At the 2006 Annual Meeting
by Brenna McLaughlin
Communications Manager, AAUP
The French Quarter looks almost untouched. Bars, restaurants, galleries, and shops are open; there are none of the tell-tale high-water marks that scar much of the rest of New Orleans. Some shops are shuttered, there are some signs promising that this or that local favorite will re-open soon. There is one major difference, though, in the French Quarter since Katrina—the people. There just aren’t that many of them. Certainly, there were tourists, residents, and workers about in mid-June, but by numerous degrees fewer than years past. The Quarter seems oddly quiet (excepting the almost desperate boisterousness of Bourbon Street)—more like a shore town in the off season than the bustling year-round convention city that New Orleans had become. The city, home to close to half a million people before Katrina, is now estimated at a population of around 200,000.
The business-as-usual veneer on New Orleans’ tourism center is almost enough to fool some first-time visitors who haven’t yet gotten a glimpse of the city beyond the Quarter into thinking that NOLA residents and officials are exaggerating the extent of the damage, underselling the extent of the recovery. As I waited for a table at Café Du Monde, for the de rigueur café au lait and beignets, two of these visitors stood behind me. Unhappy at the unexpected delay, one groused, “And they say New Orleans is still struggling.” “Doesn’t look that way to me,” the other agreed. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they may have arrived seconds too late to see why we were queuing. A large party, maybe 30 or more, had crowded in just before me. Not tourists—they wore t-shirts indicating a Presbyterian volunteer group and looked to be taking a deserved break from helping New Orleans in its, yes, continuing struggle to recover from the natural and man-made disasters of 2005.
Location is always an important part of the experience of an AAUP Annual Meeting, and it was, plainly, an extraordinary factor in 2006. When the meeting was originally scheduled to be held in New Orleans, reactions varied from chagrin over the summer bayou heat to reminisces of freewheeling New Orleans conventions past. After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and destroyed the New Orleans that we had known and expected to visit, the board and program committee’s reaction was unanimous: if the hotel was in a condition to host AAUP 2006, we would be there.
Attendance numbers at the meeting were surprisingly unaffected by the decision to stay in New Orleans, although on an individual level it was often a major factor. Some, worried about the city’s strained services, decided to stay home this year; others made coming an unusual priority. And for those who came, the meeting’s mood was uncharacteristically subdued—despite reported excitement about the program and appreciation of the good food and good service that the city is still proud to provide. New Orleans’ reality was inescapable.
At the opening banquet, Jim Amoss, editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, shared his truly gripping story of the daily newspaper’s experience in reporting their city’s disaster. In addition to the recognition its breaking news reporting received, the Times-Picayune rightfully won a Pulitzer service award for its efforts to get news to city residents stranded without access to basic information about what was happening. A tiny detail, mentioned in passing as Amoss concluded his presentation, threw the massive scale of this civic disaster into sharp relief. His home phone service had been restored only the week before—more than nine months after the hurricane.
A small group of AAUP attendees were able to gain a more immediate sense of the disaster’s scope and the significant human and cultural loss. Generously organized and led by Michael Mizell-Nelson, Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Orleans and content coordinator for the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, and Greta Gladney, a graduate student in the UNO history department, 4th-generation New Orleans resident, and post-Katrina activist, a small tour was driven through some of the most devastated neighborhoods in the city, including the Lower Ninth Ward. Scott McLemee, a writer for Inside Higher Ed who took part, later reported in his column, “It was overwhelming—too much to take in.” Another participant posted a shaky video from the trip on YouTube, and even at this distant remove, McLemee’s words ring true.
I was able to take a bus trip run by one of New Orleans’ commercial tour companies; these are not yet permitted through the Lower Ninth Ward. Other areas of the city were equally, if differently, shocking. Neighborhoods such as Gentilly (which experienced the second highest death rate) and Lakeview show at first glance not the utter ruin of the Ninth Ward, but an eerie ghost-town appearance of normality. I found myself looking out to miles of still-standing densely-built low-rise residential blocks. They look, at a glance, just like the city neighborhoods a conference-goer such as myself would have no reason to ever visit, the neighborhoods where many of us live in cities across the country—where people live, work, pack their bags for travel, and expect to come home to.
Focusing my eyes on these streets, though, and looking closely at the houses, I saw the high-water marks, the evidence of rot, the empty windows, and, most frighteningly, the spray-paint markers of search-and-rescue teams. Few people are yet living in these homes, few working from them, and there are too many reminders of those who found they’d packed their bags for good in August 2005.
The tour bus driver, who was also the guide (the company no longer had enough staff to cover absences even with the minimal tour schedule presently running), quietly personalized the trip, pointing out along the way the home which he is slowly rebuilding, the house where he had grown up, the neighborhoods where family and friends no longer live. It was a shocked and sobered assortment of strangers—from California and Tennessee, from Florida and New York—whom he then asked to write a letter to our senators and representatives, to turn a trip of mourning into a kind of mission for recovery.
It is, in the end, a small gesture: to support, with what financial might we can muster, the city’s brutalized tourism and convention economy, and to bear witness back to our own home regions of the conditions our fellow citizens are still living under. But the small gesture of one individual or organization can have real effect when multiplied by all of us—by 600 scholarly publishing representatives, by the 17,000 librarians who came to New Orleans the following week, by 30 Presbyterian volunteers, and even by two impatient, perhaps just not-yet-caffeinated, café patrons.
by Alex Holzman
Books reviewed: From Dissertation to Book by William Germano, and Revising Your Dissertation, edited by Beth Luey
University presses, for all the hullabaloo about changing product mix and presentation these past few years, still look to the scholarly monograph as the bread-and-butter of our existence. Not the greatest revenue source, perhaps, but the form of writing that allows the best combination of some revenue combined with a raison d’être—that we further knowledge and an entire promotion and tenure system by tending to this garden.
