UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES

Fall 2009

LIS 3000 Introduction to the Doctoral Program

Instructor: Richard J. Cox, Professor

Office Number and Telephone: SIS 614; 412 624-3245

Office Hours: By appointment or anytime by e-mail

E-mail: rjcox111@comcast.net

Homepage: http://www2.sis.pitt.edu/~rcox

Class Sessions: Tuesdays, 12-2:50 PM

Course Objectives

Purposes of This Course. The official description of this course reads as follows: “An introduction to the requirements for the Ph.D. degree in the . . . Library and Information Science [program] and to the broader social and academic context of doctoral studies: its history and traditions, social role, methodologies, and outcomes of doctoral scholarship in library and information science.” This course seeks to accomplish these aims by immersing students into the history and culture of higher education, the context for the development of library and information science education.

Besides orienting students to the doctoral program, the purposes of this course are fourfold:

First, the course will introduce doctoral students to the nature, history, and purpose of higher education, with a focus on the American university system. The course will have students consider the idea of the university, the role of faculty, the place of professional schools in higher education, the debate about the nature of the modern university, the responsibilities of faculty (scholarship, reading, teaching, writing, and publishing), and challenges to the university’s historic mission as played out by new limitations on intellectual property and free speech. Each week students will be responsible for reading the assigned book and participating in an in-depth class discussion about the book. Each week a student will be expected to participate in the CourseWeb discussion board, supporting continuing discussion of the various themes of the course as outlined in the syllabus. It is expected that doctoral students will contribute postings on a weekly basis. In addition, students in the seminar are expected to read the blog, “What SIS Faculty Are Reading,” providing an orientation to the divergent interests of the faculty in this school. This blog can be found at http://sisfaculty.blogspot.com/.

Second, students will learn about critical issues confronting Schools of Library and Information Science by working jointly on an assigned research project focusing on different aspects of these schools and regularly reporting on progress made on their papers during class sessions. Doctoral students will gain a foundation for understanding both the nature of these schools as well as the research being conducted about the education of librarians, archivists, and other information professionals. Students will prepare an annotated bibliography on the history and implications and debates about the American Library Association Committee on Accreditation Standards generated by the 2009 ALA Presidential Task Force on Library Education report (with the hope of preparing a jointly-authored statement on this debate as an exercise in preparing professional position statements). Students will contribute annotated bibliographic entries related to this issue to a course wiki.

Third, the course will provide a framework for enabling doctoral students to consider their own interests in and aspirations for academic teaching and research careers. Although not every LIS doctoral student is interested in preparing for an academic career, many will still participate in teaching as adjuncts, serving as mentors to and supervisors of LIS students at both the masters and doctoral levels, and working as collaborators with LIS faculty on research projects. As a consequence, doctoral students need to acquire a full sense of these professional schools in the university. Doctoral students completing this course will have a firm foundation in the nature of professional education in the university, some understanding of the changing nature of library and information science (such as the I-School movement), and the issues and challenges being faced by higher education today. This course should assist students to explore their own interests in preparing to assume faculty positions in the university, acquiring a better sense of what professional schools and their faculty members do. Students, to assist them to think through such matters, will write brief position statements on their research aims and teaching philosophies.

Fourth, doctoral students will be oriented to the specific requirements of the Library and Information Science doctoral program in this school. The instructor will review, at appropriate times during the course, the requirements and benchmarks of the doctoral program. The aim is to discuss doctoral program requirements in the context of the nature of higher education and that of professional education in the modern university. Students taking this seminar also will have the opportunity to meet with some members of the LIS faculty who will be addressing various aspects of doctoral education and the roles of faculty in a professional school.

Course Requirements

Doctoral students taking this course will be required to prepare two brief position papers, contribute to an annotated bibliography on the history and issues concerning the ALA COA standards, assist in the preparation of a draft jointly authored essay on library and information science education standards, read and contribute to seminar discussion on the nature of higher education administered by the seminar instructor, follow the discussions on the SIS faculty blog, lead a class discussion on a particular book assigned for one of the course sessions, regularly read the weekly Chronicle of Higher Education, and attend all seminar course meetings. Each of these responsibilities is described in greater detail below.

Position Papers. Doctoral students will prepare position papers on their research aims and teaching philosophies. These brief statements are commonly submitted as parts of applications for faculty positions. Each statement will be no longer than 1000 words. Students will read and critique each other’s statements. Examples will be provided.

The statement on Research is due to be discussed on Week 8 October 20, 2009. The statement should be submitted to the Instructor on Friday October 16 by noon as a Word document attachment to email; he will post the statements to the CourseWeb for everyone’s review. The statement on Teaching is due to be discussed on Week 9 October 27, 2009. The statement should be submitted to the Instructor by Friday October 23, 2009 by noon as a Word document attachment to email; he will post the statements to the CourseWeb for everyone’s review.

