I certainly didn’t mean to seem critical of accepting the public as the arbiter! I’m all for it, which is why these are such peculiar questions for me. My final paragraph only shows my surprise at how doing scholarship in public seems to be the setting the debate at three different institutional levels (departmental, divisional, and institutional), which suggests that there’s a whole lot to it that I haven’t begun to piece together yet.

In the post that follows this, I wonder about accountability to the public (building off the standard humanistic defensiveness that “the public” thinks we’re just a bunch of bullshit artists), but I don’t think I can imagine turning my back on that sort of thing. I know that I spent a huge portion of my diss.-planning time trying to figure out/make sure that it had a public component (which I’m still skeptical of, but… that’s my shortcoming).

OK. I will start running really long if I continue here. Thanks for the comment, and I’ll try to keep this all in mind when I tackle the “ethical” approach in a later post.

captcha: bulging police

interesting post! just one quick comment:

I’m not really sure that math and science are the driving forces in the contemporary american university in terms of its educational functions. It seems to me that we have to think further about the huge growth and current dominance of vocational fields over nonvocational fields, and it’s far from obvious that most vocational fields are mathandsciency. Communications? Might as well be called “applied english!” Criminology? Applied sociology. Nursing? Well, it has a science component but I doubt that there’s a lot of math and I don’t think it’s a particularly technical field. And the biggest vocational field of all, business, definitely is not mathandsciency. I guess insofar as it even has a correlate in the traditional liberal arts, we’d be tempted to call it ‘applied economics,’ but a lot of their actual training seems to have to do with marketing and communications (‘applied english’) and the management of a workforce (‘applied game theory’, for lack of a better word…). Point being, anyway, that the intense trend towards vocationalization is not something exclusively based on any single group of traditional disciplines.

See here for some figures on comparative disciplinary enrollments in the US. Science is big, but business is the biggest single field.

Also in passing… I find it curious that by the end of your post you sound a bit critical of accepting “the public” as the ultimate arbiter of the value of academic work, while earlier you sounded wistful that people in literary studies don’t get to have public releases of their research work…