quick thoughts on what might happen

Last night or this morning (I no longer remember which) I linked to an article by a Harvard Law professor who recommends abolishing academic copyright– meaning that academic books won’t cost anything, not that everyone will be free to plagiarize.

Let’s move to some more general reflections about this. Traditional publishing is already in trouble, and before long we will see that traditional universities are living in a bubble perhaps as bad as the housing bubble. The decision of left-leaning Reed College to end their need-blind admission policy, and the frightening predicament of the California state universities, are only two warning signs of what could go wrong next. Outrageous tuition rates, affordable only by way of monstrous student loan debt (or fabulously wealthy parents, which most people do not have) will not be able to keep on inflating forever. Even the tenure system is in crisis between Scylla and Charybdis– do you abolish tenure and turn universities into “flexible” businesses with the resulting risk of lost academic freedom? Or do you keep tenure and thus let a handful of stick-in-the-mud veterans exploit and bully more innovative newcomers? There is no obvious solution to this paradox.

If you’re a graduate student right now, I both envy and abhor your predicament. On the one hand you ought to have a much easier time publishing what you write and quickly building up a readership. But on the other hand, it’s not clear to me that the traditional career path of the college/university professor is going to be with us indefinitely (that may sound alarmist now, but just wait a couple of years). Nonetheless, you’re paying for your education as if that career will still be available.

The following thoughts are mostly off the top of my head, and I reserve the right to revisit them later…

Publishing: Here I am optimistic. What we had until recently was a system where it was relatively difficult to publish a book in fields like philosophy. By “difficult” I don’t mean that chances of success were low, I mean that the process involved all sorts of time-consuming hurdles. Certain credentials were generally needed to publish a book in philosophy– without a Ph.D., or in some cases even an academic position, your chances would have been slim indeed.

Given the scarcity of publishing options, you also couldn’t depart too far from mainstream views in your field, since the pool of potential referees was never very large. I sent out many inquiry letters for Tool-Being, and in the end three separate publishers asked to consider the manuscript. (Three in a row, that is. It’s not nice to submit book manuscripts to more than one place at a time, and I never did so.) In all three cases, I had to tell the publishers “please do not choose Heideggerians as your referees,” since obviously that would have killed my chances, as you’ll understand if you’re familiar with the book. (And I eventually had to do the same thing when applying for tenure: “Please do not choose any Heideggerians as my outside referees. Get people who know Heidegger but are not Heideggerians.” Luckily, there are many such people.) In the end, the book was accepted due to a positive review from a well-known analytic philosopher of mind (!), one with a reputation for harshness in his reviews of the work of others. If it had been up to the Heidegger fraternity, the book might never have been published, or at least not until many years later.

Until very recently, the mere act of getting a book published was difficult enough that it carried a certain automatic prestige, provided that you weren’t publishing with some obvious fly-by-night sort of firm or a known vanity press. But of course there was and is still a certain hierarchy among the academic publishers– to open certain doors, you have needed to go with one of the “blue blood” university presses.

All of these factors are now being swept away. I know a few people who haven’t even started graduate school yet who have just landed book deals in philosophy. This is made possible by the sudden emergence of guerrilla-type presses that can afford to gamble in the way that low-budget early recording companies like Sun and Stax were able to gamble. That isn’t possible for publishers who still have gigantic physical overhead costs; they need to be a bit more cautious. If you’re an academic publisher who has a nice big office with 15 employees, it’s simply too financially risky to publish books by high-risk newcomers who haven’t earned their academic driver’s licenses yet. But if the name of your game is risk, then that’s precisely your strategy– find promising youngsters with great ideas and take a gamble on them.

The inevitable dissemination, decrease in price, and increase in quality of Kindle-type devices will also further erode the uniqueness of books and the achievement of having published books. In not too many years we will have reached the point where literally anyone can publish a philosophy book in electronic form in a matter of minutes, even without the least trace of official academic credentials. I don’t bemoan this at all– the great era of 17th century philosophy was dominated by non-professors, and the same thing could easily happen again. As far as publishing is concerned, what it means is that all publishing is destined to become vanity publishing. (Alberto Toscano recently pointed this out to me.) You’ll just post a homemade book on line, and maybe people will download it and read it, and maybe you’ll pick up some influence.

But this means that it will no longer be publishers who vet submissions to make sure that no half-baked work hits the shelves. In the future, the half-baked, crankish, or sloppy stuff will be published just as easily as the good stuff. It will be a consensus of the community of readers that decides what is good and what is not, and the blogosphere is perhaps pioneering this new form of social quality control.

What we’re going to see is an explosion in the number and rapidity of books being published. The mere fact of being published will no longer be impressive, as it was when the presses were often stern gatekeepers. It will all boil down to how much reputation and readership you have, again similar to the blogosphere today. If you have an especial liking for a particular blogger, not only won’t you care about their c.v., in many cases you might not even think about it, whereas it always comes to mind immediately when assessing someone’s status in the university system.

If there really is a university bubble resembling the housing bubble, as I fear, then the “professor” career track that most of us in Gen-X still took for granted as the best and possibly only option for a philosopher is going to become a lot less appealing, and for many different reasons. But it won’t matter, because simultaneously there will be a lot more chance to find your niche as a philosopher outside the university system, as long as you’re coming up with good and well-presented ideas. Chances are high that this could invigorate philosophy. Times of transition from one medium to another are always times of possible ingenuity.

Another implication that comes to mind… I’ve already said that, once every book is a vanity press book published on line with the touch of a button, the mere act of publication will mean nothing– after all, almost everyone will be a published author at that point. It will be a matter not just of publishing, but of acquiring and maintaining the interest of a readership. And this requires punchier, more engaged writing than today’s academia usually encourages. Not all academic books are boring, of course, but today it is still possible to forge a career as a respected intellectual even if you write nothing but deadly dull books– as long as the right “gatekeeper” press gives these works their prestigious imprimatur. But if we enter an age where the gatekeepers are crumbling and it’s all about keeping the readers interested, then the ultra-footnoted style and plodding pace of much academic writing will naturally become extinct.

There have been transitions like this before. Just from reading Biagioli’s Galileo book, you can see the contrast between a fading generation of Aristotelian professors and the emerging mathematical physicists of the aristocratic courts and later the scientific academies. You can also sense how rapid the pace of book publication was in those day, compared to now– Galileo was constantly writing quick treatises as real-time interventions in live controversies, whereas now (at least in the USA) you’re probably looking at a couple of years for your completed book to reach the shelf.