Collaborative Position Paper on ALA COA Standards. On January 13, 2009 the ALA Presidential Task Force on Library Education issued its report on library education for consideration by the ALA Executive Board. This Task Force redrafted the core competencies of librarianship, recommended that these core competencies become the essential part of education standards, urged that the COA standards be prescriptive, argued that the majority of LIS faculty be “grounded in librarianship by virtue of their educational background, professional experience and/or record of research and publication,” and recommended that the ALA President “create a new Task Force to examine and make recommendations on aspects of library education other than that taking place in ALA-accredited LIS masters programs – continuing education, doctoral education, ALA-APA certifications, NCATE-AASL school library programs, and library technical assistant training programs.” This report can be understood to represent the culmination of twenty years of debate about the closing of library schools, the dropping of library from the names of these schools, and the emergence of new “information” schools.

Doctoral students preparing for academic careers in the university now face an array of different kinds of professional schools, ranging from very traditional library schools to I-Schools that may or not contain LIS programs. The variations in schools challenge the doctoral student to rethink their motivation for wishing to pursue an academic career. This exercise to examine the issues related to the ALA COA standards will provide an opportunity to students to explore this in-depth. The initial effort will be to assemble and evaluate everything written about these standards. We will consider the nature of the literature, examining both research studies and opinion pieces. Then we will try to frame an essay that addresses the current Presidential Task Force on Library Education report in its historical and professional context. The research question guiding our effort is as follows: Is the ALA COA accreditation program still relevant for the MLIS degree programs and for librarianship (or the information professions) more broadly?

Each annotation should be no longer than 100 words, and each should include the full bibliographic information following the Chicago Manual of Style. In their annotations, students should describe the thesis of the publication, note whether it is a research study or opinion piece, and assess its relevance for modern day understanding of LIS education. Students also should identify key ideas about the ALA COA and, if relevant, extract important quotations (not counted as part of the 100 words) about the accreditation of librarians and other information professionals. Students also should note separately (not as part of the annotation) other publications that should be included in a bibliography on LIS education and ALA accreditation. The instructor will provide a few examples of these annotations at the beginning of the seminar. Students should contribute at least four annotations each week (after we have compiled a working bibliography).

Annotations are due the Monday afternoon before the regular seminar class on Tuesday and should be posted to the course’s discussion board. The instructor will review and discuss the annotations received during the seminar, and, as appropriate, in the weekly discussion board postings. If students review a publication they believe should not be included in the bibliography, they should submit a citation and brief explanation why this is their recommendation. Students also should feel free to introduce what they have been reading into the weekly seminar discussions, if the publication is germane to that week’s subject. During the first three weeks of the seminar, doctoral students should submit, via the discussion board, citations to articles, books, and dissertations concerning the topic of ALA COA specifically and accreditation in the information professions more broadly. At the fourth week we will divide up responsibility for examining this professional and scholarly literature.

The ultimate aim is to have a working draft of a 25 to 35 page paper on the ALA COA standards describing its origins, opinions about its utility in the LIS profession, influences on LIS education, role in the evolution from library to LIS to I-Schools, future possibilities for LIS education, and needs for additional research. The hope is to prepare a jointly written essay that can be submitted to an appropriate professional journal (but the practical experience will be the benefit in thinking about how to approach the preparation of such an essay).

Reading and Contributing to the Discussion Board. Students will be required to read and comment on postings or contribute their own postings to a discussion board designed by the instructor to accompany this seminar. The focus of the discussion board will be on the literature about higher education, primarily emphasizing the nature of the university in the North American context (however, international students are encouraged to provide comments or make postings from their perspective as well). The discussion board is designed to follow the topical structure of this seminar, generally commenting on breaking stories about higher education relevant to the topics being explored in the seminar, but its design will allow students to post on topics relevant to higher education and LIS education at any time.

Doctoral students should use the discussion board to post their annotations on the LIS and other relevant literature material related to the seminar class sessions on the required book, comments on reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education relevant to course topics in the seminar, and anything else related to the seminar. The discussion board will be the record of the course, and it will remain up for the duration of the course. Students also need to follow the “What SIS Faculty Are Reading” blog. Seminar students have no obligation, however, to post to the latter blog.

Leading a Class Discussion. Each student will be expected to complete the readings below and to be prepared to discuss them in class (related recommended readings are there for the students’ use). Students are expected to have read the required reading for each week. The related recommended readings may be discussed in the course discussion board, but it should be noted that these do not constitute a comprehensive bibliography on higher education issues and topics; instead, these readings reflect a representative range of research studies, memoirs, policy reports, and polemics about the role of higher education in society read and selected by the seminar instructor.

Each doctoral student will be expected to lead the class in discussion of at least one particular week's readings, with the topics and dates to be assigned at the beginning of the course (depending on the number of students in the seminar). The student will have one hour in which to summarize and evaluate the readings or to start the discussion by presenting relevant (and perhaps controversial) issues. Each student leading this discussion will be expected to highlight aspects of the readings relevant to the understanding of the education of information professionals. In preparation for leading the class, the student is expected to do literature searches related to the topic and to comment on other relevant readings (especially identifying sources available on the World Wide Web). The student should post to the discussion board a list of other sources a day or two before the class session for the use of all the other students in the course.

