Tenure Note

Posted on February 23, 2012 by lindaessig

Jacob Oakley, editor of Stage Directions magazine, asked me to write a comment about tenure and promotion for the Stage Directions blog.  Here is what I wrote:

There has been a lot of discussion recently in higher education administration and so-called education reform circles about tenure, about whether or not it is still necessary, and whether it helps or harms higher education.   Arguments in favor of continuing the tenure system argue that it is necessary to protect academic freedom while arguments against it argue that it is a counter-incentive to innovation, at best, and a protection for underperformers, at worst.  Arts faculty were accepted quite late into the tenure fold and many institutions still have trouble defining the ways in which creative activities are analogous to research in the traditional academic disciplines of sciences, social sciences and humanities.  Thus, the only area in which I think it would be a mistake for arts faculty to be on the vanguard is in reforming the tenure system.  While I think that tenure has protected some underperformers in the arts, arts faculty, including theatre faculty, should not be the first to give up their hard won acceptance into the academic fold.

That having been said, our approach (by “our” here I mean that of  theatre faculty and administrators) to tenure and promotion can be  made more meaningful for the individual faculty members, for the institutions of which they are part, and for the discipline.  Tenure and promotion criteria should not be easier for theatre than for other disciplines.  Allowing faculty at research universities to get tenure based solely on the creative work done on their own campuses does everybody a disservice – most especially the students.  We’ve heard the arguments in favor of doing this: “but scientists get to do their research in a campus lab, our theatres are our labs.”  Yes, but those scientists do not get tenure and promotion unless the results of their research is subjected to peer review and published in national/international journals.  So, yes, the creative work on campus “counts,” but only if it is seen and evaluated by more than just the folks on campus.  Some schools (and no, I won’t name names) have semi-professional theatre companies on campus and contend that the work the faculty does in this affiliated company is equivalent to work done at any professional theater in the country. Um, no.  If all the work a faculty member does is on the campus’s own “professional” company and it is seen only by the local community, receives no evaluation by national or international peers, and does not advance the discipline then tenuring someone on the basis of that work does a disservice to everyone, especially, again, the students.

On the other hand, the campus theatre can be a fertile ground for experimentation, artistic growth, and research.  More faculty and students can be looking at the university stage as a lab.  Rather than perpetuating “the show must go on” mentality endemic to theatre, consider what would happen if the university stage was used to explore new plays? New technology? Or, to paraphrase Chekov, new forms of theatre?  And then, imagine if the work done on these stages was analyzed and written about in the journals of our discipline, from Stage Directions to Theatre Journal.  Then, the work done on university stages would be truly tenure-worthy because it is advancing the discipline and not just maintaining the status quo.

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The Most Important Arts Policy of All

Posted on February 19, 2012 by lindaessig

Arts policy discussions tend to revolve around arts funding, how to articulate the value of the arts, the importance of arts education, building communities through the arts, and the like.  We are so lucky we can be having these conversations.  We are so lucky to not be talking about the most fundamental of arts policies, the right to free speech.  That is, until earlier this month. That’s when some Arizona State Senators proposed SB 1467, which calls for the fining or firing (for a third offense) of any person who teaches in a public classroom who

“engages in speech or conduct that would violate the standards adopted by the federal communications commission concerning obscenity, indecency and profanity if that speech or conduct were broadcast on television or radio.”

These public classrooms include not only K-12, but also community colleges and public universities. I teach at a public university. I take my responsibilities to maintain a respectful and professional learning environment very seriously. Yet, I think this idea is fucking crazy. There is no provision that the speech or conduct would have to occur in the public classroom either, just that it be engaged in by someone who teaches in a public classroom.  As one website put it, teachers would no longer be allowed to have sex.

Universities are supported, conceptually if not financially, by the free exchange of ideas.  When ideas are constrained by limits on speech, research does not happen and creativity does not happen.   I’ll go so far as to say learning does not happen.  The list of classic plays that could not be read aloud would be too long for this blog; the list of contemporary plays even longer.  I would not be allowed to utter the name of a certain play by Stephen Adly Guirgis that had a successful run on Broadway last year.  Let me reiterate:  if this bill passes  I COULD LOSE MY JOB IF IS SAID THE NAME OF THIS PLAY ALOUD.

