<< SF Friday: War of the Worlds | Front Page | Andrew Davies Interviewed >>
Friday, September 05, 2008
Carnegie Mellon Puts _minnesota review_ On the Block
cross-posted from howtheuniversityworks.com
As previously reported in this column, this could be the end for _minnesota review_.
Editor Jeffrey Williams released this announcement earlier in the week:
The _minnesota review_ is seeking a new editor and a new institutional home. Please send queries and proposals to Jeffrey J. Williams, at
jwill@andrew.cmu.edu or Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, PA 15213, by December 1. Traditionally, institutional support
has included release time and summer support for the editor, support for two
graduate assistants, office space, and incidental expenses. The _minnesota
review_ is an independent journal, meaning that its revenues (from
subscriptions) sustain its publishing (its printing) without outside support.
However, institutions with which it has been affiliated have supported the
editorial work of the journal.
If a suitable editor and institutional support can’t be arranged, Williams will shut the journal down.
How’d it come to this pass? Evidently the “quality” wizards at CMU are happy to throw cash at administrators, facilities and gimmicks like the Data Truck, but the humanities? They gotta pay their own way.
How do the quality wizards at Carnegie Mellon and elsewhere initiate organizational learning for humanities types? Why, give ‘em Sophie’s choice, of course: “You can give up tenure track lines or do twice as much teaching--you choose!”
The managerial literature actually thinks this tactic and others like it is a real cleverness on their part. And it’s true, there are plenty of high scorers on the SAT who are conned into thinking this amounts to a form of worker participation in decision making.
Both the perpetrators and the dupes seem oblivious to the fact that it really sounds like an especially sadistic set piece in a violent film: ( “You want me to break your left kneecap or your right? Har, har, har!")
Faced with his own Sophie’s choice, framed by the paymasters at CMU ("You can give up your summer pay or make your graduate assistants work twice as hard--you choose, buddy!"), _minnesota review_ editor Jeffrey Williams chose option C, neither.
Since the amount of money involved is tiny--and the humanities cred that this well-regarded journal offered was cheap at the price--I think a good administrator would have backed down, somewhere along the line, over the couple of years that this was brewing.
I have no inside information, other than quite a few CMU admins and loyal servants are ticked that I’d actually raise the door to the garage in which they were plying their trade.
But my guess is that it must boil down to some manager’s ego: “I said you had to make cuts, and that’s final!”
Always wanted to run your own journal? Now’s your chance.
Comments
Man, this sucks, Marc!
I mean, I personally have no investment in the Minnesota Review. Nor, as an independent scholar, do I have much of an investment in most of these institutional issues.
Except, except . . . that my “independence” is not entirely my idea.
& I figure I’m the oldest Valve author (born in December of ‘47) and hence one of the oldest folks around these parts. And I clearly remember conversations about “what’s going to happen to the profession?” that date back to the late 60s and early 70s (at Hopkins and SUNY Buffalo). Those people knew & feared, absolutely knew and feared, that demographics and whatnot was likely to gut the profession. They didn’t predict permatemping, but they saw the writing on the wall.
And I can’t see that they did diddly-squat about it, or made an attempt. The fate of the Minnesota Review is just collateral damage to the trends that were visible and discussed back in the day.
How much would we all have to chip in?
Interesting question from David above. Let’s guesstimate. Grad students are made to live on nothing, so let’s say $25K per student—not that they get $25K, but that includes benefits, overhead etc. Summer support for a prof? I’ll guess another $25K. Office space, who knows, but I’ll guess a last $25K just to keep things even. That’s $100K/year. Which is: a) an almost negligible sum for a university, b) more than any charitable foundation that I know of will give on an ongoing basis (they give lots to short projects, but don’t like to support ongoing ones), c) more than could probably be supported by individual donations, because it has to be raised year after year, and there’s no budget for hiring a person to raise it.
I’m not a professional fundraiser, so what I wrote above could all be nonsense. But my point is that this seems like one of those projects that is most naturally supported by either a university or a nation-state.
Last time this came up, the issue was CMU threatening to take away one month of Williams’ summer pay. No idea how much English professors make at CMU, but I’d have a hard time imagining one month’s pay would be more than $15k.