Uncompensated Work: case in point - the business of academic publishing

[Laura Gibbs]

As a topic related to my "learning to say no" blog post, I wanted to share this really thoughtful and thought-provoking statement about uncompensated work and academic publishing written by Jason Jackson, who teaches Anthropology at Indiana University (I knew him when he was at my university, Univ. of Oklahoma, some years ago - very nice fellow!).

Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps

Here is the opening statement - powerful stuff, with which I am in 100% agreement. :-)

Last year, did you get paid nothing to work hard for a multinational corporation with reported revenues of over 1 billion dollars in 2008? If you have (1) done peer-reviews for, (2) submitted an article to, (3) written a book or media review for, or (4) taken on the editorship of a scholarly journal published by giant firms such as Springer, Reed Elisevier, or Wiley, then you belong to a very large group of very well-educated people whose unpaid labor has helped make these firms very profitable. Their profitability in turn has positioned them to work vigorously against the interests of (1) university presses and other not-for-profit publishers in the public interest, (2) libraries at all levels, (3) university and college students, (4) scholars themselves, and (5) particular and general publics with a need to consult the scholarly record. I am not willing to freely give my labor to large multinational corporations whose interests align with their shareholders but that are antagonistic to my own. (read more)

Jason's statement is about academic publishing in particular, which is one of the many forms of uncompensated work that college faculty are asked to do, but I'm guessing that educators at all levels and all institutions do all kinds of uncompensated work... about which they probably have mixed feelings!

I'm curious what you all think about this aspect of your work... Jason's call for a boycott has developed caused quite a ruckus, but it's a ruckus I think is definitely worth making!

[Janet Navarro]

Thanks for bringing this up Laura. Jason's article hit's home and adds yet another layer to things I have been thinking about for several years--that I actually have a hard time accurately articulating. But, I'll try here. It's a conundrum for sure. It goes something like this....

Unless you are in an institution where your load reflects the school's desire for you to participate in such activity mentioned above, which has usually been framed as a reward for doing significant previous unpaid work, then, not only are you not getting paid by the publishing (or other) company, but you are also not getting "paid" by your institution. Yet, you are still expected to do this work. For example, in the summer -- when you are not even on contract, because most of us have 9 or 10 month contracts. So, many of us actually have to pay out of pocket to get this unpaid work done. For example, I was told by members of my previous institution to send my kids to summer camp so that I could do some of the unpaid work mentioned by Jason, because without doing that work, I would likely not get tenure. However, given the paltry sums associated with the monetary compensation provided by my institution called a salary, I literally couldn't afford summer camp for my kids, nor would I have sent them there in the first place for that reason (there are monetary issues, ethical issues, moral issues, reward structure issues and others to be sure).

So, what I'm getting around to saying is -- not only is this work not compensated, but in many ways, we pay to do the unpaid work by spending money on baby sitters, phone calls to out of state colleagues, having to pay for internet in our homes to do this work and not write off because we really don't have a consulting business or home office, etc. This unpaid work is expensive.

And, while my institution doesn't pay me for it, and the company doesn't pay me for it, and I pay others so I can do it, the institution where I work, is always very happy to put this unpaid / paid work of mine on THEIR list of faculty accomplishments -- which they show to people who THEY have paid a huge sum of money to so they can be accredited. And it goes round and round.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Janet, what you say is so true - and the gender issues are a big part of the equation as well, that is for sure! I often repeat this piece of information simply because I don't think people outside the university realize how little time the university (esp. research univerities) expects faculty to actually spend on their teaching: at my school, tenure-track faculty are expected to spend 40% of their time on teaching, 40% of their time on research, and 20% on professional service. So, that means just 16 hours per week on teaching! For people who are dedicated teachers, that is a terrible problem: the teaching load is often something that cannot reasonably be accomplished in just 16 hours per week so, once again, faculty who are dedicated teachers often do a lot of uncompensated teaching work also: if the university is only paying 16 hours per week for you to teach, and you spend more time on it than that, then it is uncompensated work.

For all that I suffer from a lot of job IN-security (since I do not have any guarantee of employment from semester to semester), I much prefer being an instructor to being a tenure-track faculty member (I resigned my job as a tenure-track faculty member precisely in a dispute over teaching). As an instructor, it is my 100% job to teach, and I do not have research or service duties. What a relief!!! So, while I earn only about half of what a tenure-track faculty member earns, I actually do not fall into the trap of doing uncompensated work for my university, which is such a relief for me! I would rather earn less and have my job duties clearly defined than to be put into the kind of trap which so many tenure-trap faculty members find themselves, in the various ways that you and Jason have described.

[Ian Carmichael]

I warm to the fight - but rather than boycott, why not publish alternatively? What would would happen if the machinery of peer review were harnessed to a university website - or an independent group such as the JACT.

If we're working for free writing, editing, and critiquing, why not also publish for free...

And, dare I say it, in the preparation curriculum materials. In many - most ? cases the institutional small print says that any published materials, web-pages, presentations, podcasts etc are the possession of the institution rather than the teacher/tutor/lecturer/instructor. So, If I eschew all that and enshrine bad pedagogy by being a talking head leaving no paper nor digital trail - I can keepmy presentations inviolably mine. If I consign them to some form of permanence, then I can't carry them with me when, or if, I move institutions.

But, if I pre-post my materials publicly - then they are portable?

Anyway, I'll continue to treat my stuff as mine until the thought police arrive exercising force majeur.

Digital samizdat rules!..?

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Ian, I feel so lucky to be living at a time where samizdat doesn't involve trees or typewriter ribbons! I'm not sure how I would even be able to teach my online courses without all these wonderful free publications available online - my Online Bookshelf now has almost 400 full-text online books for my students to use in their work for class!!! :-)
http://delicious.com/onlinecourselady/ebook

The way course materials work at my school is that if I leave, I am supposed to let my university have copies of all my teaching materials so that they can continue to offer my courses after my gone (as if anybody else would want to teach my courses, ha ha) - so, it's not that they say I cannot take them with me, but the policy is that in addition to taking them with me if I should leave, I have to make sure that they continue to have copies, too. Of course, since I put everything online, that's easy!

One of the things I worry about most with course materials is the way that course management systems restrict sharing of materials - I cannot even easily share materials among my own courses! That's why I publish on the open Internet - I sure with the course management system would publish openly; here's a nifty little article which points out very clearly the need for course management systems to facilitate publication online with persistent urls... UNLIKE the course management system at my school which does nothing of the kind, alas!
Open Courses: Free, but Oh So Cheap
(the title's not very helpful; it's a response to an article in Chronicle of Higher Ed: "Open Courses: Free, but Oh, So Costly")