Differences & Repetitions

Great news for all of my readers who despise profligate government spending! My buddy Kembrew McLeod published a thought-provoking article in Tuesday’s edition of the Huffington Post called, “A Modest Free Market Proposal for Higher Education Reform.” In it, Kembrew outlines a compelling vision for ending the financial bloat that’s endemic to today’s public universities.

Among his proposals, he calls for corporate sponsorship of classes. Personally I’m looking forward to the day when the syllabus for my Introduction to Media class, which enrolls 250-plus students every fall, can finally say, “brought to you by the Walt Disney Company.” Kembrew also suggests that undergraduates be given the green light to utilize paid-for research assistance companies, which makes a good deal of sense, really, for how else are we to grow the economy in tough financial times? My favorite idea of his, though, is to incentivize cheap graduate student teaching. Soon-to-be PhDs, Kembrew writes, ought to be able to outsource their doctoral dissertations:

By no longer having to conduct original research themselves, graduate students will have more hours to spend in the classroom as adjunct instructors. Let’s do the math. PhD-Dissertations.com charges $17.00 per page, which adds up to $3,400 for a 200-page dissertation (plus, their website states that, “A discount of 10% applies to orders of 75+ pages!”). Although this might seem like a lot of money, consider the fact that most colleges pay adjuncts roughly the same, between $3,000 and $4,000, for each course taught per semester. Therefore, by just adding one extra course to his or her roster, a graduate student can pay for an entire dissertation in less than one academic year–while at the same time serving the university’s undergraduate teaching needs. Once this new generation of scholar/project managers enters the profession, there will be no more need for traditional professors.

Since I’m an overpaid university professor who’s contributing to all the bloat, I’ll happily step aside to let someone with a bachelors or masters degree do my job for, say, seven or eight bucks an hour. But don’t worry about me. I’ll be lapping it up over at PhD-Dissertations.com, where at long last I can put my skills and experience to some real use.

My latest essay, “Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing,” is now out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(1) (March 2010), pp. 3-25. In my opinion, it’s probably the single most important journal essay I’ve published to date. Here’s the abstract:

This essay explores the changing context of academic journal publishing and cultural studies’ envelopment within it. It does so by exploring five major trends affecting scholarly communication today: alienation, proliferation, consolidation, pricing, and digitization. More specifically, it investigates how recent changes in the political economy of academic journal publishing have impinged on cultural studies’ capacity to transmit the knowledge it produces, thereby dampening the field’s political potential. It also reflects on how cultural studies’ alienation from the conditions of its production has resulted in the field’s growing involvement with interests that are at odds with its political proclivities.

Keywords: Cultural Studies; Journal Publishing; Copyright; Open Access; Scholarly Communication

I’m fortunate to have already had the published essay reviewed by Ben Myers and Desiree Rowe, who podcast over at The Critical Lede. You can listen to their thoughtful commentary on “Acknowledged Goods” by clicking here — and be sure to check out their other podcasts while you’re at it!

Since I’m on the topic of the politics of academic knowledge, I’d be remiss not to mention Siva Vaidhyanathan’s amazing piece from the 2009 NEA Almanac of Higher Education, which recently came to my attention courtesy of Michael Zimmer. It’s called “The Googlization of Universities.” I found Siva’s s discussion of bibliometrics — the measurement of bibliographic citations and journal impact — to be particularly intriguing. I wasn’t aware that Google’s PageRank system essentially took its cue from that particular corner of the mathematical universe. The piece also got me thinking more about the idea of “algorithmic culture,” which I’ve blogged about here from time to time and that I hope to expand upon in an essay.

Please shoot me an email if you’d like a copy of “Acknowledged Goods.” Of course, I’d be welcome any feedback you may have about the piece, either here or elsewhere.

Over the last year or so I’ve been thinking a great deal about countercultures, or more specifically, the countercultural legacies of the 1960s. What first prompted me to do so was Fred Turner’s outstanding book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago Press, 2006), which I blogged about here back in January 2008.

Since then I’ve had the good fortune of reading a number of books, all of which explore the persistence of countercultural practices and sensibilities from the 1960s. These include: Preston Shires’ Hippies of the Religious Right: From the Counterculture of Jerry Garcia to the Subculture of Jerry Falwell (Baylor U.P., 2007), a wonderful book that I just finished, about the meteoric rise of evangelical Christianity in the late-20th century and its roots in the 1960s counterculture; and Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels: How Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (Collins Business, 2004), a provocative look into how an anti-establishment, “rebel” ethos has come to pervade what used to be called mass culture.