A well-known species of monograph is the revised dissertation, viewed by most presses with the same enthusiasm as an annual physical exam. We know it’s good for us, but it still gives us a bit of a chill. Why? Well, dissertations themselves are often too-narrow, over-documented, literature-review-packed bores that have no real beginning, middle, and end, substituting instead the aforesaid review and a collection of chapters whose connective tissue remains severely underdeveloped. The newly-minted PhDs revising these ultra-specialized works often lack the training needed to morph them into what we mean by “book” as we set about building our lists. Graduate programs do a good job of training people in the literature of their fields and in the research methods they employ; they do a lousy job of ensuring that writing skills are a prerequisite for being called a scholar. This is even true, heaven help us, in English departments.
Twenty years ago, in a very different publishing world, we could accept a level of revision that was, shall we say, less than optimal. Today, with the shrinking markets we know so well, and with perhaps an oversupply of manuscripts, we really do need to insist that even first books achieve a level of organization, writing, and felicity that was not previously seen. We as publishers need more than ever to be aware of the needs of a book’s audience and the means of maximizing that readership. This is a good thing—I work with the bias that clearer writing and economy of presentation will improve knowledge—but it leaves the poor souls looking to convert dissertations to books feeling more mystified than ever about the process.
Senior scholars, who generally do want to see their junior colleagues survive and thrive, have taken some action themselves. Most academic departments, at least in the humanities and social sciences, are providing some workshops, brown-bag lunches, etc., in which they provide some guidance on everything from how to approach publishers to how to revise. Presses are helping conduct these sessions on many campuses, trying to save faculty (and themselves) headaches down the line while providing real service to the university community. Learned societies are doing the same at their annual meetings. And now, perhaps not coincidentally, two university presses have offered new volumes on how to go about the actual revising. They are William Germano’s From Dissertation to Book (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Beth Luey’s edited collection, Revising Your Dissertation: Advice from Leading Editors (University of California Press, 2005).
Alert readers will recognize both Luey and Germano as familiar names on the scholarly author-publisher circuit. Luey’s Handbook for Academic Authors is in its fourth edition (Cambridge, 2002), while Germano wrote Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books (Chicago, 2001). Those earlier works are more eclectic and consider a broader range of scholarly communication issues, including revision. These new books zero in on dissertation revision itself, though both also contain useful information about approaching publishers, a process most first-time authors find equally mysterious. But though both offer invaluable advice, Germano has the ultimate advantage of a single author’s point of view. He embraces an ideology, namely that writing is a form of thought and more writing—and revision—can only make for better thought. Though I have some quibbles with this notion, it is a powerful core on which to structure a whole.
This is not to say there’s anything amiss with the Luey book. Indeed, there’s much that’s very good, particularly the inclusion of first-rate chapters on specific areas of scholarship, from humanities (Jennifer Crewe) to social sciences (Peter Dougherty and Charles Myers) to science (Trevor Lipscombe). The last in particular not only details methods for revising a dissertation into an article or articles, but provides a primer on the different types of scientific journals and the kinds of articles they encourage. Luey herself, in the introduction and conclusion, provides the perspective and encouragement of a scholar who’s been through all this herself, but has also lived a career that includes particular expertise in scholarly writing and publishing.
If I have any criticism of this volume, other than the usual ups and downs of any edited book, it’s that the first part, “Rethinking and Revising,” may over-emphasize the possibility of revising for the mythical educated reader. No doubt true in some cases, but I’d argue that the primary audience for the vast majority of revised dissertations is scholarly, ranging from post-doctoral to undergraduate. This changes nothing in terms of advice about clear writing, but it does change assumptions about audience knowledge and purpose. General readers want to learn, yes, but in doing so require a higher degree of entertainment than most first-time authors are able to or should have to provide.
Luey and Germano offer much of the same information on where to publish, the channels of publication available, audience, and market—though Luey, with chapters on reference and professional publishing, really mines every conceivable outlet for a revised dissertation. Germano, enjoying the space provided by a single-author book, is able to develop nuances such as cosmetic versus deep revision, the importance of a table of contents in both planning revision and speaking to audience (also covered, but less developed, in Scott Norton’s interesting contribution to Luey, “Turning Your Dissertation Rightside Out”), but most of all, on writing as a thinking process and revision as a rethinking process. My only caveat is that at some point you can change the words but you can’t really make either the thought or the writing any better. For those inherently nervous about releasing their writing to the world, or at least to a publisher, the notion that more revising means more improvement can provide a justification for never finishing. In fairness, Germano does warn about this.
So to which book the palm? Here I must split the baby and mix the metaphor. They are both fine and any dissertation reviser would do well with either. So too would junior editors who haven’t written dissertations themselves and need to know more about both the nature of the beast and its metamorphosis into publishable book. For those who prefer to dip in and out of such a guide, picking the area that is of particular concern at any moment, Luey’s may be of most use. For those who want to read a complete, but wonderfully brief, introduction to all the issues, Germano is the place to turn. And all of us in scholarly publishing should thank both authors—and their presses—for providing texts that will help us help our authors and potential authors over the hurdle they face in turning dissertations into publishable scholarship.