps, but also the erosion in scholarly publishing, and even trade publishing. While there I ran into the novelist Sarah Schulman, whose work I discussed in my 2005 book, AIDS and American Apocalypticism.

Later still . . .

I’m now attending another session, arranged by the MLA Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature, entitled Book History Matters, whose three presenters (Meredith McGill, Rutgers; Patricia Crain, NYU; Martin Brückner, U Delaware) examined the material conditions of the production and use of the high tech medium of another century, the mass-produced book.

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So like salmon we return annually to the intellectual spawning ground from around North America and other parts of the world.

Having visited my family in Maryland for the Christmas holiday, I traveled north today from DC to Philly via Amtrak. I was fortunate to find a seat and luggage space and a congenial seatmate, a retired lawyer from Connecticut’s Ernst & Young who has retired with his wife to Williamsburg, Virginia, but was taking the train to New Jersey to visit a son, who is a train engineer. His son’s childhood passion for trains never abated, so he is successful at something he loves to do. A very fortunate man.

Between Wilmington and Philadelphia, I spotted Dr. Robert Scholnick (founding director of American Studies, College of William & Mary) walking down the aisle, so we chatted for a while until he, his wife Sylvia and I got off in Philly. Bob and I share some mutual interests in medical humanities, and he has also been a mentor and career coach for me. Bob is presenting a paper later this evening at a session I will attend.

Got settled into my room at the Loews Hotel, a high camp art-deco lodging, whose structure began its life as a banking and financial services building.

Attended a session on using anthologies in American literature courses, which included my UConn colleague Sharon Harris, the new director of the Humanities Institute. Interesting for its discussion of using free on-line or other digital texts, the cultural politics of anthology selections, and the now exorbitant economics of paying for permission to use selections in anthologies. Met Paul Lauter, a hero to teachers in American studies, the lead editor of the Heath Anthology of American Literature that I have used for many years. Lauter and colleagues at Trinity College (Hartford, CT) will be hosting a conference on anthologies later in the spring, where I will present a paper on nineteenth-century friendship albums as self-composed manuscript anthologies.

Took an early dinner. To warm the heart, a Crown Royal Manhattan. Main course of roasted half chicken, diced potatoes in cream sauce, roasted tomato, and asparagus, with a glass of champagne. (Governor Rell: I am paying for most of this conference out of pocket!) Finished off with a bracing cappuccino. Waitress asks how the meal is; I reply, Honey, if it were any better, I’d have to shoot myself. A stroll about the city hall square, the city hall bell sonorously tolling the hour.

Now off to a late evening session.

Later:

Attended the panel session on which Bob Scholnick spoke, Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Imperial Contexts, which also included papers by Victor Goldgel-Carballo and Sheshalatha Reddy. I was struck by echoes of early twenty-first century anxieties about digital textuality (particularly World-Wide Web and other on-line documents and discourses) with analogous new technologies of publication in the early twentieth and early nineteenth centuries.

Also attending the session was College of William & Mary PhD grad, John Miller (mentored by Bob Scholnick), who taught as an adjunct in the English Department at Thomas Nelson Community College when I was there and who is now at Longwood University.

As it is now nearly the eleventh hour . . . so to bed.

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Among the topics healthcare leads the list, but also American (in)justice, local DC politics (in the person of Marion Barry) and Afghanistan.

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