Nathan's blog
Dr Nathan Hollier is Manager of Monash University Publishing. He has worked in academia and academic publishing since the mid-1990s, including as editor of Overland magazine (2002–2007), and is the founding President and a current board member of SPUNC Inc., the representative body for small and independent publishers in Australia.
25/01/2012
In the e-corner ...
Ding! Ding! Ding!
In today’s Australian newspaper, Melbourne University Publishing CEO and Publisher-in-Chief Louise Adler is quoted saying that Australia’s university-based scholarly e-presses ‘are not professionally edited, and are not published, marketed or distributed in the ways (traditionally or electronically) recognised by the industry as a whole or the scholarly publishing sector. They have almost no impact internationally.’
It’s obviously time to put the gloves back on. Or take them off. Or something.
ANU E Press, Sydney University Publishing, Adelaide University Press and Monash University Publishing titles are professionally edited, to a greater or lesser degree. What I gather Adler is referring to here is that these presses don’t generally employ editors to work closely with authors and turn their manuscripts into books that will sell a sufficient quantity in the retail sector to break even or make a profit. That is because, at risk of speaking for others, they are generally not trying to sell their books to ‘general’ bookstore-going readers; they are producing them primarily for academics, students and libraries and rely on reports from other scholars, as part of a rigorous peer-reviewing process, to ensure that these are original and readable. It is certainly the case, however, that some Sydney and Monash titles, at least, are produced with a general readership in mind, and where that is the case these titles are edited for that readership.
What does it mean that these e-press titles are not ‘published, marketed or distributed in the ways (traditionally or electronically) recognised by the industry as a whole or the scholarly publishing sector’? I think what Adler means here is that these e-press titles are not professionally distributed into the bookshop trade, marketed to that trade or sold in their electronic versions to consumers via e-book vendors such as Kobo.
For the most part this is true, though it is not true of Monash University Publishing (or MonUP), whose titles are distributed professionally into the bookshop trade in Australia and New Zealand, the UK and Europe, the Middle-East, Africa, Asia and North America, via agreements with Footprint, Eurospan and ISBS. As Andrew Trounson, the author of the piece Adler is quoted in, pleasingly noted, MonUP has a hybrid model, which we hope brings together the best of both (traditional and new) worlds. But is it necessarily a bad thing that the e-presses Adler refers to have rejected traditional and created for themselves new business models that combine some form of open-access online publication with print-on-demand facilities that (as with the ANU E Press) make the print versions of their titles available for purchase around the world, including through Amazon? If they can do this economically and disseminate knowledge for free and reach a readership which in all likelihood is much larger than that they could reach via traditional bookshop distribution, does it matter that this model is not ‘recognised’ by the trade publishing industry? In 2010, to grab the figures most readily to hand, the ANU E Press reported over three million downloads of its titles. (MonUP, with the ANU E Press, incidentally, is in the process of acquiring a website statistics package that will produce very firm figures on online readership of these two presses’ titles.)
Without professional bookshop distribution and conventional marketing, it is true, it is difficult to be taken seriously by established review organs and make the social and cultural impact a press might hope for (which is why MonUP has such distribution and marketing), but if the cost of these things is an unworkable business model and comparatively low readership, is it worth it? What kind of an impact can you make if you go broke or are not actually read except by those people who purchase a copy of your title during the few months a store will generally stock your book (which is why MonUP titles are also available online open-access)?
These e-presses are taken seriously by the scholarly publishing sector; indeed, as Agata Mrva-Montoya noted in a 19 Jan 2012 SUP blog which was then published in The Australian, this e-press grouping, in Australia at any rate, to a substantial extent is the scholarly publishing sector. Where publishing specifically for the scholarly market in Australia has traditionally not been possible, because the market is so small, these e-presses have found a way of doing it, and their output is fully accepted as scholarly by Federal Government research measurement and recording agencies. The traditional university-based scholarly publishers, on the other hand, have always had to focus on reaching a popular audience where they have been required to maximise their financial return on investment (because of that small scholarly market I’ve referred to). In recent times, in the face of tight university budgets and difficult and uncertain economic and book publishing conditions, these publishers have focused squarely on popular or trade publishing.
At their best (UWA Publishing is the Australian exemplar), these ‘traditional’ presses bring scholarship to a popular audience and serve an invaluable social and, if this is not a dirty word, political function. They help democracy function; in fact, without them, it is hard to imagine democracy, in any meaningful sense of the word, existing. Needless to say, not all traditional scholarly presses fulfil this purpose as well as they might, and the e-presses, in their own way, certainly contribute significantly to our democratic society also.
No-one likes a fight but, of course, getting mugged is worse still. Like us, I would expect, the e-presses will want to do what they can to set the record straight.