Below is the full list of required readings for the seminar:

Ann Patchett, What Now? (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Steven M. Cahn, From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

David F. Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

James Axtell, The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

Mark Edmundson, Why Read? (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).

Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).

William Germano, From Dissertation to Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Corynne McSherry, Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Mary Lefkowitz, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Reading the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Education, and the JESSE listserv. Each student will be expected to peruse weekly the Chronicle of Higher Education. This publication is the premier source of news and information about higher education, and it is published in three sections: the news section; The Chronicle Review, a magazine of arts and ideas; and Careers, with career advice and hundreds of job listings. During and between class sessions, the instructor will highlight higher education news pertinent to professional schools and library and information science education; much of this discussion will occur on the seminar discussion board, where students should post comments about what they have read in this source. The instructor will pass around his personal subscription for the use of the class, to be shared among the seminar students. Students also can read the Chronicle in the SIS library.

Students also should sign up for the daily e-mail service of Inside Higher Education (follow instructions at http://www.insidehighered.com/home) and subscribe to the JESSE listserv, the official listserv of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (follow the subscription instructions at http://web.utk.edu/~gwhitney/jesse.html).

Attending Class Sessions. Attendance at seminar class sessions is mandatory. Absences will necessitate documentation produced by the student or prior consultation with the instructor. Two unexcused absences will result in the lowering of the grade by one letter grade; more than two unexcused absences will result in a failing grade.

Grading. The course grade will be based on a 50/50 weighting for the position papers/ALA COA work and the class discussions of the readings and commentary on the discussion board. Due dates for various assignments are listed in the syllabus below and can be found on CourseWeb. No incompletes will be given (except for personal emergencies). If an incomplete is given, final work must be handed by February 1, 2010.

Academic and Other Student Issues. Academic Integrity: Students in this course will be expected to comply with the University of Pittsburgh's Policy on Academic Integrity Any student suspected of violating this obligation for any reason during the semester will be required to participate in the procedural process, initiated at the instructor level, as outlined in the University Guidelines on Academic Integrity. This may include, but is not limited to, the confiscation of the examination of any individual suspected of violating University Policy. Furthermore, no student may bring any unauthorized materials to an exam, including dictionaries and programmable calculators.

Disabilities: If you have a disability that requires special testing accommodations or other classroom modifications, you need to notify both the instructor and the Disability Resources and Services no later than the 2nd week of the term. You may be asked to provide documentation of your disability to determine the appropriateness of accommodations. To notify Disability Resources and Services, call 648-7890 (Voice or TTD) to schedule an appointment. The Office is located in 216 William Pitt Union.

Students who must miss an exam or class due to religious observance must notify the instructor ahead of time and make alternative arrangements.

These materials may be protected by copyright. United States copyright law, 17 USC section 101, et seq., in addition to University policy and procedures, prohibit unauthorized duplication or retransmission of course materials. See Library of Congress Copyright Office and the University Copyright Policy.

The Course

Introduction, the Mission of the University, and History of Higher Education

Week One (September 1, 2009)

Introduction to the Course and Course Requirements

“The Changing Nature of the University.” Preliminary Discussion by Professor Cox

Changing University.pptx

The PowerPoint Slides attached here are from a presentation given by the instructor at the week-long Archival Education and Research Institute held at UCLA in July 2009.

Required Reading

Ann Patchett, What Now? (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). This is a discussion about the preparation by this novelist of her commencement address, offering lots to think about where one is going after the completion of an academic milestone.

Recommended Reading

William M. Sullivan, Work and Integrity: The Crisis and Promise of Professionalism in America, 2^nd ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005). This is not a required volume, but it is a highly recommended reading for assisting students to think through why they are committing their time and resources to a doctoral program.

Randy Pausch, with Jeffrey Zaslow, The Last Lecture (New York: Hyperion, 2008). This is the memoir of the CMU professor dying of cancer, and his reflections on his professional and personal life. This is a revealing examination of why someone wants to be a professor, why they love teaching, grappling with ideas, and working with students. Reflecting on giving his last lecture and having it videotaped, Pausch writes, “I was trying to put myself in a bottle that would one day wash up on the beach for my children. If I were a painter, I would have painted for them. If I were a musician, I would have composed music. But I am a lecturer. So I lectured” (p. x).

You can watch Randy Pausch’s last lecture at CMU at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Class Session Activities

Review of course requirements by Professor Cox

Signing up by students for leading discussions during the remainder of the course

Orientation to the seminar and SIS faculty blog

Introduction by students about their program plans, dissertation research potential topics, and their career aspirations

Week Two (September 8, 2009)

The Idea of the University

Required Reading

Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Professor Cox will lead the discussion of this book.