Most recently I broached Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (University of Chicago Press, 1997). I’d been putting it off for some time, mostly because I know Frank looks unfavorably on cultural studies (my primary intellectual identification). Rightly or not, he claims that cultural studies, in its concern for “resistant” readings and uses of mass cultural artifacts, mis-recognizes the politics of culture. Since the late 1950s, Frank shows, advertisers have been touting not only their own anti-establishment sensibilities but infusing them into their advertising campaigns. Advertising, he argues, is a principal–and unusually effective–site where the critique of mass culture has been waged. Of course, this critique exists not for the sake of tearing down “the system,” as it were, but rather for encouraging ever more consumption vis-à-vis product and consumer differentiation.

Frank may caricature cultural studies, but the larger point he makes is a compelling one. The so-called “creative class” about whom Richard Florida has written so much in recent years has its origins in the late-1950s and early-1960s, when (in the case of Frank’s book) upstart ad men and women lashed out against the stultifying organizational and scientific structures within which they worked.

But what’s also intriguing to me is how it wasn’t simply advertising per se that led the way. Indeed, there was something of a countercultural, “creative revolution” happening in any number of other industries at the same time. Last summer I blogged about Gerard Jones’ history of the comic book industry, Men of Tomorrow. I didn’t realize it then, but Jones tells a story similar to that of Thomas Frank. Before the 1960s or 70s, most comic book companies employed writers and artists whom they treated like hacks. A good deal of the material was formulaic and dictated from on high, and the “creatives” were meant merely to execute that vision. And though I’m less familiar with the music industry, I gather that there’s a similar story to be told there as well. If Tom Hanks’ silly little movie That Thing You Do! (1996) is any indication, record producers of the 1950s pretty much ran the show, subordinating talent to what they knew–or thought they knew–they could package and sell. Is it any surprise that, at the end of the film, the character Jimmy (Jonathan Schaech) breaks from Mr. White’s (Tom Hanks) Playtone record label to pursue a successful solo career making serious rock ‘n roll? He’s the film’s embodiment of the creative revolution that was about to happen in music.

I’m not sure where all this reading is going, honestly. Nevertheless, all of the books I’ve mentioned suggest that we now live, as it were, in the long shadow cast by the 1960s. That makes me wonder: what, if anything, will be the unique contribution of this moment in which we’re now living? How does one create, let alone “rebel,” when the dominant ethos is already “anti-establishment” and throw-out-the-rules “creative?”

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Gerard Jones’ wonderful book called Men of Tomorrow, which is a history of comic books’ “golden age.” Don’t worry–I’m not going to re-review it. The book did get me thinking about another type of publishing, though–academic journal publishing–and the issue of ownership rights to one’s work. That’s what I want to reflect on here.

As Jones shows, the comic book industry’s “golden age” (roughly 1938-1960) really wasn’t all that golden, especially when you look at things from the standpoint of labor. Writers and artists were largely considered to be hacks by comic book publishers, and with rare exceptions, most were paid a pittance. There were a few star writers and artists, of course–people like Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and Batman creator Bob Kane. But stars or not, comic book writers and artists were almost universally compelled to sign away the rights to their words, illustrations, and characters to the publishers who employed them. (Kane was an exception, but only because of a legal loophole.) That was a basic condition of their employment and of the system writ large. Most sufferred terribly a a result. What’s all the more shameful is that comic book publishers often claimed to be making little or no money off of the writers’ and artists’ work when, in fact, they were profiting handsomely from it.

There seem to me some rough parallels between the “golden age” of comic books and contempory academic journal publishing. Most significant here is the issue of ownership rights to one’s work. Nearly all journal publishing contracts stipulate that authors must transfer copyright and other entitlements to the publishers of our articles. We retain some rights, of course, including (thankfully) the right to be identified as the author of the work. We’re also typically allowed to re-use material from our published articles in whatever books we may write, although generally our doing so requires asking for the journal publishers’ permission. But otherwise, like the writers and artists of comic books’ golden age, publication of our journal articles is contingent on publishers stripping us of most of the rights to our creative work.

