Mike Palmquist wrote:
> But whether we fight about it now or not, change is coming. It would be
> absurd to think that we aren't going to be moving to electronic
> dissertations that are interlinked, provide access to primary and secondary
> sources, provide access to information collected during a study, include
> non-textual elements as appropriate, and so on. One thing I know for sure:
> in 30 years, my grandkids will find it pretty darned quaint that my
> dissertation was printed on rag paper, bound, and microfilmed in case anyone
> wanted to look at it.
I appreciate all the things you've said here, Mike, but I'm mostly drawn to this
bit. Here's what I wonder: how do we figure things are going to move, in thirty
years time, from an atmosphere in which hypertext dissertations seem absurd to
one in which those quaint print ones do? Maybe even one in which students
examining remnants of print culture will have to fight pretty darned hard
against "the rules" (which may indeed be all lower case, but wield no less power
for all that) if they want theirs paper-bound? (I wonder who the equivalent of
the person who whips out the ruler to check the margins or spies the
documentation to make sure no crimes against tradition and good taste have been
committed will be at that point?) As the subject line Tari composed suggests,
somebody really does have to start. Guess everybody could sit back waiting for
someone else to do the challenging and the nose-rubbing, but it might be a long
wait if, as Steve suggests, a responsible mentor is one who cautions his or her
charges against being that someone.
It's interesting that "liberalism" and "conservatism" have come up, I think,
because it strikes me that even though lots of folks would practically tie
themselves into knots to avoid the latter label, pretty much everyone I've ever
known is conservative about something, and the two couldn't really be "binary
oppositions" even if they tried. Steve points out that, if he's conservative at
all, it's only in service of liberal ends. And that's *exactly* the point. It
is ever thus, for all of us. If Lennie is conservatively aware of the politics
of his institution, it's only because that awareness serves his desire to
continue offering his students educational choices, opportunities, and freedoms
that still seem threateningly liberal to many of his colleagues. Sometimes
people hug the tree not because they fear dancing on its limbs, but because they
wish to ward off the chainsaws. What could be more liberal than that brand of
conservation?
Could ever a concept have halted more conversations than "binaries"? I wanna
run around shouting "hot, warm, cold" or "body, mind, spirit" just to distract
people into dissertating on tertiaries for awhile, as a welcome change of pace.
(I blame it all on the base 2 that is somehow at the heart of everything here,
whether we're consciously aware of that or not.) Quite common to think of
businesses or any sort of money making venture as conservative, but that's an
oversimplification, too. Might still be quite risky to take one's dissertation
online, after all, but the administrators at my college, at least, have no
qualms at all about general education courses being online in their entirety.
Mostly, that's been a top down initiative driven by the college president, the
vice-presidents, the IT leaders--all people who don't have tenure. Amazing how
bottom line thinking can, after all, inspire innovation--not as that "end in
itself" of which Steve is, perhaps, rightly suspicious, but as a means to an
end. All hail the corporate transformationists and marketing gurus who've given
me this new space in which to play and to think and to teach and to learn, even
if that's not mostly why they did it, even if--here at home--there still aren't
nearly enough kids in the sandbox to suit me, and even if we don't always see
eye to eye on what we might best do in the sandboxes they've built..
Anyway, what I hear Mike saying is that even though the battle ultimately will
be and probably *ought* to be lost, academia will continue to fight it.
Naturally, then, I can't help wondering what end that resistance serves, and why
it seems so outlandish to suggest that whatever we name that end--an exercise,
a tradition, a journey, a process, a rite of initiation--it isn't, at least in
part, a conservative one. Aren't rites and rituals *always* conservative?
(Levi-Strauss and all of that: repetitive, cumulative, symbolic, nostalgic,
functional. I see all of that in the reminiscences of those who have passed
successfully through the dissertation ritual.) To interrogate ritual isn't
merely to question its value, but to gain a better understanding of how it
functions, to appreciate more fully why so many value it in the first place,
maybe even to attempt to make it more deeply valuable.
I like the Gershenfeld snippet about "inventing" the laptop because it so aptly
illustrates the idea that *lots* of somebodies have to start. There's nothing
new under the sun, maybe, but *everything* is new. This afternoon, I'm off to
lead a workshop on developing a kind of "cyberlibrary" for our online
Composition instructors. Nothing the least bit unique about that idea in the
larger scheme of things, but I'll have to invent it for people, and to hope that
I can be clear and simple enough to allow them to want and need to invent it,
too. Then, together, we'll create an "innovative" space in which to manage the
virtual equivalent of tying and untying our shoes. If I'm really very lucky,
then, several years down the road, someone will come along and invent it all
over again. I'm predicting that the hardest part won't be that this thing is
online, per se, but that it asks teachers to make public that which they
generally choose to keep private--likely for all the practical/political reasons
Lennie suggests.
For now, maybe, the students who wish to compose hypertext dissertations will
continue discovering what Dene discovered when she defended online. (Haven't
_High Wired_ right in front of me at the moment, so the title of that article
escapes me.) As I recall, she writes about having had to defend *twice,* so
that she satisfied the conservative dictates of that ritual even as she nudged
it ever so gradually in a new direction. I'm guessing that will remain the
plight of the hypertext dissertation "inventor" for a good long while yet.
It'll take lots of those inventors--many repetitive, simultaneous
inventions--for the ritual to evolve so that all of its accumulated power
remains even as the genre's new iterations make it something old but new again.
As it stands, most of what we call hypertext is still text: familiar enough to
be inviting, new enough to be interesting. Maybe that is the earmark of all the
best innovations, after all, but thirty years still seems like an awfully long
time to wait around for somebody else to do the innovating. I don't see why my
grandkids ought to have all the fun.
Kathy A.Fitch
Assistant Professor of English
College of DuPage
http://www.cod.eduhttp://personal.kwom.com/Kafkaz/kfitch/http://personal.kwom.com/Kafkaz/ptweb/
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