22/09/2011
‘Paying the Rent’: Publishers throwing in their lot with the retail sector
I’ve been watching with interest recent debates about retail rents. Obviously, in Australia at the moment, and not only in Australia, the retail sector is (sing along) ‘doing it tough’. In the Melbourne Age newspaper of 20 September 2011, Premier Investments CEO Mark McInnes was reported saying an increasingly ‘adversarial’ relationship had led to Premier attaining a 30 per cent rent reduction after threatening to close one of its Portmans stores. Premier Investments’ retail chains also include Peter Alexander, Just Jeans, Jay Jays and Smiggle. According to McInnes (or to the Age quoting McInnes), ‘Landlords have got a business model, they are protecting that business model, the [shopping] centres are underperforming, the retailers are underperforming and there are massive arguments going on between retailers and landlords about the types of rent they are trying to get.’ Business commentator Malcolm Maiden, in the same paper on the same day, referred to the ‘the battle with landlords that is developing as the retail recession intensifies’.
For publishers, or for this publisher, at any rate, an important question is: How much of this downturn is cyclical ... occasioned by the international recession ... and how much is structural: arising from the expansion of internet traders unencumbered by retail rents and staff and a host of other overheads associated with doing business in the retail sector on the street?
E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963), noted that the first mass political activism in the wake of the industrial revolution was not about low wages but high prices. If we’re in the early stages of a digital revolution, a possible parallel can be seen.
It hardly seemed a coincidence that in the Age, again of 21 September, another article reported on Australia Post struggling to keep up with delivery demands arising primarily from increased online shopping.
Of course, these two phenomena are likely to be related: consumers can be expected to look extra hard for bargains and forego the ‘real’ shopping experience (assuming that is worth experiencing) when money is especially short and economic confidence low. One businessperson I was talking to recently, however, voiced the opinion that, because of the internet, retail rents need to come down by half before ‘shopfront’ retailers can compete with their online competitors. His successful clothing brand was driven to the wall by rent costs, and he was now re-launching the brand as an online entity only.
‘It will take a long time for the rent chargers to accept this need for their costs to come down,’ he said.
Has there ever been a truer word spoken?, I wondered.
At Monash University Publishing we have thrown our lot in with the retail sector. You can buy our books in human bookstores – I’ve been unsatisfied with that ubiquitous ‘bricks-and-mortar’ adjective, for bookstores, for some time, and am going with ‘human’ as more suggestive of these stores’ distinctive property – in Australia and New Zealand, North America, Asia and, soon, the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. But I’ve been surprised at the number of print books we sell from our own site even though, naturally, we don’t undercut the retail price (except with special offers for contributors etc.). Getting to bookstores is, I guess, not always easy.
I still believe for a range of reasons – primarily to do with maximising a book’s impact – that distribution into the human retail trade is the best option for us, and that human bookstores offer or can offer a unique and valuable service.
But, not surprisingly, perhaps, I also like the idea of those retail-property rents coming down, and of the price-competitiveness of our products going up.
Thinking about it for a moment, a more or less inevitable effect of the web and its spread would seem to be to make the specific location of retail outlets less important.
One could have said the same thing about the spread of car ownership and the growth of suburban society, after the 1940s, except of course that the growth of suburban car society resulted not in increased freedom for the retailer and the consumer but in increased cost burdens being placed upon, and fewer choices being made available for, them, because of the simultaneous rise of massive shopping centres offering retailers a ‘captive’ market of consumers extracted from their own, ordinary communities, and charging high rents for this privilege. (Jason Epstein discusses this dynamic in his eminently readable Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (2001).)
There is some hope, I think, that falling profits in the human retail sector will bring rents and prices in this sector down as well and, over time, lead not only to this sector’s renewed competitiveness but also increase the capacity of retailers ... and most importantly bookshops, with their seemingly inevitable low margins ... to be more creative and experimental in what they stock, and so to provide a better service for producers and consumers, including readers and publishers. What results might actually be a more diversified and interesting social landscape.
Reflections on Academic Humanities Publishing
Having backed a humanities career horse many years ago, I’ve been saddened – and at times sent broke – by this horse’s continuing poor showing. I’d been thinking and reading a bit about the current state of the humanities, and at the same time becoming increasingly committed to a strong humanities and social sciences list for Monash University Publishing, when Ali Lemer, Events Manager with the Victorian Society of Editors, asked me to speak at one of their dinners. This is an edited excerpt from that presentation.
I do have some positive things to say about developments in humanities publishing but before getting to those it is necessary, and important, to identify and acknowledge some of the profound challenges facing the humanities now – as a disciplinary body – at all levels of education and, consequently, as a field within the publishing industry.