Now, the old saw usually goes something like this: academic publishing is the pecuniary backwater of the publishing industry. Consequently, scholars must grant journal publishers exclusive rights to publish, license, and otherwise commercially exploit our work. Otherwise, the latter would be unable to cover production costs, must less hope to turn a profit.

This may be true where the journals in question are published by not-for-profit university presses. It’s not the case, however, for large, for-profit journal publishers. Consider this: Taylor & Franics/Informa’s revenue topped £1.1 billion GBP in 2007, an increase of 9% over the preceding year. John Wiley & Sons 2007 merger with Blackwell was a US$1 billion deal. The proposed merger of journal giants Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer (now Cinven), in 1997/19998, would have been a US$9 billion deal had it gone through. These companies and others like them are hardly straped for cash.

So what might we do to improve the situation for academic authors? We might take a cue from the comic book industry. In the 1990s, star writers and illustrators such as Todd McFarlane stopped working for Marvel and DC, the industry majors, and began their own lines. Significantly, they allowed those in their emply to retain rights to the words, pictures, and characters they created. This totally transformed the industry. The new companies almost immediately siphoned off the best talent from Marvel and DC, who were then forced to offer similar deals to writers and artists in order to remain competitive.

I wonder: is something similar possible in academic journal publishing? Is there a way to allow authors to retain most rights to our published work, and perhaps even to profit directly from it? If we could create a journal like that–a successful one–might it not compel the large journal publishers to follow? These are questions I’ll consider in a future blog post.

Google often celebrates holidays and other major events by changing the look of its home page. At Thanksgiving, for example, you’re likely to find pilgrims gallivanting, or perhaps an unfortunate turkey or two running for their lives. Valentine’s Day usually means hearts and all that mushy stuff, St. Patrick’s Day brings shamrocks and leprechauns…you get the drill. Well, today, Google’s usually white background has been turned black in an effort to raise awareness for Earth Hour–an event designed to curb global energy consumption and raise awareness about global climate change.

Let me say that I’m behind the Earth Hour event. It’s a fantastic idea, and I’d love to see its principles institutionalized. (It does make me wonder, though, about the prospects of Earth Day, which is a different event celebrated every April, getting downsized to a mere hour–but that’s a topic for another post.)

However welcome Google’s promotion of Earth Hour may be, I still find it strange for two reasons. First, I read a fascinating article by Ginger Strand called “Keyword: Evil–Google’s Addiction to Cheap Electricity,” which was published in the March 2008 issue of Harper’s. There, she notes how Google’s new server farm, to be built in The Dalles, Oregon, will consume about as much power in a given day as the entire city of Tacoma, Washington. Second, though I’m grateful to Google for plugging Earth Hour, the company gives no indication that it’s planning on unplugging anything itself. It offers this statement instead:

Given our company’s commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.

Much as I respect Google–one of the most heavily-trafficked websites on the internet and host of Differences & Repetitions via Blogger–and its decision to promote Earth Hour, I’m sad to say its doing so seems more like carefully calculated corporate greenwashing than it does a genuine effort to cultivate environmentally sustainable practices. To point out the obvious: turning a computer screen black is not turning it off.

In addition to extinguishing all our lights for an hour, how much more of an impact could we make if we unplugged everything–lamps, toasters, computers, even Google itself (yes, YouTube too)–for an hour?

I was just finishing up some research on Oprah Winfrey for my book when I came across this startling little nugget from Forbes.com: Microsoft maven Bill Gates no longer is the richest person in the world. He’s ceded the throne to über-investor Warren Buffett, after 13 gilded years at the top. Actually, he’s slipped to number three, one notch below telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim Helú.

Before you go shedding any tears over Mr. Gates’ fall from grace (or from the top of the Forbes list, at any rate), be sure to keep this tidbit in mind: the guy’s still worth $58 billion, which is $2 billion more than he was worth this time last year. He’s clearly not hurting.

And for those of you keeping track of the concentration of wealth, here’s some depressing news. According to Forbes.com, there are 1,125 billionaires on the planet whose “total net worth…is $4.4 trillion, up $900 billion from last year.” Yes, that’s right–at a time when real wages are falling for the rest of us, the wealthiest people in the world got about 25% richer. So why not put that in your pipe and smoke it? They sure do.

