There’s been a lot of discussion in various internet settings over the last week, some of it pretty contentious, about the definition of the Digital Humanities and its relationship to digital media studies. (See, for instance, the debate started by Ian Bogost’s post, as well as that provoked by Dave Parry’s first and second takes on the issue.) Some of this debate arose, I think, from a sense of annoyance among folks who’ve been working in DH for years that suddenly, now, with the rise of social media and the visibility of those working in and on those forms, a bunch of attention is being paid to something called “digital humanities” — but the thing going by that name isn’t quite the same thing that it’s been for the past few decades, and the thing that DH has been is now being overlooked (or worse, dismissed) in favor of this new interest in digital media.

As someone who works in digital media, but feels a profound connection to the idea that I have of the digital humanities, I’ve found myself a little puzzled at moments, both by the debate and by the emotion behind it. I’ve intermittently had that sense of realizing, mid-argument, that you and the person with whom you’re arguing are using exactly the same words but are nonetheless speaking two different languages. And as Matt Kirschenbaum noted — correctly, I think — the fact that these battles over the definition of such terms are based in stereotypes indicates that they’re nearly always, and certainly in this case, institutional turf wars.

This is not at all to say that such battles don’t matter — in fact, for those embroiled in them, institutional turf wars often matter enormously. But what I’ve spent the last few days pondering is why — what the real stakes of such wars of definition are, and whether there’s a better way of thinking about the questions of institutional structure that underwrite them. The result is an awfully long and somewhat rambly blog post, safely tucked below the fold, in which I work through my thoughts on these questions.
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You go!

In the coming year, I’m going to be going up for a promotion review, and along with all the other attendant stress work, I need to develop a list of potential outside reviewers for my case. (I’m replacing “stress” with “work” here in no small part because this review has far lower stakes than the last; if it doesn’t go well, the worst that will happen is that my feelings will be hurt.)

Here’s the thing, though: for this particular review, all the outside reviewers have to be full professors. And while there are a fair number of full profs in media studies, broadly construed, most of them are in film studies on the one hand, or have come out of communication on the other — which is to say that either their object or their methods bear very little in common with mine.

So I need to develop a list of full professors who are working in digital media studies from a humanities-based critical/theoretical viewpoint, and I’ve decided to attempt to crowd-source this list, not least because I know that there are several folks out there not far behind me who will have need of this list in the not-too-distant future.

The more inclusive and extensive the list, the better, I think, so I’m including folks whose work literally grows out of media studies along with those whose work (like mine) has come to media studies from a more traditional humanities discipline. I’ll begin with a few that occur to me right off the bat:

Cathy Davidson, Duke University
N. Katherine Hayles, Duke University
Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California
Anne Balsamo, University of Southern California
Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara
Anna Everett, University of California, Santa Barbara
Jeffrey Schnapp, Stanford University
Neil Fraistat, University of Maryland
Jerome McGann, University of Virginia
Johanna Drucker, University of Virginia

I know I’m missing some obvious names, and there are probably many less obvious ones as well. Who should be added to this list? Are there other ways to approach such a list that I’m not thinking of?

I’m standing in the airport, after the usual delirious experience of waking up at 3.30 am to be ready for my 4.30 am cab. The flight I’m about to board, as usual, will take me to Houston, but then from there, I’m on first to Amsterdam and then to Trondheim, Norway, where I’m serving as first opponent on a dissertation defense. Last night, I went back into Jill’s archives to remind myself of what this process is like; it sounds like it ought to be a fascinating experience.

And that’s aside from the fact that it’s taking place in Norway. Unfortunately, given the time and the distance, I won’t be able to pop in on folks I know there, but I hope to see a little bit of the place.

And to relax some. Given that I just wrapped the draft of the book up on Friday, this trip is pretty much what constitutes my summer vacation, and I intend to make the most of it. I have a tiny bit of work with me, but 80% of the reading I have with me is for nothing but fun.

More from the other side.