Why do you want to prepare for a career as an academic? The place to start is with considering the mission of the university and its historical place in society. John Henry Newman, the English convert from the Anglican to the Catholic Church, served as rector in Dublin, Ireland of the then newly established Catholic University of Ireland (today University College Dublin) from 1854 to 1858. Newman was a poor administrator of the fledgling university, but he wrote, as a result of his experiences, one of the most influential descriptions of the purpose of the university, The Idea of the University, published in 1859 (you can find numerous excerpts and full text versions of different editions of Newman’s book on the Web). A century and a half later, Pelikan, a prolific historian of religion and theology, wrote a “reexamination” of Newman’s seminal book, crafting one of the best excursions into what the university represents. Pelikan considers the purpose of the university, its role in society, the relationship of teaching and research, the present crisis in higher education, the role of athletics, and the university’s function as a means for preserving knowledge.

The History of Higher Education

Required Reading

John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

When one joins a faculty, he or she becomes part of an institution with both a rich past and broad popular perceptions of its role in society. Colleges and universities, like any institutional form, have a history. They were not immediate successes, and they have gone through many changes and faced many challenges. Historian Thelin provides an overview history of American higher education, considering the successes and failures of these institutions and providing a foundation for understanding the current debates about the university. Thelin considers the ongoing debate about what should be taught in the university, the tensions between liberal arts curriculum and professional training, government influence on the nature of higher education, the role of private foundations, and the perceptions of higher education through American culture such as films and popular magazines.

Recommended Related Readings

Thomas Bender, Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske, eds., American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Hugh Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874-1889 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960).

George Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Class Session Activities

Discussion of the Thelin book and the evolution of higher education in the United States as a case study

Students will report on the progress in their research on the ALA COA.

Successfully completing doctoral coursework (Professor Cox)

Professional Schools and Faculty in the Emerging Corporate University

Week Four (September 22, 2009)

The Role of Faculty

Required Reading

Steven M. Cahn, From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

So, what does a faculty in a university do? Do they teach a little, but mostly engage in important research and scholarship? Do they have bosses, in the sense that most people in corporations and other institutions do? Or, are faculty members more like independent entrepreneurs? Many outsiders such as policymakers and media pundits, as well as parents often paying the bills, have questioned just what is happening with the modern university. Friends and foes alike want to know more about what is being taught, how efficiently the university is being run, why costs seem to be out of control, and just how practical or useful is the research being done by universities and their faculties. This user-friendly guide to becoming a professor covers all the basics.

Recommended Related Readings

Ryan C. Amacher and Roger E. Meiners, Faulty Towers: Tenure and the Structure of Higher Education (Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 2004).

“The American Academic Profession,” Daedalus 126 (Fall 1997).

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (New York: Penguin Books, 1992; org. published 1954).

Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: HarperCollins, 2002; org. pub. 1959).

David Damrosch, Meetings of the Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Leigh DeNeef and Craufurd D. Goodwin, eds., The Academic’s Handbook, 2^nd. Ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).

David B. Downing, The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

Paul Gray and David E. Drew, What They Didn’t Teach You in Graduate School: 199 Helpful Hints for Success in Your Academic Career (Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2008).

Donald Kennedy, Academic Duty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

James Lang, Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

David Lodge, The British Museum Is Falling Down (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1965); Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (New York: Penguin Books, 1978); and Nice Work (New York: Penguin Books, 1990).

Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt, Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education (New York: Routledge, 1999).

Deborah L. Rhode, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Scholars, Status, and Academic Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford Law and Politics, Stanford University Press, 2006).

Richard Russo, Straight Man (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).

Elaine Showalter, Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and Its Discontents (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

Jane Smiley, Moo (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1995).

Alexander McCall Smith, Portuguese Irregular Verbs (New York: Anchor Books, 2003); The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs (New York: Anchor Books, 2003); and At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances (New York: Anchor Books, 2003).

Don J. Snyder, The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Job Lost and a Life Found (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1997).

Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety (New York: Penguin, 1987).

Class Session Activities

Discussion of the Cahn book and the process of becoming a faculty member.

Students will report on the progress in their research on the ALA COA.

Preparing for the Preliminary Examination (Professor Cox)

Week Five (September 29, 2009)

Professional Schools in Higher Education

Required Reading

David F. Labaree, The Trouble with Ed Schools (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

What does it mean to be a professor in a professional school in the university? Although one of the hallmarks of the rise of the modern university in the past century has been the creation of professional schools and the development of disciplines, the professional schools have often had a tenuous, stormy relationship to the university. Labaree, a sociologist, provides a candid analysis of one of these kinds of professional schools, schools of education. Labaree examines their poor reputation, lack of respect, a divided loyalty between working practitioners and the demands of the research university, their mission, and the challenges facing them – all relating to issues faced by other professional schools such as in library and information science. Understanding the position of these schools in the university is critical to an individual preparing to be an academic in a professional school.