Is this the Arizona we want?

I want the Arizona Jaime describes, not the one that would allow a student to carry a concealed weapon into my classroom but would fire me for uttering the F word.

[Just in case I need to say it, I am writing this at home, on my own time, and my opinions are solely my own]

Update: Here’s an AP/abcnews story about this. Note that the instigator is a party in the Citizen’s United case. My question, should corporations have a right to free speech when teachers would not?

Update #2: On February 28, 2012, the state senate voted down this and two related bills that would have limited the ability of faculty to teach effectively.

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Guest post: Jaime’s Love Note to Arizona

Posted on February 14, 2012 by lindaessig

*A Love Note for My Home State, On Its Birthday*

Dear Arizona,

A few days ago I drove to Globe to give a presentation at the Cobre Valley Center for the Arts. I left my Phoenix home around 9 on a beautiful, clear Saturday morning. Brilliant sun, crisp air, just me and a Lola coffee and the satellite radio, hurtling eastward on the 60.

I thought of you throughout the drive, there and back. I know it isn’t fashionable to freely express your love for the place you’re from, particularly if you’re from Arizona and paying any kind of attention. But care, I do, and I’d like to tell you why.

I recognize your potential. You seem to have lost sight of it, but with your wide-open skies, miles of road ahead and behind, your independence and determination… you’d do well to remember: with some thoughtful leadership and collective resolve, your best days could very well be in front of you.

You are exquisitely beautiful. So much so, it sometimes astonishes the senses. You are the potent wildflowers on the drive to Fountain Hills, the Verde Valley’s velvety red rocks, the incomparable clean scent of the desert after a rain. Cynics focus only on the vacant strip malls and beige-stucco home-farms that ornament your land like costume jewelry. But you are – you could be! – so much more.

You already possess many of the tools required for advancement and success. You have brilliant and innovative minds, room to experiment, and creativity that pulses like heartbeats through your storied neighborhoods. If you could find the courage within, you could also be lifted by the strength of cultural diversity and the honored traditions of your residents.

It seems there is a powerful disconnect between those who see you as I do, and those who believe your best days have come and gone. Lately and often, the people you choose to associate with… don’t reflect well upon you and don’t seem to have your best interests, or future, at heart. Lately and often, your exploits embarrass me and others like me with roots in your soil.

But I have seen you at your best and know you can be better. And I’d like to help, if I can be useful. Because in truth, I will always feel closest to home within your borders.

With love on your birthday, and blessings for 100 more,

Jaime

Jaime Dempsey is proud to work on behalf of Arizona’s arts and culture sector. The opinions expressed here are solely her own (although I share them)

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John Dewey, Audience Development Expert

Posted on February 6, 2012 by lindaessig

While doing some other research, I came across a reference to John Dewey’s 1934 book “Art as Experience.”  I have been somewhat familiar with Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy for a while.  His views on experiential learning influenced my own thinking about failure and pedagogy, but I hadn’t realized that he had also written on aesthetic philosophy.   His basic premise is that the way art is viewed, for example (and especially) in museums, separates the art from the experience that engendered it and therefore inhibits our understanding and enjoyment of it.  He writes, “Objects that were in the past valid and significant because of their place in the life of a community now function in isolation from the conditions of their origin.  By that fact they are also set apart from common experience, and serve as insignia of taste and certificates of special culture.” He goes on to ask, “Why is it that to multitudes art seems to be an importation into experience from a foreign country and the esthetic to be a synonym for something artificial.”

How can we bring art down from the pedestal, as Dewey describes it, and return it to the lived experience of communities? And why should we?  The answers seems obvious to me but I’ll explain a little bit further.  We should connect art with communities experientially in order to  develop, enrich and diversify audiences, to garner broad-based support and funding for the arts, and to provide richer cultural experiences for all.