In Australian universities today the research focus is squarely on science (conceived of in the very narrow, specifically English sense of this word), and the teaching focus is on vocational education, the imparting of practical skills and professional training (Turner and on the narrow meaning of ‘science’ in English, see Wierbicka). A consequence of this has been the decline and regular disappearance of language departments. (Schwartz, p.11; Turner) Classics and Philosophy are also under pressure, where they continue to exist. (Schwartz) Writing in October last year Professor Graeme Turner from the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland stated: ‘The Excellence in Research for Australia process is certain to reveal what many know already: that the landscape for the humanities disciplines, once you move beyond the main metropolitan universities, looks like scorched earth. Picked off by administrative restructures, market forces and just plain neglect, whole programs have disappeared.’ He extrapolated: ‘In some of the regional universities, as well as in some of the more vocationally oriented metropolitan campuses, it is hard to see humanities programs of any quality surviving.’
Luke Slattery, reporting on these rankings in February this year, bore out Turner’s prediction: ‘Results from the research assessment reveal that in a field such as studies in human society, only a quarter of our 41 universities attained the international average of three points or higher ... Only 12 universities made it onto the page in anthropology; none of the other 29 had done enough research in this field, broadly defined as the study of human behaviour and social development, to warrant ranking ... In academic work, the University of NSW top-scored with a ranking of four, while four other universities made par with three. The remaining 36 were either given a sub-world standard ranking or no ranking at all.’
Humanities academics feel undervalued while, at the same time, being fearful of losing their employment altogether (Schwartz, p.11). Part of the undervaluing is financial: the median annual starting salary for Humanities bachelor degree graduates aged under 25 and in their first full-time employment in Australia in 2010 ($42,000) was nearly 15 per cent lower than the median average for all bachelor degree graduates ($49,000). (Cambourne) But there are additional factors: Humanities departments have not been alone in suffering from the shift away from democratic governance structures of management within the university, but their Socratic traditions perhaps make these changes especially difficult to bear. Similarly, the dramatic increase in university class sizes since the late 1980s has had a particularly negative effect on humanities teaching, which depends on personal interaction. The whole idea underpinning humanities education is that it should not be passive. The initiatives to standardise testing in secondary schools is also clearly inimical to humanities traditions.
Humanities education, especially when it is advanced as humanities education, rather than as a branch of ‘objective’, ‘value-neutral’ science (in cultural theory, for instance) or a set of measurable skills (within an Education degree, say), is well and truly on the sidelines. The humanities are not seen as being anything like as valuable as either science on one hand or training for a professional career on the other.
This is certainly the case at the level of government: the Labor Party election document of 2007, ‘The Australian Economy Needs an Education Revolution’, was all about the supposed need for more skilled workers to increase economic production. (Schwartz) The humanities are disadvantaged by the relative funding model, now 20 years old, which, Turner notes, ‘privileges research income over research output.’ In addition, ‘there is the practice of putting new money into higher education through strategic research initiatives rather than through changes to base levels of funding. By routinely requiring matching contributions, from the universities or elsewhere, strategic funding consolidated the advantage of those who already had most of the research dollars: typically, the biological sciences.’ (Turner) The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative, designed to measure (amongst other things) research impact, has relied for its measuring of research impact on the Scopus bibliographic database, in which the arts and humanities are relatively poorly covered.
But there is evidence also that the humanities are also undervalued within Australian university senior management. While Macquarie University Vice Chancellor Steven Schwartz recently lamented the fact that ‘the humanities are in crisis’ (p.11) and called for a new level of support for them, he also referred to ‘leaky finances’ supposedly ‘forcing’ universities ‘to jettison disciplines to keep afloat’ (p.11). This would likely be disputed by Turner, who argues that with a small number of exceptions, universities ‘have sat back and watched, deploring the depredations that market forces have wrought on their humanities programs, while operating in complicity with them.’ (Turner)
Turner contends that ‘It is not enough to blame government funding strategies ... These defects in the system would be remediable at the university level if there were sufficient will. Universities don’t decide how their money comes to them, but they do decide how to spend it. Most, however, have decided there is no money in the humanities and gradually declined to invest in them.’ (Turner)
The odds stacked against the humanities in most parts of the world outside of Australia seem even more extreme. In Britain the Tory-Liberal Democrat Government is preparing to remove all public funding from university humanities departments, completing turning on its head the notion of ‘public good’ that historically underpinned the development of the humanities, and universities. Those who forsake training in a particular set of skills likely to lead to certifiable credentials and employment, in favour of the broad education and general knowledge that indirectly contributes to the health and quality of life of society as a whole, are paradoxically to be treated as self-indulgents who effectively need to be punished. New private higher education options are springing up in the wake of these government cutbacks in the UK, but it is feared these will be available only to the very wealthy who can afford their considerable fees (see Eagleton).