Recommended Related Readings

Neil Henry, American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)

Julie Thompson Klein, Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990) and Crossing Boundaries: Knowledge, Disciplinarities, and Interdisciplinarities (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).

Rakesh Khurana, From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage Books, 1996) and Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

Edgar H. Schein, Professional Education: Some New Directions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1972).

Class Session Activities

Discuss the nature of the professional schools and the Labaree book as an example of what these schools look like and the issues they face.

Students will report on the progress in their research on the ALA COA.

Staying focused on the dissertation through the coursework and examinations (Professor Cox)

Week Six (October 6, 2009)

The Corporate University

Required Reading

Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

Studies and polemics have poured from the presses decrying the takeover of the modern university by the corporate mindset, where students become customers, everything is for sale, and the financial bottom line is the critical metric for evaluating the state of higher education. Regardless, universities have to pay their bills, and the financial structure of higher education has become more uncertain with declining government support and greater competition for career training. Bok, the former president of Harvard University, considers athletics, corporate-supported research, teaching, distance education, for-profit educational ventures, and a variety of other issues in a book that challenges the public and policymakers to reconsider where higher education is heading. What he describes has striking similarities to issues that have challenged professional schools for generations, but the corporate trend in higher education ought to cause these schools to re-evaluate their own missions, priorities, and prospects. Can a faculty member function as both teacher and scholar in the new breed of university? Can a faculty member recognize his or her own academic standards in this changing environment?

Recommended Related Readings

Stanley Aronowitz, The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (New York: Perennial Classics, 2002; org. pub. 1959).

Steven Brint, ed., The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

James E. Cote and Anton L. Allahar, Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007)

Larry Cuban, The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can’t Be Businesses (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

William C. Dowling, Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007).

James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005).

Ronald G. Ehrenberg, What’s Happening to Public Higher Education? (Westport, CO: Praeger Publishers, 2006).

Cynthia G. Franklin, Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009).

Roger L. Geiger, Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

Henry A. Giroux and Susan Searls Giroux, Take Back Higher Education: Race, Youth, and the Crisis of Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Eric Gould, The University in a Corporate Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).

Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, eds., Declining by Degrees: Higher Education and Risk (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

Benjamin Johnson, Patrick Kavanagh, and Kevin Mattson, eds., Steal This University: The Rise of the Corporate University and the Academic Labor Movement (New York: Routledge, 2003).

Nannerl O. Keohane, Higher Ground: Ethics and Leadership in the Modern University (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

David Kirp, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Christopher J. Lucas, Crisis in the Academy: Rethinking Higher Education in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).

Frank Newman, Laura Courturier, and Jamie Scurry, The Future of Higher Education: Rhetoric, Reality, and the Risks of the Market (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2004).

Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

Richard S. Ruch, Higher Ed, Inc.: The Rise of the For-Profit University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1997).

Donald G. Stein, ed., Buying In or Selling Out? The Commercialization of the American Research University (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College, Inc., and Museumworld (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

Robert Zemsky, Gregory R. Wegner, and William F. Massy in their Remaking the American University: Market-Smart and Mission-Centered (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005).

Class Session Activities

Discuss the Bok book and the nature and purpose of the “corporate” university.

Students will report on the progress in their research on the ALA COA.

Preparing for the Comprehensive Examination (Professor Cox)

Faculty Responsibilities: Scholarship, Reading, Teaching, Writing, Publishing

Week Seven October 13, 2009

The Faculty and Scholarship

Required Reading

James Axtell, The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

Many critics of higher education attack faculty about their research activities, either blasting faculty for not teaching enough or for engaging in research and writing that is incoherent, jargon-laden, and irrelevant to modern life. Axtell, professor of humanities at William and Mary, focuses on the values of research as a central function of university life and faculty responsibility, with, as the book’s title suggests, a keen eye for the joys of being an academic. Axtell, among many issues, considers the dangers of a creeping vocationalism throughout all of higher education, a perspective suggesting some interesting challenges to faculty residing in professional schools, the cradle of vocationalism in the university. Axtell helps the reader, especially one considering an academic life, to consider the forces that pull in or push out someone from heeding the call to be a professor.

Related Recommended Readings

Rachel Hile Bassett, ed., Parenting and Professing: Balancing Family Work with an Academic Career (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005).

Frederick Crews, Postmodern Pooh (New York: North Point Press, 2001).

David Damrosch, We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995),

Douglas V. Henry and Michael D. Beaty, eds., Christianity and the Soul of the University: Faith as a Foundation for Intellectual Community (Grand Rapids, MI: BakerAcademic, 2006).

Michèle Lamont, How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

Richard E. Miller, Writing at the End of the World (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005).

William H. Willimon and Thomas H. Naylor, The Abandoned Generation: Rethinking Higher Education (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995).

Class Session Activities

Discussion of the Axtell book and the nature of academic life

In preparation for next week’s class, Dr. Cox will discuss his blog, “Reading Archives,” and the importance of a broad reading regimen as a tool for both research and teaching. Students should peruse his blog, found at http://readingarchives.blogspot.com/, in preparation for the discussion.