I’ll provide an example of how this first can be done. I met this afternoon with the Home in the Desert team.  This is a project that would most likely be described as “community arts,” although in the old days might have been called “outreach” (a rightfully outdated term).  My colleague Rick Mook described what has been going on at a Boys and Girls Club site in central Phoenix where he, a hip-hop choreographer, a spoken word performer, and other guests from the community are working with a couple dozen youth from the neighborhood. The youth and the project leaders walked around the block and collected media: sounds, images, and movement from the desert neighborhood. The choreographer pointed out movement ideas inspired by the approaching sunset and developed a gesture vocabulary with them.  The kids recorded the movements on video. The next night they reviewed the material and the kids took notes of what was most meaningful for them.  Last week they had a spoken word workshop with a guest poet.  The next night they recorded some of the spoken word poetry. In the midst of developing the work they also learned how to use the sound equipment, do the mixing, set up takes, and edit on the fly.   For the last half hour, the kids didn’t need any instruction.  They kids were making art, the artists were making art, and they started from an experiential act of observation in the very neighborhood in which they lived.  In April, they’ll perform the work in front of an audience from their communities.

At (or near) the other end of the socio-economic spectrum is “Sleep No More,” the hit show from Punch Drunk Theatre based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth.  What makes the production unique — and exceedingly popular – is that the performance is most definitely *not* put on a pedestal.  Audience members literally experience it, masked, following performers from room to room, sometimes kissed by them, sometimes startled, sometimes locked out of little rooms and sometimes invited in.  The audience buys tickets, sometimes repeatedly, because it is an EXPERIENCE.  The audience members become a community (despite the masks).  This is not a shameless plug for the production – it definitely has its drawbacks – but rather is another example of EXPERIENTIAL artistic consumption.

For both of these groups, the creators and participants in Home in the Desert and the creators and audience of Sleep No More, the art is not separated from common experience.  It is *lived*.

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When Needs Collide

Posted on January 26, 2012 by lindaessig

I’m using my blogspace to work on something I’ve been circling around in my arts entrepreneurship class the last two weeks.  It’s a large group (40 students), the plurality of whom are film majors, but there are also actors, graphic designers, arts administration majors, musicians, and others.  We’ve been talking about “needs.”  Required reading includes Anne Bogart’s book “and then, you act,” which includes these two fundamental questions: “Who needs this art now?” and “Who needs to make this art now?”

It seems that great art gets made when the answer to these two questions collide – when the deep need to make art collides with a community’s deep need to have art.  But complicating this exercise is that I also have the class read Maslow’s “Theory of Human Motivation.”  This is the article that posits a hierarchy of needs at the base of which is food, followed by safety needs, love needs, esteem needs, and finally the need for self-actualization that drives the artist.  Many students find these two readings to be compatible whereas many others (it’s about evenly split) think that Maslow just isn’t applicable to artists.  As one student wrote, “I need to make art now because it is what I do.”

Interestingly, in a brainstorming exercise today, a lot of the ideas student teams generated involved food: edible art, a flash mob restaurant, dinner art studio (like dinner theatre only with artists painting while you watch), transformer forks, food paint, a culinary art show, edible fashion, and more and more.  (Other ideas included arts-related iphone apps, a variety of performance venues, and teleportation among others.)  Are the students on to something about connecting the arts to our most basic of needs: food?  Movies have already cashed in on another basic human need: sex.  Is food a way in to new audiences?

(Related post: Why I Like Cooking)

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Is There a Problem Problem?

Posted on January 15, 2012 by lindaessig

In a recent posting on artsjournal, Sarah Lutman asserts that the propensity for foundations to ask “What need or problem will be eliminated” leads to a “culture of pathology” that is “especially insidious for the arts.”  Challenging, yes, but not necessarily insidious.  Problem formulation can be seen as an essential element of creativity, especially creativity that leads to innovation. When viewed in this light, one can approach the “What need or problem will be eliminated” question not as a physician, but as an artist.

The question put me in mind of a session I had with my arts entrepreneurship class last week.  I like to explain what it means to take an entrepreneurial approach to  art-making and an artist’s life by means of analogy.  I ask the students to envision themselves walking down a path through a wooded area.  The can look at the path at their feet and stay safely on their present path (carpe diem) or they can look up, forward toward the many future possibilities that lie ahead, choosing the path or paths that they see on the horizon (carpe futurum). Now, let’s say there’s an obstacle on the pathway.  They can look up, they can see the opportunities ahead of them, but there’s a roadblock.  “What should you do?” I ask.  Student one says, “Knock it down!”  Student two shouts, “Go around it!”  Student three says “Climb over it!”