In the US, according to Schwartz, ‘Huge for-profit ... universities, such as the University of Phoenix, shun the humanities entirely.’ (p.11) Toby Miller, chair of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, reports that just 53 per cent of US humanities staff had full-time jobs in 2009. Business professors in 2005–2006 were paid twice as much as humanities professors. Between 1979 and 1997, US government National Science Foundation (NSF) grants went from five times the size of grants awarded to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), to 33 times the size. In 2010, just 0.45 per cent of federal research money went to the humanities. Miller also notes that ‘The vast majority of governmental support for the humanities nowadays goes to museums, historical societies, regional re-granting bodies and libraries.’ (Miller, ‘Dilemma’.)
By and large, the new universities of Asia focus on science, technology and business and pay little attention to the arts, literature or philosophy (Schwartz, p.11).
University Library acquisitions budgets – especially in relation to humanities publications – have been placed under pressure by the dramatic increase in recent decades of the cost of journal subscriptions in the areas of science, medicine and technology (SMT), a cost increase arising primarily from the acquisition of journals in these areas by commercial publishers who tightly control and effectively exploit associated copyrights. In Australia, between 1986 and 1998, the number of journal subscriptions in university libraries declined by 37% while expenditure on these increased by 63% and the unit cost of journals increased by a ‘staggering’ 474%. (Houghton)
Libraries are under pressure to purchase journals in these fields because without access to the information within them, scholars in these fields will find it difficult to gain access to the largest research grants, now such a priority for most universities. (Miller, ‘Worldwide jitters’.) Even ten years ago, an institutional subscription to a humanities journal might be under US$100 while one in physics might be close to US$1500. (Miller, ‘Worldwide jitters’.). In 2004, Brain Research cost approximately US$20,000 a year, while Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry Letters cost almost US$30,000. (Davidson) The situation has deteriorated further since then.
The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), probably the best known and most influential global universities ranking, places a heavy emphasis on the natural sciences as opposed to the social sciences and humanities. It does not seek to measure humanities quality at all.
James Engell and Anthony Dangerfield (in their book Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money, 2011) suggest that the traditional role of money in universities has been inverted. Rather than being a means to achieving an end, making money has become an end in itself (Schwartz, p.11); arguably the only real end. Martha Nussbaum, in her recent work Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010), concurs:
Thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive ... The humanities and the arts are being cut away, in both primary/secondary and college-university education, in virtually every nation of the world [and, in addition] what we might call the humanistic aspects of science and social science—the imaginative, creative aspect, and the aspect of rigorous critical thought—are also losing ground as nations prefer to pursue short-term profit by the cultivation of the useful and highly applied skills suited to profit-making.’ (2)
She concludes: ‘We are in the midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance ... a world-wide crisis in education.’ (1–2)
Valuing the Humanities
I’m sure – I hope at any rate – it is unnecessary to mount an argument for the value of humanities scholarship to this audience. But I would like to remind us of the nature of this value by reporting what some prominent advocates for the humanities have had to say on this topic in recent times.
For Nussbaum: ‘These abilities are associated with the humanities and the arts: the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a “citizen of the world”; and, finally, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person.’ (7) She adds: ‘the faculties of thought and imagination ... make us human and make our relationships rich human relationships, rather than relationships of mere use and manipulation. When we meet in society, if we have not learned to see both self and other in that way, imagining in one another inner faculties of thought and emotion, democracy is bound to fail, because democracy is built upon respect and concern, and these in turn are built upon the ability to see other people as human beings, not simply as objects.’ (6)
Speaking personally: I think if I had of been clearer on this point during my own time as a (primarily) humanities university teacher: that I was educating people for citizenship, this would have enabled me to better articulate the value of what I was doing, to my students and to myself.
Anna Wierzbicka (professor of linguistics at the ANU) has also made useful comments recently on the value of humanities scholarship. Noting that ‘The fundamental distinction between studying things and studying people was introduced into European thought by the Italian 18th-century philosopher Giambattista Vico’, she explains: ‘Essentially, the idea is that people can know things of many kinds about people in a way they can’t know things about anything else, that it is extremely important for people to know these things about people, and further, that people can know things of these kinds about people imaginatively, from inside, and that they can have a better understanding of them than they can ever have of the natural world.’
Wierzbicka also notes that a ‘link with values and moral judgment needs to be taken into account in the full definition of the humanities’: ‘Natural sciences are widely taken to be value-free (and social sciences tend to imitate science in this regard). The humanities, on the other hand, do not aspire to be value-free. Thus, when a historian writes of Stalinism and Nazism that “moral judgments are intrinsic to all historical understanding’’, he [sic] is placing history in the context of the humanities rather than the social sciences.’