Students will report on the progress in their research on the ALA COA.

Thinking about a dissertation committee (Professor Cox).

Week Eight October 20, 2009

The Faculty and Reading

Required Reading

Mark Edmundson, Why Read? (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).

Higher education has become dependent on the World Wide Web and, as one result, the art and understanding of the value of reading seems to have fallen by the wayside. Faculty members browse through the Web looking for materials to use in lectures or to adopt as inexpensive, convenient readings for students. Students search quickly and often sloppily for materials to use in papers or PowerPoint presentations. And, because of such activities, reflection and learning are adversely affected. Some, especially those in library and information science schools, defend the move from books and reading as due to the decline of the importance of print, the creation of a new virtual library, and the demands of teaching practical skills to individuals who will function as information professionals. Yet, reflective reading is critical to any individual who strives to be a scholar and to function as an academic. Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Virginia, goes one step farther and even argues that reading just makes life more enjoyable. His argument about the importance of a liberal arts education challenges faculty and students in a professional school, but one might ask whether such a perspective is not also critical for students preparing to work in libraries, archives, and other information centers. Reading is not just about training or entertainment, but it is essential to developing a well-rounded life.

Related Recommended Readings

Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1996).

Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001).

Nicholas A. Basbanes, Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World (New York: Harper Collins, 2005) and A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994).

Sven Birkerts, Reading Life: Books for the Ages (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2007).

R. Howard Bloch and Carla Hesse, eds., Future Libraries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

Maureen Corrigan, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books (New York: Random House, 2005).

Andrew Delbanco, Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997).

Everette E. Dennis, Craig L. LaMay, Edward C. Pease, ed., Publishing Books (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1997).

Michael Dirda, Book by Book: Notes on Reading and Life (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2005); An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2003); Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

Denis Donoghue, The Practice of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979). An abridged version of Eisenstein’s massive work is available as The Printing Press in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998).

Anne Fadiman, Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005).

William J. Gilmore, Reading Becomes a Necessity of Life: Material and Cultural Life in Rural New England, 1780-1835 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989).

Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).

H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

Frederick G. Kilgour, The Evolution of the Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003).

Wendy Lesser, Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering ((Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).

David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order 1450-1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Viking, 1996).

Alberto Manguel, Into the Looking-Glass Wood: Essays on Books, Reading, and the World (San Diego: Harcourt, Inc, 1998).

Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary: A Passionate Reader’s Reflections on a Year of Books (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2004).

Laura Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Redmond Kathleen Molz and Phyllis Dain, Civic Space/Cyberspace: The American Public Library in the Information Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).

Geoffrey Nunberg, ed. The Future of the Book (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Diane Osen, ed., The Book That Changed My Life: Interviews with National Book Award Winners and Finalists (New York: The Modern Library, 2002).

Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (New York: HarperCollins, 2006).

James Raven, ed., Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

Jonathan Rose, ed., The Holocaust and the Book: Destruction and Preservation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

André Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (New York: Verso, 2000).

Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

Lindsay Waters, Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004)

J. Peder Zane, ed., Remarkable Reads: 34 Writers and Their Adventures in Reading (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).

Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Class Session Activities

Discussion of the Edmundsen book and the importance of reading

Students will report on the progress in their research on the ALA COA.

Picking a dissertation topic (Professor Cox).

Statement on Research Due. Statements should be posted on the Discussion Board by Monday October 19^th at noon. Every student should read each other’s statement and be prepared to discuss them.

Week Nine October 27, 2009

The Faculty and Teaching

Required Reading

Ken Bain, What the Best College Teachers Do (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Teaching is often something taken for granted, as a task anyone can do and anyone with a research agenda and accomplishments will be successful in doing. Yet, teaching is a complicated, time-consuming responsibility where there have been more failures than successes and, just to make it all that greater of a challenge, where one often has little sense of whether they have succeeded or failed. Fortunately, we are seeing more studies and descriptions of the characteristics of good teaching. Bain’s study of one hundred college teachers deemed to be successful provides a window into what characteristics enable a faculty member to engage students, capture their interests, and actually help them to learn. Bain, a historian of American foreign policy, helps anyone to understand why university teaching is not something to be seen as a burden or dismissed too lightly but rather that it is at the heart of the academic’s work and calling.

Related Recommended Readings

Patrick Allitt, I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).

James Atlas, Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1992).

Chris Anderson, Teaching as Believing: Faith in the University (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2004).

James M. Banner, Jr., and Harold C. Cannon, The Elements of Teaching (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

Benjamin R. Barber, An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992).

Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Michael Bérubé, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and ‘Bias’ in Higher Education (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2006).

Derek Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

Anne Cuzan and Lisa Damour, First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student's Guide to Teaching (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).

Peter Filene, The Joy of teaching: A Practical Guide for New College Instructors (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

Gerald Graff, Beyond the Culture Wars: How Teaching the Conflicts Can Revitalize American Education (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1992).