Courtesy of the Los Angeles Times via Sivacracy, to which I can only feebly respond, “yikes!”

The all-you-can-eat packages of voice, video and Internet services offered by phone and cable companies may be convenient, but they represent a potentially significant threat to people’s privacy.

Take, for example, Time Warner Cable, which has about 2 million customers in Southern California. The company offers a voice-video-Net package called “All the Best” for $89.85 for the first 12 months.

But for anyone who has the wherewithal to read Time Warner’s 3,000-word California privacy policy, you discover that not only does the company have the ability to know what you watch on TV and whom you call, but also that it can track your online activities, including sites you visit and stuff you buy….

You can read more here.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a piece called “The Publishing Industry Strikes Back,” in which I advocated for more open-access publishing in the humanities. There I also talked about a PR front called Prism, whose goal is to undermine open-access journal publishing in medicine and the sciences. Well, as it turns out, this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education included a couple of really interesting reports, both from the front-lines of open-access journal publishing. I figured D&R readers might appreciate an update.

The first of these stories spotlights James D. Jordan, President and Director of Columbia University Press. Last month, he courageously resigned from the Executive Council of the Association of American Publisher’s Professional and Scholarly Publishing division. He did so, notably, because he opposed Prism and its efforts to restrict open-access to publicly funded scientific and medical research. If you’re a Chronicle subscriber (unfortunately, the publication’s not open-access), you can read the whole story here.

The second story ups the ante even more. Other university press officials and the Association for Research Libraries are speaking out publicly about how Prism misrepresents its constituency and makes erroneous claims about the nature of open-access journals. The story also recounts how some open-access supporters are beginning to resign from the editorial boards of journals whose publishers support Prism. Here’s an excerpt:

Reactions to Prism have been widespread and vigorous, with some commentators calling for a boycott of the association. The news provoked one university-press director, Mike Rossner of Rockefeller University Press, to make a public request that a disclaimer be placed on the Prism Web site “indicating that the views presented on the site do not necessarily represent those of all members of the AAP.” Mr. Rossner continued, “We at the Rockefeller University Press strongly disagree with the spin that has been placed on the issue of open access by Prism.”

The Association of Research Libraries sent its members a talking-points memo, dated September 4, that deals with some of the arguments made on the Prism site. The librarians’ group wrote that Prism “repeatedly conflates policies regarding access to federally funded research with hypothesized dire consequences ultimately resulting in the loss of any effective system of scholarly publishing. Many commentators agree that inaccuracies abound in the initiative’s rhetoric.”

One of those commentators, Tom Wilson, took his own advice that “academics should resign from editorial boards of journals published by the supporters of Prism”: He posted an open letter on the Information Research Weblog announcing his resignation from the editorial board of the International Journal of Information Management. Mr. Wilson, a professor emeritus of information technology at the University of Sheffield, in England, was founding editor of that journal. He is also publisher and editor in chief of Information Research, an online, open-access scholarly journal.

There’s much more to the story, of course. In any case, I hope you can see just how much momentum the effort to resist Prism seems to be gaining. What’s especially encouraging, as I think I mentioned last time, is the fact that individuals and groups from across a whole range of fields and professions are joining together to support the cause.

The decisive battle has yet to be won on Capitol Hill, of course, and so the fight’s long from over. But it’s precisely this mobilization of pointed counter-arguments, coupled with a refusal to support publishers who actively oppose open-access, that must persist in the short term.

P.S. I have to give a shout-out once again to my friend Julie Bobay, the Director for Scholarly Communication Initiatives at the IU Libraries, for passing links to these stories on to me.

I mentioned briefly in a post last month that I’ve been working on a piece on cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing. It’s evolving, and I have other projects in line ahead of it, so I haven’t yet had time to give it the polish it deserves.

In the interregnum, I’ve been doing my best to stay on top of trends in this no-longer-so-small corner of the academic publishing universe. (It’s a multi-billion dollar industry, in case you didn’t know.) And I’ve been fortunate in this regard that Julie Bobay, a colleague of mine at IU and Director for Scholarly Communication Initiatives, has put me on her mailing list. A week or so ago she sent me a copy of this Washington Post article, which reports on an organization called Prism. Its job? To fight open-access journal publishing, beginning in medicine and the sciences.

