A new interview with me has just been published by the Open Book Collective (which I just typed as Open Book Coolective — also true!). My friend Livy Snyder of punctum books conducted it, inspired by the conversation I had with punctum’s Eileen Fradenburg Joy last month about open access publishing and academia, particularly the part of academia I work in: regional, public, teaching-first schools.
In the interview, I talk about some of the resource challenges we face at desperately and perpetually underfunded schools. I’m not sure the public knows quite how dire things are in public higher ed these days. The right-wing war on college, the American hostility to all ideas of the public good, the perpetual anti-intellectualism of our culture, and the short-sighted and destructive celebration of simple vocational thinking and instrumental outcomes has pushed many schools to the edge of disaster. Mine is one of them. We’re facing a massive enrollment crisis, budgets are being slashed, and our library barely has any money for materials and databases.
The only good thing I see on the horizon for education in this country is the rise of real open access (not the limited/fake open access of high-cost publishing fees, a strategy that just moves the cost of publishing to individual scholars). More and more journal editorial boards are realizing that there is no actual benefit to selling their souls to exploitative paywallers, leading to significant growth in truly open access journals. I hope that we will see more of this with book publishing soon. Having published a book with an exploitative academic publisher, let me tell you: there is no good in it. The sooner we can get away from these outmoded, destructive publishing practices, the sooner we can begin to create some sort of community of scholars — some sort of knowledge commons — from the ruins.
In the interview, I mention Matt Brim’s important book Poor Queer Studies, which I’ve written about twice on my Finite Eyes blog: first in a general overview of the book, then as part of a paper I presented at the MLA. It’s such an important book because it centers the types of schools that most students attend, not the rich schools that get an overwhelming amount of attention from the press and public despite educating a tiny percentage of American students. Though Brim’s is not a book about open access publishing, it is a book with a lot to say about access, making it an important companion to these conversations.
Education in the United States needs a revolution. It needs more radical thinking. It simply will not survive in any worthwhile way otherwise.