Cathy Davidson has an excellent post up at HASTAC thinking about the meaning of tenure and ways of imagining valid tenure standards for an increasingly interdisciplinary future. Along the way, she announces that HASTAC will be working with the MLA on reimagining tenure guidelines, and that they hope to work with other disciplinary organizations as well.

But the key moments of her post come after that announcement, as she ponders what the basis for tenure decisions ought to be:

The basic question is not have you published that book. The fundamental question is, based on one’s first six or seven years in the profession, is one likely to be a lifelong, energetic, idea-filled, responsible, creative, innovative contributor to the profession, even when the Damocles’ Sword of tenure is no longer swinging above.

And:

How in the world can a “floor” requirement ever predict future performance? That is, if you establish a quantitative measure, such as one book for tenure, two books for full professor, what in the world are you saying about future contributions? You achieve the measure and then you stop? Really? Is that the ideology of tenure?

The point of the tenure evaluation is supposed to be using a scholar’s past performance as a predictor of continuing performance — on some level, the existence of the first book is meant to stand in for all the future books that will follow. For too many scholars, though, the book requirement becomes a literal end in itself, a finish line that, once crossed, leaves the scholar without future direction or motivation.

So what if we were to say, forget the book, or whatever number of articles one were to set, and instead focus the standards for tenure on the demonstration of an active, ongoing research agenda? How many different forms might meet these new standards? What new kinds of scholarly engagement might we foster?

Actually, I mean that in a more positive sense than it no doubt sounds. I tried a few other variants (Mouthing Off Pays Off!) but none were quite as satisfying. And it’s possible that the ambiguity is intentional.

In any event, the payoff: I got a letter in my mailbox from the MLA today, not one of the mass-produced kind but clearly a more personalized type thing. I’m the chair of the discussion group on Literature and Media this year, and so I assumed that the letter had to do with that. Instead, the letter began:

Dear Professor Fitzpatrick:

It is my pleasure to inform you that at its recent meeting the MLA Executive Council appointed you to the Program Committee for a three-year term, from 1 July 2009 through 30 June 201012.

I’ve got to assume that the Executive Council is at least not wholly unaware of my recent mouthings-off on MLA-type issues, so I’m taking this as a good sign, and as an opportunity to have some influence on the future of the field.

I’m extremely excited about the possibility — perhaps more excited than I should be. As a friend of mine has been known to say, it’s alarming how much good news in academia comes with a big pile of work attached…

I was somewhat bemused to see the white paper recently released by the MLA, reporting to the Teagle Foundation on the goals and objectives of the undergraduate major in language and literature in the context of a liberal arts education. (From what I can tell, the report itself was actually released in December — as reported by Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed — and posted on the MLA website or announced as available yesterday.) This paper argues strongly for the core values that have long rested at the heart of such an education (in particular, language proficiency as developed through and complemented by the careful reading of literature), while at the same time proposing to bring students into these majors by acknowledging and even including in the major the many other kinds of texts that comprise the contemporary cultural scene.

However, it’s clear that the center of gravity remains in a fairly dated definition of the literary in particular and of reading in general:

While we advocate incorporating into the major the study of a variety of texts, we insist that the most beneficial among these are literary works, which offer their readers a rich and challenging—and therefore rewarding—object of study. Our cybernetic world has brought us speed and ease of information retrieval; even where the screen has replaced paper, however, language still remains the main mode of communication. Those who learn to read slowly and carefully and to write clearly and precisely will also acquire the nimbleness and visual perceptions associated with working in an electronic environment.