At the risk of labouring the point (of the value of the humanities) I’d also like to quote Peter Singer (professor of bioethics in the University Centre for Human Values at Princeton University and laureate professor in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne): ‘The idea of a liberal arts education goes back more than 2000 years to Plato’s Academy ... We might say that it attempts to answer the broad questions ... Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? This kind of education does not train you in a profession, but it gives you an intellectual foundation to use throughout your life, whether you decide to go into medicine, law, business, engineering, or any other occupation.’ And, in a formulation that brings Nussbaum’s to mind: ‘If our best-educated citizens have no idea how to answer these basic questions, we will struggle to build a democracy that can solve the problems we face, whether they are what to do about climate change, the world’s poor, the problems of Australia’s indigenous people, or the prospect of a future in which we can genetically modify our offspring. An education in the humanities is as valuable today as it was in Plato’s time.’
Are we in Australia as empathetic and understanding towards the various ‘others’ outside of and within our own society, as we could be? Are we capable of thinking critically (as opposed to cynically), about issues of public policy on which decisions must be made (and are made in our name)? Are we fully aware of the difference between scientific ‘fact’ and assessments based on value judgements? And of the inevitability and value of these judgements? Do we reach for a rich philosophical and ethical basis for the various decisions we make as individuals and as a society in our day to day lives?
We don’t have time to discuss the answers to these questions in detail and I’ll leave you to make up your own mind but one point I can’t resist making is that, reportedly, more than 80 per cent of Australians are actively disengaged from political commentary and debate, even during election campaigns. A senior Minister in the current Federal Government said at a conference I attended a couple of years ago that, during the 2007 election campaign, it made no sense for then opposition leader Kevin Rudd to engage with the Prime Minister (John Howard) on economic policy because, according to ALP polling, when the electorate heard words like ‘economy’ and ‘economic policy’, approval ratings for the Coalition went up, regardless of the particular policies being advocated, whereas when people heard words like ‘education’, ‘health’ and ‘job security’, approval ratings for the ALP went up. The powers that be in the ALP believed, in other words, that existing word-associations were likely to have a greater effect on voter behaviour than the content of policies themselves. And, well, I also can’t resist noting that Australia’s refugee policies and the treatment of outback Aborigines were attacked in May this year by the United Nations’ top human rights watchdog, which suggested there was ‘a strong undercurrent of racism here’ (hardly surprising following years of disinvestment in the study of other societies and cultures). (‘UN rights chief slams “racist, inhumane” elements in Australia’, and this general point about the effects of disinvestment in study of this kind is also made by Turner and Nussbaum.)
It is heartening – after all this doom and gloom (sorry) – to consider that, while the Bachelor of Arts Degree is no longer the most common degree taken in Australian universities (it was knocked off that perch some ten years ago by the Master of Business Administration), more than 26 per cent of Australia’s university students still choose to enrol in the humanities (where they are taught by 10.8 per cent of the nation’s university staff). (Turner) Polling of what people would like to study also suggests strong interest in the humanities. ((My Career), Sydney Morning Herald, 6 Feb 2010, p.4.) ‘When working life wanes and it comes time to feed the soul,’ Schwartz points out, ‘only the humanities provide the required nutrition ... Not once have I encountered a retiree [at university graduation ceremonies] whose return to university was driven by a passion for accounting or marketing or business administration.’ (p.11) And, of course, much high quality humanities scholarship continues to be produced.
We have a situation, then, in which the humanities can be seen to be highly valuable, even imperative, socially, and are popular, while, at the same time, these disciplinary fields are going to the wall; whole bodies of knowledge are being lost from our societies.
This seems to me to be, broadly speaking, a case of market failure, in Keynesian terms, in which the market, so good at pricing and facilitating exchange in privately owned goods, is not able, of itself, to deliver for society a product which would greatly benefit – not individuals, or not only individuals – but society as a whole, a product which essentially yields public, rather than private rewards (or ‘positive externalities’ in Keynesian terms), and without which the quality of life of all individuals within society is immeasurably cheapened.