Drawing on some cognitive research from Thomas Ward and others, I explained that problem formulation is itself a form of creativity. Student one conceived of the roadblock as something that needed to be knocked down – this student would invent or create something that knocks stuff down to get past roadblocks.  Student two conceived of the roadblock as part of a larger landscape and would figure out a way to go safely off the path to get around it.  Student three conceived of the roadblock as a vertical problem, something to be climbed over, and so would create a stile, or a ladder, or some other way to get over it to the opportunities on the other side.  This analogy (analogy is another in Ward’s taxonomy of cognitive creative processes) helps students see that before there can be innovation, there is the creative process of identifying the problem.

So, while foundation requests for “a problem” make grant writing hard, they can also help grantwriters focus, and not necessarily on the problem itself, but on the many opportunities that lie on the other side of it.

[“Wooded Path” from glig.com]

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Kerry’s Question

Posted on January 9, 2012 by lindaessig

Kerry Lengel, theatre critic for the Arizona Republic, recently posed the following question to me: “Is the business model for non-profit arts broken? If so, how can it be fixed – or replaced?”  Our phone conversation was focused primarily on nonprofit theatres, although much is generalizable across all arts disciplines.

My full response was no doubt longer than would be useful for his column, so I post it here:

The business model for theatre, like any organizational model, changes and evolves over time.  There was a time before the nonprofit theatre model as we currently know it existed and then, thanks in large part to a significant investment from the Ford Foundation, the regional theatre movement was born.  There was a time when commercial theatrical production developed through a system of “out of town try-outs” (the “town” being New York City), but that system is largely gone, replaced by commercial/nonprofit partnerships, corporate investment, and foreign imports.  That having been said, we’re in a period where the pace of change for nonprofit theatres appears to have been accelerated by economic and political exigencies.

The direct answer, then, is that it is a model that is evolving.  To be financially viable today – as opposed to the 25 years ago – theatres, like all arts organizations, will need to diversify their revenue models in ways that enable them to most effectively meet their mission.  In difficult times like these, we need more mission, not less, and it would be a mistake for an arts organization to allow its mission to drift on the tides of revenue (the “follow the money” syndrome), but by the same token, arts organizations can be more creative and entrepreneurial about the way they generate revenue from a diversity of sources. As with other types of financial portfolios, a funding portfolio that is diversified will likely be more stable, more able to withstand the vicissitudes of the economy, than one that is not.  For some companies, this could mean developing a “with profit” model, where there is a for-profit enterprise designed to fund or supplement the nonprofit one.  It also could mean program expansion to generate revenue from new sources.  When times are tough, the initial reaction is often to cut back, but there are examples both small and large (see Michael Kaiser’s “The Art of the Turnaround” for the latter) of companies expanding in tough times in order to stabilize their revenue streams.

Arts organizations, including theatres, can also ask themselves, “Who are we doing this for?”  Or, “What need are we meeting?”  By being more responsive to the communities around them, arts organizations will be more stable.   Further, by engaging communities through participation rather than just passive viewing, the community will be more likely to support the ongoing existence of an arts organization, because the community will have “skin in the game.”  The passive audience model does need changing. It is simply not engaging enough for the participatory culture of this century.

Personally, I think the current problems go beyond the nonprofit theater business model to an arts ecosystem that is designed to maintain the organizational status quo rather than foster innovation and develop new work.  The concentration of both financial and cultural capital in a few large arts organizations doesn’t necessarily trickle down to artists who are actually making work – especially locally.  I would love to see an ecosystem in which artists are funded directly and innovative arts organizations that are designed to get their work to new audiences are nurtured and incubated.

As a postscript, I recommended “20Under40: Reinventing the Arts and Arts Education for the 21st Century.”  My arts entrepreneurship class is reading the opening essay this week by Brain Newman, “Inventing the Future of the Arts,” in which Newman looks at seven trends affecting the nonprofit arts model. Some of Newman’s seven are reflected in my recommendations above. Paraphrased they are:

  1. Mergers/Downsizing/Partnerships
  2. For profit and with profit – (re)building a culture of enterpreneruship within the nonprofit arts sector rather than imitating corporate cultures
  3. Audience as curator
  4. Participatory culture – offering “experience” not just viewing
  5. Communal conversation
  6. Free stuff that supports artists; but demand for free stuff from artists
  7. “Electracy”

Newman concludes his essay with a directive for the arts with which I wholeheartedly agree: IMAGINATION NECESSARY.

