In February, 1995, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Library in cooperation with the University of Nebraska Press and the Chancellor, sponsored a day-long invitational Scholarly Communications program for the campus. Part of the program was the following "mythical" dialogue between a distinguished senior professor and an ambitious assistant professor. Running against the background of a contemporary "chorus," the dialogue captures the quandaries of the modern academic rewards system. -Ann Okerson
1. The Crystal Ball is Murky: Futurist thinking about computers and other electronic technologies is distorted by utopianism - wherein we foresee the future we would like to have - and technological determinism - wherein we imagine that the potentials of the technology determine its applications. In fact, institutional and economic forces will have a major influence on how electronic technologies are adapted to our needs. Within universities, institutional imperatives will slow and distort the effect of the technologies for years to come. For example, it is easy to say that traditional publication is dead and that an era of electronic communications has arrived. We may wish that this were true and think that technology demands that it be true, but the needs of the academy for the certification of scholars and scholarship will continue. This poses a dilemma: the university as a system will resist changes that need to be made for the good of students, scholarship and society. Universities do change, but the change often occurs because of individual acts of foolhardy courage.
2. A Senior Professor's Advice to an Assistant Professor: In the English Department Library a senior professor talks to a newly-hired assistant professor who says she wants to use computers as an essential part of her work, not just for word processing and email. The senior professor arches his gray eyebrows in disapproval: "Computers are finally just fancy machines that will do what we want if we don't get misled by enthusiasts. Don't be the first person to come up for tenure in English with a portfolio of electronic publications. Hold off on that hypertext, multi-authored edition of Hamlet. Do the monograph on the image of the king in Shakespeare - that will prove you are one of us. The computer project won't work out the way you picture it, and, even if it did, the tenured faculty will not see it as showing what you and you alone can do."
3. The Computer as Labor-Saving Device: It is true that the labor computers save us is often less than the labor they create. I have never known anyone who learned to use a computer for word processing who decided to go back to the typewriter. But I have known many people who have regretted venturing very far into cyberspace. At first, computers are user-friendly, like a path lined with flowers, but soon the flowers give way to quicksand. Work that required programming is always twice as difficult as we first imagined and it is very hard to match our efforts with the steep curve of technological development. There is as much danger in getting too far ahead of the curve as there is in falling behind. In addition, our need to understand computers and other new technologies is overlaid on all the other demands being made on us. How many of us are hearing about what is coming at us with an inward groan? Have computers made your life easier?
4. More Advice from the Senior Professor: "I am troubled about the future of our profession. As I understand it, the half-life of knowledge in the technical end of computer science is under 5 years. During my career as an English professor, the half-life of knowledge was a life time; now I would guess it is roughly a decade and the rate of change grows faster, in part because of computers. In the new rush to keep up with scholarship and publish one's own work, the whole point of literature and books is being lost. A book is an object one can love; an electronic text is an insubstantial flow of words to be used and even manipulated. Your career will be in a brave new world where being an English professor is as volatile and pressure-cooked as being a scientist. Mind you, the life of scientists gets even harder. When you are working late at night in the library, look across and see how many lights are still burning in the chemistry building."
5. The Effect of Electronic Technologies on Scholarship: Scholarly communication as we know it, the typed manuscript and printed page, will not disappear, but it will be made subordinate to electronic texts, just as the spoken word still lives at conferences, but has been made subordinate to the written word. The change will add up to much more than a simple alternative to conventional publication. In the process, rhetoric will change; the nature of academic work will change. William Gibson's science fiction novels, in which people enter cyberspace, prefigure a truth: the computer as a data base and the thousands of other scholars networked with us are becoming active partners in our scholarly work. The role of author as authority is becoming more provisional because electronic texts are fluid and easy to revise. As knowledge becomes plastic, our access to it also becomes more dynamic and engrossing. Most of us already know what it means to be engrossed by computers, to lose ourselves in cyberspace, even if it is just in games or email backchat. But the "self" we lose temporarily is a construct of the western tradition, subject to being lost permanently. The next generation of scholars will develop a "self" rather different from the academic self that felt so comfortable with the printed word.
