Stanley Fish, Open Access, and some thoughts on higher education

I'd like to point you in the direction of a fascinating interview with Staney Fish conducted earlier this week on election day in the US, one of many similar conversations conducted with various academics which can be listened to on the Radio Open Source website. Radio Open Source is a podcast and blog (more information can be found on its Wikipedia entry), and is hosted by the American media personality and author Christopher Lydon (who has a Wikipedia page of his own). It's been going for a while now, but I've only just stumbled upon it and I highly recommended you to take a look at what's on offer in the site's archives.

Along related lines to that of 'Open Source' (which, according to Wikipedia, can be defined as "computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license"), I've been reading a little about Open Access (OA) in recent days. OA takes the same approach to digital scientific and scholarly material as Open Source does to software in general - it opens it up for readers to view (although, of course, not to modify as one might in the case of open source software). At the danger of over-citing Wikipedia, I refer you to an entry there on OA, but I would also highly recommend this video presentation by Stevan Hanard, a scholar at Southampton University, on the how's and why's of OA (only the brief introduction is in French - the rest is in English so stick with it).

Here at the University of Exeter, it will become compulsory for PhD students to upload their completed thesis/dissertation into the institutional repository from the academic year 2008/09 onwards. This, in my opinion, is a positive move given the limited visibility currently afforded to PhD dissertations. Furthermore, by encouraging open access to scholarly works written by its own distinguished researchers, Exeter, like an increasing number of other higher education institutions in the UK and abroad who are catching on to the benefits of OA, permits its student body access to the volume of work produced by the academics to whom they are most closely associated with. As the list of universities who subscribe to the idea of open access grows, this provides students and researchers with the opportunity to draw ideas from a larger portion of the 25,000+ scholarly journals currently in circulation around the world - this can only be a good thing. Exeter has organised its collection of free scholarly papers into what it has named the Exeter Research and Institutional Content Archive (ERIC), but at present I find the number of works available extremely limited (just 4 from the English department!), and the dissertations uploaded by PhD students of previous years are not relevant to my own work. I'm confident the repository will see a larger number of works trickle through in the coming years, but for now I'd say it's still early days for open access at Exeter.

In closing, I feel compelled to comment briefly on what happened in the US on Tuesday night. I'm wary of writing too much about politics - this blog is after all a chronicle of my time as a PhD student and not a space for partisan grandstanding, but as a student hoping to break into academia in the next few years it is necessary to talk about the effect President Obama will have on higher education as I finish my PhD and look for work. Where I work is still a great unknown to me, but it has been my dream since my teenage years to work in the US, and since Tuesday that dream has somewhat intensified.

I am inclined to agree with Stanley Fish's view that Obama's presidency will have little short-term impact on higher education in America (even if its predominantly liberal population of scholars will be a lot happier having an intelligent leader in charge of their country). This realisation doesn't discourage me from hoping to teach at an American college, however - I am drawn more by the sense of hope and change which seems to be permeating the American consciousness right now more than an anticipation of college-friendly policy changes. I believe it would be a wonderful thing to work and study in a nation where, after eight years living under the burden of an administration that governed so often with the politics of fear and ignorance, a change is coming in the shape of a man who speaks so eloquently of hope and understanding.

There is also the sense that higher education in the UK, particularly when it comes to the arts and humanities, is floundering - and it can only get worse under what looks increasingly to be a Tory government after the 2010 general election. I have had conversations both with my academic supervisor and my line manager at work this week who have complained of the time-consuming need to deal with increasing amounts of paperwork, and of the need to meet targets which reflect less the quality of research and teaching at the institution than they do its success at securing vast sums of money, and its obsession with ticking off boxes as its climbs up the university league tables. How does it benefit a world-leading scholar to wake up at 5am every morning to work on an application for a research grant sought by at least ten other academics in that scholar's school? Surely the university should acknowledge the merit of their researchers not by forcing them to beg for the opportunity to develop it, but by granting them a semester's leave to write up a paper in their own time. When you combine this approach to research in many so-called "top twenty" universities in the UK with the ever-dwindling financial support for arts and humanities postgraduate students here, is it any surprise than I'm repulsed by the prospect of starting by academic career in such a narrow-minded climate? The whole issue of postgraduate funding in the UK was in fact summarised in a BBC News online article recently, which I encourage you to look at.

This has turned somewhat into a rant and for that I apologise, but what Tuesday's election result made me realise more than anything else is that American truly is the land of opportunity. Under eight years of Bush many of us doubted that cliche, but it's true and I believe it provides more opportunities for an English scholar such as myself than my home country does. My PhD supervisor came to this country 15 years ago because, among other things, she believed that British scholars were the best in the world, that the British Library was and remains "the centre of the universe", and that its universities value research as much as they do teaching. I have no doubt that our scholars are outstanding, and whilst I agree that the British Library is an indispensible resource its importance to scholars isn't as crucial as it was 15 years ago since EEBO was introduced, but on the third point I detect a worrying shift: it seems to me that my supervisor simply doesn't have the time to conduct research in the way she did when she first came to this country anymore. Would it be any different for her in America? Maybe not, but after January 20th 2009 there is a greater chance it will be, whereas I think the opposite could be said about this country.