This is a move that has repeatedly been made by English departments, precisely the thing that gets them accused of a colonialist approach to interdisciplinary studies: incorporating the texts and methodologies studied in other fields, but only insofar as they shed light on the still narrowly defined category of the literary, and refusing to imagine that those other fields, methodologies, and texts might have their own histories and significances apart from the light that literary studies can shed on them. In part, this colonizing project is evidence of a field reacting against its apparent decline. One might see, for instance, Mark Bauerlein’s evaluation of the report, in which he sees “the realization that unless literature is defended, literary study will shrink with each media expansion. Long novels and complex poetry cannot compete on their own, not in a Web 2.0 universe. English and foreign-language professors are the guardians of them, and the MLA report is an inspiring example of that duty.” It’s fine, both Bauerlein and the MLA report seem to suggest, to use things like film to sex up the major enough to bring in the students, but once they’re in, they need to be taught what’s really important: print, and not just print, but literature. The understanding of reading presented here is as narrowly circumscribed as is the definition used by the NEA in its much-discussed reports, Reading at Risk and To Read or Not to Read — how can anyone be shocked that a small percentage of the population reads when reading is defined in such particular (and dare I say elitist) terms?

This kind of colonizing gesture is one of the reasons why a few of us on the executive council (or whatever it is we’re called) of the MLA’s discussion group on Media and Literature are scheming a change in that group’s title, making it simply “Media Studies.” If the MLA wants to read the texts that we read, in the ways that we read them, we’re happy to engage in that dialogue with them. But the organization, and the field of literary studies more broadly, needs to understand that media texts aren’t just the frosting on the literary cake; they are texts with their own histories and their own modes of study, and engagement with them requires literacies that include but are far from limited to a facility with language.

In short: the future of the literature major, it seems to me, is in media studies, in its interdisciplinarity, its openness, its acknowledgment both of the specific histories and literacies engaged and promoted by different media forms and of the multiplicity of ways those forms interact in an increasingly complex media culture. I encourage the MLA to think less about how media might be used to promote the primacy of literature than about how the notion of literature might be opened to interact with (rather than take over) the serious study of other kinds of cultural texts.

The big news around here is last night’s announcement that the Media Studies program at Pomona, in which I’ve taught for the last ten years, and which I’ve chaired (other than the semester I was on sabbatical) for the last four, will as of July 1, 2009, be converted into a department.

On the one hand, this seems a small, symbolic change; media studies already has tons of majors, a strong faculty, and a coherent curriculum. But the conversion will actually have enormous effects: we’ll be able to hire faculty directly into media studies, without requiring that they be joint with another field; we’ll have dedicated space, both for the faculty (instead of being spread throughout the campus) and for the department itself, so there will finally be a there there; and we’ll have a budget more appropriate to an academic unit our size.

But I don’t want to discount the symbolism here — and I’ve been shocked this morning to discover how much this means to me. Pomona College, in many ways a very traditional bastion of the liberal arts, a place whose faculty has at times joked that our school motto should be “We Have Never Done It That Way Before,” has decided that media studies is genuinely a discipline, not a flash in the pan, not a fad, but something that should be considered on a parallel with English, or history, or psychology, or chemistry. I hadn’t really realized until this morning the degree to which I had internalized and accepted the two-tier system here, in which media studies was for years “only” a program, held together with volunteer labor and duct tape.

Of course, there’s a lot more labor that will be required in order to get this conversion underway, and in order to get a new department up and running. But it feels, on some level, like the labor you put into painting your very own house, the house you own, as opposed to the apartment you’re renting. I’ll be happy to put in the work, because I’ll be building something permanent, someplace I and others can live for years to come.

So here’s a set of research findings that have caught me completely by surprise*: women’s careers in academia sometimes stall out on the road to full professorship because of heightened departmental and institutional service demands placed upon them. So reports Inside Higher Ed, in an article about Judith Glazer-Raymo’s new edited volume, Unfinished Agendas: New and Continuing Gender Challenges in Higher Education. Women, often socialized to prioritize responsibility for the functioning of groups over the demands of personal projects, are far more likely than men to find their research agendas derailed by administrative responsibilities.

This wouldn’t be such a problem, I think, if promotion and tenure processes genuinely valued such service; as it is, the high premium placed on scholarship, particularly at the moment of the review for full professorship, leaves many female faculty lagging behind their male counterparts. (The same is of course true of faculty of color, who find themselves in much higher demand service-wise than white faculty, and whose political commitments often necessitate prioritizing such service.)