6. The Assistant Professor Replies: "But you see I don't really want to do a conventional monograph on Shakespeare - I don't really believe in the singular truth, the mono-truth that it would inscribe. I don't want to sit in Love Library late at night, copying ideas from books onto note cards so I can reassemble them in my own egocentric way. I like the excitement of a rapid exchange of ideas among colleagues over the Internet and the sense of a group of us closing in on a part of a truth. I love literature and, yes, books, but when I hold one of the older works of scholarship in my hands, I cannot identify with the mind-set that produced it. Most scholarly books seem so inert; their authors people puffed up with themselves. And if I force myself to write the monograph, will anyone want to publish it?"
7. The Role of English Professors: As Richard Lanham has pointed out, English professors have a role to play in the advent of the age of electronic communications, but the need for them has been obscured by the focus on science and technology. As rhetoricians, we have much to say about the ways computers are affecting texts and the uses of language in texts. As theorists and critics, we are already addressing the deeper sea changes in thought that are unfolding. Art and literature often prefigure social changes, and postmodernism prefigures the development of computer technology. Much recent theory in literary studies is remarkably congruent with the issues raised by theorists about the impact of computers, even though the literary theory predates the advent of the personal computer.
8. Digression: A Dialogue on Teaching: The Senior Professor: "Why
promote a technology that is fragmenting the thinking of our students
and cutting them off from their heritage? English professors understand
that new ways of thinking and being are in large part old ways. We can
best contribute to the future of our students by stressing continuities
with the past."
The Assistant Professor: "I disagree, we will lose our relevance if we
resist this fundamental change in the way our students think and live.
My sense of the needs of students is at odds with the classrooms I teach
in and the way I am expected to do my own work. We are preparing
students for the twenty-first century, but teaching and writing in the
modes of the nineteenth century. The formal essay in the composition
classes is ill-suited to students who will spend their lives composing
electronic hypertexts with images and sounds as well as words. The
lecture/recitation approach to teaching literature also seems out of
touch with the way my students are already living their lives."
The Senior Professor: "English departments took the lead in developing
multicultural education and have been roundly thwacked for it. Our
colleagues in other departments and the public won't look kindly on your
abandoning the conventional essay and the conventional class. English
could stand a few years without any controversy."
9. Technologies and the Culture War: The recent articles and books attacking the university in the name of Great Books and Political Correctness direct much of their criticism at English departments. These controversies have been dubbed a culture war. They are in part expressions of fear about basic shifts in the paradigms of western thought, shifts driven more by the advent of electronic technologies (and by changes in the structure of our society) than by the ideas of literary theorists. Newt Gingrich and the Tofflers notwithstanding, the outcome of these shifts in the way we think and work are still up for grabs. The "third wave" need not swamp us if we stay at the helm. Universities are the major counterforce to the commercial interests that want to manage the applications of new forms of electronic communications to American life with all the vision and depth with which they introduced television in the 1940s and 1950s. We academics have much to say about how intellectual resources are utilized in a high-tech society and about what should be salvaged from the past. At this symposium we are focused on the economics of publishing and storing texts, but the potential costs of our reluctance to be innovative cannot be calculated in dollars alone.
10. Final Words from the Assistant Professor: "I'd be a fool not to worry about tenure, given the job market in my area, but I am also fascinated by the challenge of playing a role in the shaping of a new age. If humanists don't become involved in the applications of electronic technology to human knowledge, much of what we value may be lost. So I face a choice: a prudent career strategy with the Shakespeare monograph or a bolder vision of wrestling with the electronic future, like Jacob with the angel. Only I am afraid: Jacob deadlocked with the angel, wrestling through the night, and so was blessed and became a blessing to his people, but the Bible doesn't say what would have happened to him or his people if he had lost."