Thomas Hatch, Into the Classroom: Developing the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).

Alfie Kohn, What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated? And More Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004).

Rebekah Nathan, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (New York: Penguin, 2006).

David F. Noble, Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).

James J. O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

Jay Parini, The Art of Teaching (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

Sam Pickering, Letters to a Teacher (New York: Grove Press, 2004).

Neil Postman, with Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1969) and Teaching as a Conserving Activity (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1979),

Jane Tompkins, A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books, 1996).

Class Session Activities

Discuss the Bain book and the nature of the teaching responsibility for faculty, new and seasoned

Students will report on the progress in their research on the ALA COA.

Meeting the Teaching Practicum requirement (Professor Cox).

Statement on Teaching Due. Statements should be posted on the Discussion Board by Monday October 26^th at noon. Every student should read each other’s statement and be prepared to discuss them.

Week Ten November 3, 2009

The Faculty and Writing

Required Reading

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).

Anne Lamott has written one of the best of such writing guides. Drawing from her personal experience, Lamott’s book is the classic, inspirational guide for those thinking of trying writing or who are looking for advice about it. In a witty and lively fashion, the author discusses all facets of writing, from planning a project to dealing with multiple rejections of finished pieces. Lamott provides a lot of excellent advice about the practical aspects of writing, including having others read drafts to working with editors and publishers. As she strongly asserts, writing is not a magical process, but it is hard work, marked by trial and error, discouragement, and often, unexpected results. Too often working academics and professionals are focused on the mechanics of both research and writing, rather than the art of writing the research in a manner that enables it to be read and comprehended. If you read only one book about writing this is the one to read.

Related Recommended Readings

Jacques Barzun, Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers, rev.ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)

Nancy Bunge, Master Class: Lessons from Leading Writers (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005)

Frank L. Cioffi, The Imaginative Argument: A Practical Manifesto for Writers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Scott F. Crider, The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2005)

Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease: The Desire to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2004).

Tom Goldstein, Journalism and Truth: Strange Bedfellows (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007).

Lee Gutkind and Hattie Fletcher, eds., Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008).

Robert Inchausti, ed., Echoing Silence: Thomas Merton on the Vocation of Writing (Boston: New Seeds, 2007).

W. Brad Johnson and Carol A. Mullen, Write to the Top! How to Become a Prolific Academic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (New York: Pocket Books, 2000).

Mark Kramer and Wendy Call, eds., Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University (New York: Plume, 2007).

Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987)

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1994).

Noah Lukeman, The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile (New York: Fireside Book, Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Jane E. Miller, The Chicago Guide to Writing About Numbers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)

Richard Mitchell, The Leaning Tower of Babel and Other Affronts by the Underground Grammarian (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984)

Joyce Carol Oates, The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art (New York: HarperCollins, 2003).

Sara Paretsky, Writing in an Age of Silence (New York: Verso, 2007).

Richard A. Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2007).

Ben Yagoda, in his The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).

Other Books on Writing by Professional Writers

Marie Arana, ed., The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work: A Collection from the Washington Post Book World (New York: Public Affairs, 2003).

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)

Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Joshua Odell Editions, 1996)

Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2006)

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (New York: HarperPerennial, 1990).

Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distractions and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993).

Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2005).

Bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1999).

Wendy Lesser, The Amateur: An Independent Life of Letters (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

Bret Lott, Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life (New York: Ballatine Books, 2005).

Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing (New York: Random House, 2003).

Richard Rhodes, How to Write: Advice and Reflections (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995).

Kevin Smokler, ed., Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press, 2004)

Class Session Activities

Discuss the Lamott book and consider what professional and scholarly writing entails

Students will report on the progress in their research on the ALA COA.

Preparing and defending the dissertation proposal (Professor Cox).

Week Eleven November 10, 2009

The Faculty and Publishing

Required Reading

William Germano, From Dissertation to Book (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Every doctoral student, successful ones at least, will write a dissertation. The quality of the dissertation, not only its ability to demonstrate research competence, but its relevance to the profession and its potential for publication, will make or break a fledgling academic career. Since graduate schools and advisors spend little energy in explaining what to do with a dissertation once it is done, Germano (vice president and publishing director at Routledge) wrote this book. It offers advice on figuring out the marketplace, identifying what a broader readership means and revising for it, working with an editor and publisher, helping the beginning scholar understand why the dissertation is not yet a book, determining whether a dissertation should be expanded into a book, the basic common weaknesses to revising dissertations into books (audience, voice, structure. length), and planning and carrying out the revision. Germano offers this general advice and commentary about the nature of scholarly writing and publishing: “Scholars who write and publish are probably happier than those who don’t. This is a completely impressionistic take, I admit, and there are doubtless deeply depressed academics who nonetheless publish furiously. But like physical exercise, writing is the tiring thing that gives you more energy after you’ve done it. Writing is a risk, and risk is exciting, and excitement is something you will fight to sustain in your professional life as you age and your student don’t.” One’s commitment to writing for publication is something that anyone contemplating an academic career should contemplate as carefully as possible, since “Writing is a lifelong occupation, an avocation, a battle, and in it we find out what we think and who we are. Learn to practice the habit of writing. Set aside daily writing time and make the lined pad or the desktop screen your regular companion. Let it become your devotional exercise, even if it is the only devotional practice in your life. Your career as an employed scholar depends on it, though I think the rewards – for you, for the rest of us – are more important than that. What you write is a part of who you are, and in that sense every volume of your writing is a piece of autobiography.”