For those who don’t know, open access refers to a range of publishing initiatives, all of which are designed to make knowledge cheaper and more readily available to researchers and the public at large. In some cases publications may be made freely available on a website; in others, they may be placed into sophisticated digital repositories, where they’re not only made accessible, but they’re also massively cross-referenced with other published research. In most cases, open access tends to respect authors’ and users’ rights better than the scholarly publishing industry. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The case for open access is especially–though by no means uniquely–acute where the research in question has been funded by public money. Consider this: a state university (for example) may subsidize a given professor’s research. She or he is then expected to sign away key rights (e.g., copyright, translations rights, electronic publishing rights, terms of access, etc.) to whatever press has agreed to publish journal articles related to this work. The university then will essentially have to buy back that research, typically in the form of a high-priced journal subscription. Now, this isn’t to suggest that traditional academic journal publishers don’t add significant value to the work they produce. They do. But it is an odd situation, don’t you think, when universities and other institutions are expected to pay for their employees’ research on both the front and the back ends?

Prism apparently is a none-too-thinly-veiled public relations front for the Association of American Publishers (AAP), whose aim is to convince scholars, administrators, and especially government officials that cheap and accessible knowledge is a very bad thing. You’ll see from Prism’s website (if you care to go there) that it’s “on message” and fairly, if predictably, astute from a rhetorical perspective. I say “predictably,” because one of its main tropes against open access is the tired old saw, “big government.” One of the organization’s main aims is to convince you, or whoever cares to listen, that open access portends government control, and worse yet censorship, of published research; it also claims that the established publishing industry, and only the established publishing industry, can safeguard the rigorous peer review standards that help give published research its legitimacy.

I won’t refute Prism’s arguments here. That work is already well underway elsewhere. For now, I merely want to point out one significant danger that Prism poses: it has the ear of the US government. The AAP is headed by Pat Schroeder, a former US Congresswoman, who no doubt was hired because of her contacts in Washington. The Prism website also has lots of nifty wizards that make it easy for you, dear reader, to generate emails and letters to send to your Congressional representatives, proclaiming the evils of open access publishing.

I take comfort in the fact that librarians, scientists, doctors, mathematicians, and others outside of the humanities are rather well-organized in opposing Prism and what the organization stands for. It’s my sincere hope that more scholars in the humanities will become aware of the issues, realize they affect us as well, and sign on to this important cause.

…courtesy of Kembrew McLeod and The Chronicle of Higher Education, a sobering “report” on the state of a liberal arts education in an increasingly corporatized university. Enjoy…?

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Chronicle Careers
Monday, January 15, 2007
An Educational Prank

By Kembrew McLeod

In a groundbreaking marketing move, six corporations sponsored my undergraduate course during the fall of 2006. To be more accurate, I should say, with a wink and a nod, that they “sponsored” the course.

There was no contractual exchange of money or services in this faux patronage experiment and, to be honest, some of the businesses didn’t want to be involved in my scheme. (One company representative, sensing the political motivations behind my endeavor, told me via an e-mail message: “You will not use the Disney logos or any connection to the Disney Co. in your class.”)

I began referring to my syllabus as a McSyllabus, and for the duration of the semester my corporately sponsored name was Professor McKembrew McLeod.

I even planned to plaster a tweed sports coat with the logos of my pseudo-sponsors — McDonald’s, MTV, AT&T, Disney, Pfizer, and Sony Music. Kind of like a NASCAR outfit, but with elbow patches. Alas, I never went through with that part of my plan, as there were too many papers to grade and not enough time.

My experiment was a provocation, a quiet protest that escalated near the end of the semester after a contentious move made by the University of Iowa’s Board of Regents. That body had increasingly adopted a top-down management style and embraced a corporate model for the university, and demonstrated that last November by scuttling a 10-month presidential search because it didn’t like the finalists.

The board’s actions inspired me to push my prank even further, and so I personally contacted each regent, telling them about my plan. It came as no surprise when one regent — unaware of my satirical motives — happily endorsed the idea of a corporately sponsored classroom. But more on that later.

I should point out that I write this column from a protected position. As a newly tenured professor, I have strong free-speech rights in the workplace — a right that is weakening across the country as colleges reduce the number of tenure-track professorships. Cutting the workforce and extracting more labor for less compensation may increase the bottom line of corporations, but it’s no way to run a university, for a number of reasons.