The classic solution for market failure of course is government action. But in the current public-policy environment it would seem to be irrationally optimistic to wait for that. In recent years hopes have grown that the development of digital technologies and, more specifically, the capacity for virtually cost-free reproduction of digitally created products, will facilitate a loosening of the social dominance of market means of product exchange and distribution. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett write in The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better (2009):
For everything that can be copied digitally, additional copies cost little or nothing either to produce or to distribute over the internet ... So low are marginal costs of digital products that there is a growing “free” sector. Efforts are made to enforce patents and copyright protection in an attempt to restrict access and enable companies to hold on to profits; but the logic of technological progress is difficult to resist. (258)
Humanities publishing, in particular, is benefitting from new technologies and business models which enable a new level of emphasis on the dissemination of knowledge and a new degree of freedom from the need to have one’s costs recovered through the sale of print books in bookstores, alone. In Australia the ANU E Press, Adelaide University Press, UTS ePress and Monash University Publishing (which grew out of an epress) publish a large and increasing number of books and journals that are, for the most part, made available online open access (and so, free of charge to anyone able to view the web). It is no coincidence that these presses are, physically or administratively, housed in their host institutions’ libraries. Libraries, after all, have borne the brunt of the dramatic increases in journal acquisitions costs in recent decades while, at the same time, being among the earliest and most sophisticated institutional consumers (and in many cases developers) of data management, discovery and distribution software.
The ANU E Press alone currently publishes over 50 books a year. Extensive, targetted metadata dissemination heightens the discoverability of these library-based presses’ works online. They are generally typeset as part of a semi-automated, XML-based workflow, and digitally printed, yet, at their best, are the equal of commercial publishers’ offset printed books, in terms of their physical quality (the advancement of digital print technology is a story in itself). And the strategy of publishing open access online in no way precludes simultaneous distribution into brick-and-cement bookstores, or even a business model based on these ‘traditional’ sales (that’s what I hope, at any rate, since this is the business model of Monash University Publishing).
I am not suggesting that these new presses, making use of new developments in digital communications technology, are ‘the solution’ to the problems faced by the Humanities as a whole (which can only be overcome by a wider social mobilisation and more enlightened political leadership), but they are, I believe, a very positive development for Australian education (and humanities scholars especially) and society.
References
No author listed, ‘UN rights chief slams “racist, inhumane” elements in Australia’, www.theage.com.au, viewed 26 May 2011.
No author listed, Sydney Morning Herald (My Career) 6 Feb 2010, p.4.
Keeli Cambourne, ‘Job net is wide in public service, Sydney Morning Herald 5 March 2011, quoting Graduate Careers Australia 2010 GradFiles survey.
Terry Eagleton, ‘AC Grayling's private university is odious’, Guardian online, 6 June 2011.
Cathy N. Davidson, ‘The Futures of Scholarly Publishing1’, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 35:3 2004, pp. 129–142, p.139.
J.W. Houghton, ‘Crisis and transition: The Economics of Scholarly Communication’, Learned Publishing 14:3, 2001.
Toby Miller, ‘Dilemma of blowing up the humanities’, The Australian (Higher Ed), 16 Feb 2011, p.25.
Toby Miller, ‘Worldwide jitters over publishing’, The Australian (Higher Education) 4 May 2011, p.40.
Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Princeton University Press, 2010.
Steven Schwartz, ‘Soul food in the age of money’, The Australian Literary Review 4 May 2011, pp.11–12.
Peter Singer, ‘We must nurture the humanities’, The Age 27 July 2009, p.13.
Luke Slattery, ‘Cultural life diminished by the absence of top-flight experts---RESEARCH RANKINGS’, The Australian 1 February 2011, p.6.
Graeme Turner, ‘In thrall purely to sciences’, The Australian (Higher Ed) 13 October 2010.
Anna Wierzbicka, ‘The humanities battle to gain a scientific edge’, The Australian (Higher Ed) 7 July 2010, p.24.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better, Allen Lane, 2009.
*Thanks to Professor Graeme Turner for kindly sending me his very helpful notes for a lecture he presented on ‘The Humanities and the University in Australia’ at the University of Queensland on 14 October 2010.
20/05/11
The Future is Regional
In about two weeks’ time (on 3 June) the Monash University Publishing team will load up the station wagon, strap a mattress to the roof and head down to Wonthaggi for the launch of Andrew Reeves’ Up from the Underworld: Coal miners and Community in Wonthaggi 1909 – 1968.
This is being launched by Senator the Honourable Kim Carr, federal Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, at the State Coal Mine Visitor Centre.
This is going to be an exciting event for us. It’s not every day that one of your titles is launched by a federal Minister, and certainly not one so central to Australia’s future plans for economic and educational development as Senator Carr. The response to the book and the launch event, especially in the Wonthaggi region, has also been fantastic. And we’re very proud of the book itself, both as a work of history and as a physical production, with a cover adorned by a Noel Counihan painting and over fifty graphics inside.
But I’m also especially pleased to be publishing a work with such a regional focus, and hope that such works will be a strength of this press.
Of the many characteristics of the digital era that I continue to find difficult to ‘process’, foremost among these is the impact of this technology on rural and regional life.
Growing up in Mildura in the eighties, one felt more or less completely isolated from the world outside that rural city and the cluster of little towns around it.