The comments on the IHE article are, as one commenter points out, quite telling: a couple of (assumedly) male respondents pipe up with “quitcher whining and learn to say no,” while a number of other commenters point out the often wildly different — and gendered — levels of acceptance of that ability to say no. Men who say no to service requirements are at times seen as wisely protecting the time they need to conduct their research; women who do so are often treated as selfish and uncollegial.

A significant part of this problem rests in a vast disparity in our own internalized senses of responsibility to the collective body, of course, but I think only by starting conversations like these, by creating awareness of such disparities and the quite material effects they wind up having, can we begin to make any change.

—–
*Irony alert!

There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few days of William Deresiewicz’s article in The American Scholar, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” I’m mildly annoyed by the opening of the article — I suddenly realized the shortcomings of my super-fantastic education when I couldn’t think of anything to say to my plumber? — but much of the analysis that follows strikes me as spot-on: the pressures toward producing markers of success rather than real quality of mind, the homogenizing force of “normality” despite a superficial commitment to diversity, and so forth. Despite Deresiewicz’s repeated suggestion that such pitfalls might be escaped by leaving the elite universities for the small liberal arts environment, my sense is that the problems he’s discussing are less produced by a particular type/size/structure of institution than by that institution’s self-regarding focus on somehow being — and producing — the “best.”

But what most caught my attention in the article was the section in which Deresiewicz explores the differences between his and his students’ experience of the institution of higher education and that of his friend who attended Cleveland State. There is a rather astonishing safety net underneath students at elite institutions, one that simply doesn’t exist for students at the vast majority of non-elite schools, and I’ve often felt that rather than protecting students, enabling them to take chances without fear, such safety nets often leave them ill-equipped for life in a world — a corporation, a city, whathaveyou — that simply doesn’t care if they’re struggling. On the campus of an elite institution, few choices students make have any real, substantive consequences. On the one hand, we want to give our students those four years out of time, insulated from mundane worries, so that they can think and explore — but if that insulation makes them risk-averse, or perhaps risk-unaware, have we done them a service?

The other point in the article that, perhaps unsurprisingly, resonated most strongly with me was Deresiewicz’s acknowledgment that, at his Ivy, he “learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic ‘Oh,’ when people told me they went to a less prestigious college.” I’ve seen that nod, more times than I can count, not to mention any number of less polished, less polite variants ranging from mild surprise to outright shock. How can I be where I am, the look seems to say, teaching “the best and the brightest,” if I wasn’t one of them myself? Or, even worse, that my humble institutional background demonstrates that we really do inhabit a meritocracy in the academy, that even someone from a crappy third-tier state institution can go on to work at a top-ranked school. Since graduate school it’s been made clear to me, time and again, in some ways very subtle and in some ways not at all, that I either remain the scholarship kid, present largely as a marker of the academy’s collective broad-mindedness, or I am now assumed to be “one of us,” that my background must have had the same privileges and possibilities as everyone else’s.

But one thing that Deresiewicz doesn’t really explore is the presence of the scholarship kids within the very elite student populations he’s exploring, and the fact that their experience of the elite college safety net can be, as Oso Raro recently described, brutally temporary, and that for some of those students, graduation can be “more like an expulsion than a celebration, the end of a particular dream state.” Which of the privileges of their elite educations do these students get to carry with them, and which disappear? Are these students more likely, as Deresiewicz suggests the bulk of elite college students are not, to choose career paths that don’t provide traditional markers of success? Deresiewicz claims that “the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out,” and yet the scholarship kid is very often unable to occupy that social position after college — unable to take the prestigious unpaid internship necessary to breaking into some fields, for instance. Are these students more or less likely to take risks in their career choices, to consider, for instance, the kinds of public service that Deresiewicz suggests elite students often won’t, or do pressures toward security leave them unable to do so? Where are they in this portrait of the elite of the future?

The article leaves itself open to many such questions, but that it at least creates a bit of space to question many of our assumptions about elite education is rather extraordinary.