Related Recommended Readings

Joan Bolker, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998).

Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research, second ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002).

William Germano, Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)

Beth Luey, ed., Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).

Walter W. Powell, Getting into Print: The Decision-Making Process in Scholarly Publishing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

André Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (New York: Verso, 2000).

Franklin H. Silverman, Authoring Books and Materials for Students, Academics, and Professionals (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998).

Franklin H. Silverman, Publishing for Tenure and Beyond (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999).

Lindsay Waters, Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004).

Eviatar Zerubavel, The Clockwork Muse: A Practical Guide to Writing Theses, Dissertations, and Books (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).

Class Session Activities

Discuss the Germano book and the nature of writing and publishing books

Students will report on the progress in their research on the ALA COA.

Researching and writing the dissertation (Professor Cox).

The Irony of LIS Schools in the University: Threats to Intellectual Property and Free Speech

Week Twelve November 17, 2009

The Faculty and Intellectual Property

Required Reading

Corynne McSherry, Who Owns Academic Work? Battling for Control of Intellectual Property (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Intellectual property has become one of the great contested issues for librarians, archivists, and other information professionals. It may seem ironic that one of the hottest parts of the battlefields is right in the university itself. As faculty in these schools strive to introduce students to the parameters and perils of intellectual property issues, they may as well discuss their own work, labor that their university may claim it owns. What happens to lectures posted on the Web, distance education courses offered online, faculty work-for-hire, and the notion about whether academic work is something that should be owned at all? Examining the law, historical cases, and interviews and other research, McSherry looks at how universities are throwing up more controls over what it contends is its property, the knowledge of the faculty the academy employs.

Related Recommended Readings

Susan M. Bielstein, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

Mark Helprin, Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto (New York: Harper, 2009).

Bill Ivey, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Arthur Raphael Miller and Michael H. Davis, Intellectual Property: Patents, Trademarks, and Copyright, 3rd ed. (New York: West/Wadsworth, 2000).

Michael Perelman, Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Siva Vaidhynathan, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (New York: Basic Books, 2004) and Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York: NYU Press, 2001).

Class Session Activities

Discussion of the McSherry book and the challenges of intellectual property

Students will report on the progress in their research on the ALA COA

Challenges and obstacles confronting doctoral students in their programs (Professor Cox).

Week Thirteen November 27, 2009

The Faculty and Free Speech

Mary Lefkowitz, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Mary Lefkowitz, the classicist who took on the Afro-centrists (arguing that the Greeks stole their philosophy and other knowledge from Africa), offers a very personal account of her life and academic career as a result of her involvement in this controversy. Her book is more about the nature of academic freedom and the culture wars in the university in the 1990s. If one wants more of the substance of the debate about the use of historical sources versus memory, mythology, and present social and political agendas, a reading of her 1996 Not Out of Africa is the place to go. However, this new book is a fascinating additional source about the controversy, similar in tone and spirit to the personal account Deborah Lipstadt wrote about her experiences in the David Irving libel trial regarding her own work on the Holocaust deniers. One senses the surprise by which Lefkowitz discovers that academic freedom, postmodernism, race, and politics make for strange bedfellows. Early on she writes, “Telling the truth, instead of being our first responsibility, had suddenly become less important than achieving social goals” (p. 2). Also less important, according to Lefkowitz, is the responsibility that college and university administrators feel they have to promote civil discourse, the debate about ideas, and the defense of faculty who are attacked because of criticism they offer of certain ideas about and approaches to scholarship. Her commentary on incidents at her school (Wellesley), how her criticism of publications such as Martin Bernal’s Black Athena soon evolved into a convoluted set of accusations about Jews exploiting blacks and a focus on race rather than historical scholarship, and the libel suit involving her and the subsequent lack of support by her school’s administration places her in the arena of other such academic debates such as the Bellesiles’s scandal on the use or misuse of evidence and the Irving suit against Lipstadt. Lefkowitz seeks to bring all these various matters together, seeking “to describe and expose some of the strategies and arguments that were used to turn an uncontroversial statement about history into a controversy about race and, even beyond that, into an inquiry about the purpose of education.” She seeks “to use my experience to show why it is better in the end for all of us to pay attention to facts, and argue from evidence” (p. 14).

Discussion of Final Work on the ALA COA Paper and Wrap-up Discussion about Other Issues Raised in the Seminar