Now, not surprisingly, a lot of those people I grew up with (and who, in another age, I would probably never have heard from again) are enthusiastic users of Facebook and various other means of digitally keeping in touch.
Australia’s highly urbanised society has, since its early days, shared Banjo Paterson’s dream to go bush with Clancy. The founders of the Country Party, in New South Wales, even campaigned – for many years – for their own nation state, in which the ‘evils’ of urbanisation and industrialisation could be avoided.
Now, with the cities’ increasing congestion and expense and the spread of digital technologies and infrastructure to regional areas (assisted, in part, by the attention afforded the two independent rural MPs who sided with the Government after the last federal election), the decay and decline of rural areas may not necessarily be so ubiquitous, the experience of driving through country towns so inevitably morose.
It is to be hoped that intellectually, too, the privileging of what Raewyn Connell has termed ‘metropolitan’ theory (Southern Theory, 2007), which seeks a universal explanation for social phenomena, will also, increasingly, come into question. And, in turn, new spaces will open up for non-metropolitan voices.
The publication of Up from the Underworld exemplifies ways that new technology can help to preserve historical traditions, rather than erase them, while the book itself tells an important story of struggle, sacrifice and cooperative achievement.
If, as Martha Nussbaum has reminded us recently (Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, 2010), the great value of humanities scholarship derives from its capacity to explicate ‘other’ worlds, experiences, desires, fears, imaginings and sets of values, a focus on localised cultural and historical study might play an important part in generating more sophisticated understandings of and lines of communication between the various groups that make up our nation and our world.
10/05/11
I was impressed by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always do Better, when it was first released in 2009, and wrote this review of it for Overland magazine. They didn’t end up running the review, so with the recent re-issue of this publication, I thought it worth publishing here. The study, especially in the authors’ discussion of developments in digital technology, has implications for publishers and publishing.
REVIEW
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, Allen Lane, 2009.
In the UK, according to Thornton McCamish (Sunday Age 16 August 2009), The Spirit Level has helped to stimulate a “lively debate about the social costs of inequality”. Here, no such debate has got off the ground, in spite of Richard Wilkinson’s visit to Australia in 2009, the mass media’s publicising of Executive incompetence and excess during the global financial crisis, supposedly high levels of resentment against profiteering banks, and intermittent public spats about school funding formulae. Whatever the reasons for this quietude, Wilkinson and Pickett’s findings and arguments need to be remembered by anyone seriously interested in understanding and responding to fundamental social dynamics here and throughout the world.
Drawing their primary data exclusively “from the most reputable sources – from The World Bank, the World Health Organization, the United Nations and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and others”, and taking care to ensure that their objects and methods of study have been consistent and systematic throughout, these epidemiologists find that more equal societies are more healthy – physically, mentally and emotionally (and thus also ‘happier’) – more trusting and internally cohesive, have higher life expectancy and social mobility and lower rates of crime (including violent crime and crimes against women and children), shorter sentences for criminals and better records of rehabilitation, and lower rates of teen pregnancy and obesity and of their associated problems. In more equal societies women do better, professionally, and more money is spent on welfare, health and education, while, partly because resources are less likely to be siphoned off into prison building and private bank accounts, more financial assistance is also given by these nations to the poor in other parts of the world.
All of this is very affirming for those of us who believe in the general social value of equality: “Health and social problems are indeed more common in countries with bigger income inequalities. The two are extraordinarily closely related.” More arresting though are the authors’ other central findings: firstly that “as nations join the ranks of the affluent developed countries” – the focus of the research here – “further rises in income count for less and less”, in terms of their impact on health and quality of life. In these countries, for example, “there is no relationship between the amount of health spending per person and life expectancy”. And secondly, though coterminously: the strongest influence on the physical and social health of these nations is the degree of equality that exists within them: “Some countries can be almost twice as rich as others without any benefit to life expectancy. Yet within any of them death rates are closely and systematically related to income”. In other words: “The problems in rich countries are not caused by the society not being rich enough (or even by being too rich) but by the scale of material differences between people within each society being too big. What matters is where we stand in relation to others in our own society.”
Why is this the case? Wilkinson and Pickett trace out, more comprehensively and thoroughly than has been done before, so far as I am aware, the complex process by which a person’s economic position in society is likely to affect – indeed, statistically speaking, determine – his or her chances not only of, say, achieving in school or obtaining a good job, but of being overweight, violent, a teen parent, happy, healthy, living a long life, and even of such things as getting certain cancers and other illnesses: “In a striking experiment, researchers have . . . shown that people with friends are less likely to catch a cold when given the same measured exposure to the cold virus – in fact the more friends they had, the more resistant they were.” As individuals, our socio-economic experience and social position seeps through our psyche and into our physiology itself. In more unequal societies, for example, more stressed pregnant women carry more stressed foetuses who may then turn throughout their lives to food as a source of comfort, as most obese people do. (Australia is singled out, incidentally, as having one of the very worst systems of child care and maternity / paternity leave, in the rich world.)
