0.1 Sustainability: the elephant in the room  (Page 6/12)

Robert Darnton’s series of essays in The New York Review of Books has called attention to some of the key issues. Darnton’s series of review essays and response notes began in The New York Review of Books , 12 February 2009 issue. But even so, the community of scholars is scarcely aware of what is happening and is little engaged in any practical way. Not until the fall of 2009 was an effort launched to file an appeal to the court arguing that no settlement should be completed until the interests of the scholarly community have been assessed and addressed. This letter to the court was the initiative of Pamela Samuelson, who—like Darnton—has been a steady critic of the narrow framework in which the settlement is being pursued. See e.g. Samuelson’s “Google Book Search and the Future of Books in Cyberspace” ( (External Link)&cd=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us ) The appeal letter is now officially filed on behalf of a group of sixty-five academic authors—a number that supplies a dismal gloss on the institutional awareness of the scholarly community.

The problem here has two programmatic faces: how to pursue scholarship into a future that will be organized in a digital horizon; and how to secure access to our inheritance of printed scholarship within that new framework. A sharp institutional contradiction has ensued, for whereas scholars want to preserve and integrate our print work for digital emergence, we also see the need to give up print-based forms of scholarly inquiry for born-digital forms. This means migrating the scholarly print archive—journals and publishers’ backlists—and also beginning to shut down the system of print-organized scholarly research and communication and migrate to a digitally-organized social machinery.

I say “begin to shut down the system” because this is not a machinery we can easily turn off. The system comes with a long history and is firmly integrated in every aspect of our scholarly institutions. Jobs, promotion, tenure, and the institutional organization of the university remain keyed to it. Understanding those relations, we talk about prying ourselves free of the system by shifting criteria for scholarly advancement from monograph to periodical work, or we plead that digital work—some of it anyhow—be put on an equal footing with print work in considering scholarly merit. But as Our Lady of the Flowers said to her judge, we’re already beyond that—way beyond it, in my opinion, though not—as we all know—at the level of institutional politics.

Certainly Kathleen Fitzpatrick is already beyond it, as I think many if not most younger scholars tend to be. Fitzpatrick’s book Planned Obsolescence grounds its various proposals around a pair of key premises: (a) that “scholarship is about participating in an exchange of ideas with one’s peers”; and (b) that the traditional “system surrounding [the] production and dissemination” of this exchange “has ceased to function” in reliable ways. She is confident that we have the technical means to reconstruct this “system” in digital forms. But the charged polemic of her book reflects her worry “whether we have the institutional will to commit to the development of the [digital]systems” that will replace the “entrenched systems that no longer serve our needs.” I quote from the online mediacommonspress publication of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence ( (External Link) ) In other words, “Not what, but who.”