Close attention from faculty members was a privilege I enjoyed while attending a midsized state university in Virginia during the early 1990s. That one-on-one interaction broadened my intellectual horizons, and it transformed my life.

But few students I have met at Iowa have had the same experience. My own department, for example, is bursting with more than 1,300 majors, but we have only 12 full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty members. Of course, some of our students do receive the special attention they deserve, but it comes from the goodwill of a faculty whose workweek easily exceeds 40 hours (not to mention our hardworking graduate students, visiting instructors, and office staff members).

The arts and humanities have obviously been hit hard, but even “big money” units have been affected. For instance, the blossoming university-industrial complex has experienced serious consequences in certain areas of basic scientific research, where the sharing of information is becoming less and less free. As universities and their corporate partners place a greater emphasis on developing valuable patented technologies, the norm of openness among scientists has eroded.

That has been widely documented, including in a survey of nearly 2,000 university-based geneticists the results of which were reported in the January 2002 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. According to the survey, a third of the scientists agreed that it was becoming more common in their field to withhold data for financial reasons.

About three years ago I interviewed David J. Skorton, then the president of Iowa, about some of those issues. During our talk Skorton told me that he understood and took seriously the expectation that we should do “the best we can to commercialize technologies developed in the universities for the state’s good.”

“But,” the president quickly added, “my own point of view has been, and will remain, that I am more concerned with freedom of expression than with the commercial imperative.”

I’m sure his philosophy did not sit well with the university’s regents, with whom the president had skirmished over other issues. When he left last year to become president of Cornell University, few people on our campus saw his departure as a coincidence.

Iowa’s presidential searches have always been campus-led affairs, but after Skorton announced his resignation, for the first time in the university’s history, the board appointed a regent as head of the search panel and exercised unprecedented control over the committee’s operations. The regents also appointed the former dean of the business college as Iowa’s interim president, who is quoted in a Q&A on the university’s Web site as saying that “in educational programs and in research and clinical programs, we should seek partnerships, relationships where we’re not bearing all of the costs and we’re sharing the rewards.”

All of which got me thinking, “What would a liberal-arts education look like if McDonald’s underwrote it?”

My project gained a new sense of urgency when the regents terminated the search for Skorton’s replacement. In a cryptic press release, the regents explained that the board “needed candidates who had more experience as leaders who oversaw complex health-sciences operations as well as the myriad of other academic and nonacademic operations of a large university.” The Des Moines Register reported that the final applicant pool did not include an earlier candidate who had been favored by the board president, a candidate with significant ties to the insurance industry.

This disturbing sequence of events prompted me to send the aforementioned e-mail message to each member of Iowa’s board explaining my prank in a straight-faced manner:

“In a class exercise I thought you’d appreciate, we are imagining what it would be like if several corporations sponsored this class. In one assignment, the students will be making an advertisement for one of these ‘clients,’” I wrote, adding, “Because it is so important to organize the university more like a business, I thought you would appreciate and agree with the philosophy that underpins this project.”

I concluded by mock complaining, “I believe that too many professors at the university are out of touch with real-world business practices.”

Because I contacted the regents in the middle of the presidential-search firestorm — and given my prankish history, which is just one Google click away — I worried about two things. Either the regents would (a) see through my sardonic rhetoric and try to have me fired for being a smart aleck, or (b) affirm the e-mail’s core sentiments.

One way or the other, it was a lose-lose proposition.

A few days later, I received an e-mail message from one regent, who cheerfully wrote: “Conceptually, it sounds great. Happy Thanksgiving.” Although this was not a smoking-gun admission — “yes, product placement in the classroom is part of our nefarious plan for the future!” — my suspicions were nevertheless confirmed.

The troubles faced by the University of Iowa (and our nation’s universities, more generally) run deeper than a mere bureaucratic squabble. This episode highlights the systemic problems that emerge when we try to turn the university into “an economic engine for the state,” a term our administrators are fond of using.

Perhaps I should start stitching together that logo-slathered tweed jacket after all.

Kembrew McLeod is an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa. His latest book, Freedom of Expression: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property, will be published this spring by the University of Minnesota Press.