The authors go on to speculate about human beings’ fundamental evolved psychological nature and traits, bringing to mind this aspect of the project of Emile Zola and, unfortunately, being no more convincing. (As ‘Frankfurt school’ thinkers like Habermas have argued convincingly, one needs always to be wary of reducing ‘the social’ to ‘the natural’.) They do, nonetheless, decimate the proposition, still dominant in our nation at least, that human beings are naturally overwhelmingly inquisitive, selfish and greedy: “Now that we have much more knowledge of hunting and gathering societies it is clear that our ancestors did not [as Hobbes thought] live in a state of continuous conflict … [S]ocial and economic life was based on systems of gift exchange, food sharing, and on a very high degree of equality.” “Forms of exchange involving direct expressions of self-interest”, on the other hand, “such as buying and selling or barter, were usually regarded as socially unacceptable and outlawed”.
Turning to the future, and technological development, Wilkinson and Pickett argue that in the “digital age”, in which goods can be reproduced, perfectly, for very little extra cost, the sustainability and desirability of private property may well need to be reconsidered. Why pay to develop a product that can easily be copied? And why should profits from such copying go into private hands (such as those of Google)?
What, then, is to be done? Refreshingly, for scholars trained in the ‘natural’ sciences especially, Wilkinson and Pickett are strongly aware of the social dimensions of knowledge and of the ultimately arbitrary nature of disciplinary boundaries: the point is to change the world, for the better. Also, being unencumbered by any conscious intellectual debt to Marx and finding that “greater equality can be gained either by using taxes and benefits to redistribute very unequal incomes or by greater equality in gross incomes before taxes and benefits, which leaves less need for redistribution”, they recognise, as Marx and his followers sometimes did not, that there is no single ‘correct’ approach to economics. That said, they do identify what is likely to be the most effective means of bringing about the kind of social transformation which their findings suggest is desirable: industrial democracy: giving employees a greater share of profits from, and say over the direction of, the companies they work for.
This is argued for so clearly in the book’s final chapter, and on the basis of such evident logic, that it is made to sound easy and unproblematic (employees would, for instance, be restricted from selling their shares). Partly for this reason, the arguments are patently inspiring; and the authors’ practical intentions are signaled by both the confidence of their rhetoric (“[n]ow that we have shown that reducing inequality leads to a very much better society . . . We are on the verge of creating a qualitatively better and more truly sociable society for all”) and by the fact that they have set up a research institute to continue to advocate and campaign for change (see www.equalitytrust.org.uk).
The study as a whole stands as a corrective to those – like Clive Hamilton – who would argue that increasing affluence has made the goal of wealth redistribution in the rich ‘first’ world less vital, politically. It also invites a reconsideration of the truism, accepted within most approaches to cultural theory (including mine), that cultural and political phenomena are, if not floating free from the economic, then independent to some degree. For Wilkinson and Pickett what Marxists call, or used to call, ‘the superstructure’, sprouts directly from the economic ‘base’: “We should perhaps regard the scale of material inequalities in a society as providing the skeleton, or framework, round which class and cultural differences are formed. Over time, crude differences in wealth gradually become overlaid by differences in clothing, aesthetic taste, education, sense of self and all the other markers of class identity.” On the evidence presented here, it is hard to disagree.
It is also true, of course, that times change, and that social progress does take place; sometimes even social transformation. Still, I am not quite convinced that “if governments understood the consequences of widening income differences they would be keener to prevent them”. Would Thatcher? Would Howard? Or Bush (I or II)? And isn’t it possible that for what might imperfectly be called ‘the ruling class’, social dysfunction and pain (especially other people’s pain) are a price worth paying for their position of dominance?
Clearly, Wilkinson and Pickett did not need to read Marx to arrive at their conclusions. They have merely responded intelligently to the evidence they have found. But a consideration of Marx’s work on ideology may have added an extra layer of analytic strength to this book. After all, remember what happened – and what didn’t happen – when Laurie Carmichael and others put the case for industrial democracy in Australia Reconstructed (1987) …
3/25/11
Talk for Professional Historians’ Association of Victoria
On March 16, I gave a speech at a Professional Historians Association of Victoria event.
Event organiser Kimberley Meagher asked me to cover: ‘what SPUNC [Small Presss Underground Network] does/represents; general direction of publishing considering the introduction of new media/ publishing mediums; tips for getting published; outside/mainstream/niche interest in history material’.
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