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Shifting Sands

Posted on January 1, 2012 by lindaessig

Happy New Year!  I started Creative Infrastructure one year ago yesterday to enter an ongoing conversation about the infrastructure for art, the arts, artistic creativity, and arts education.  Public policy is one element of that infrastructure, and an area of increasing interest for me. Ian David Moss, on his Createquity blog, published his annual round-up of the top ten arts policy stories of the year.  Like many end of year round-ups, be they of movies, books, or exhibits, this one provides a means to observe trends, confluences, and contradictions.  There seems to be a shifting of sands across the arts funding “landscape” or to extend the metaphor further, the arts funding “desert,” for the funding landscape often feels akin to the parched terrain that surrounds Phoenix.

Looking at Ian’s top 10, there are stories about cuts to federal and state funding and the Arts Council England as well as the annihilation of the Kansas Arts Commission, but also stories about crowd-sourced funding, cultural funding in Singapore and Brazil, and the consortium of funders underwriting the ArtPlace initiative.   It is by looking at the juxtaposition of these two sets of stories that one senses a shift in the sands, a shift away from government or even individual institutional funders and toward more innovative and entrepreneurial means of funding artistic production such as crowds and consortia.

Diversifying the funding opportunities for artists and arts organizations is a good thing.  As with other types of financial portfolios, a funding portfolio that is diversified will likely be more stable, more able to withstand the vicissitudes of the economy, than one that is not.  I fear, as do many, that the sands may shift, as they have in Kansas, to the point where there is no public funding in the portfolio, which would not be – is not — a good thing.  Public funding brings not only money to the portfolio, but cultural and social capital as well (see my earlier post on that topic). When the government invests in artists, in arts institutions, and in arts education, it is making a statement about the importance of the arts to who we are as Americans or Kansans or Phoenicians and as citizens of the world.

Photo: Shifting Sands by EriQueM, TutokeMedia

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How Much Is Too Much?

Posted on December 21, 2011 by lindaessig

The New York Time published an article by Patrick Healy last week about nonprofit theatres mounting commercial productions on Broadway, partnering with commercial producers, or extending runs or remounting hits in order to increase revenue.  Nonprofit theatres have to make revenue.  In the absence of the kind of government support (or even ownership) enjoyed by European theatres, that’s how they fund their missions.  This post isn’t about that.  It’s about a nugget in the middle of the article: Andre Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theatre (currently presenting a commercial production of War Horse) is quoted as saying, “unlike commercial producers, none of us at Lincoln Center Theater are personally making money off of these shows.” The article goes on to report Bishop’s compensation at $482,000, so clearly he is making money, just not directly from the ownership interest a commercial producer would have.

There was a lively twitter conversation about this and other issues raised by the article, so I wanted to see where Bishop’s compensation falls in relation to that of other arts organization executives.  This information is publicly available. (I got mine from the 2009 Form 990 tax filings available from the National Center for Charitable Statistics).  Bishop’s compensation is about 2/3 that of his Lincoln Center neighbor Peter Martens at NYCB but higher than that of the artistic heads of the Roundabout and Manhattan Theatre Club (and lower than that of LCT executive producer Bernie Gersten).  Here it is laid out, along with some others, one large and one small theatre in several other cities.  I acknowledge that the sample size is small and so one can’t draw any statistically significant conclusions:

Company state AD salary ED/MD salary Total expenditures Salary as % of Expenses
LCT NY $487,407 $506,634 $53,786,823 1.85%
MTC NY $336,270 $315,899 $20,037,669 3.25%
Roundabout NY $402,403 $467,718 $54,073,308 1.61%
Public Theatre NY $313,751 $274,364 $21,373,089 2.75%
Arena Stage DC $240,674 $168,268 $14,906,255 2.74%
Woolly Mammoth DC $90,635 $84,335 $3,644,137 4.80%
Guthrie MN $542,144 $229,000 $27,913,555 2.76%
Mixed Blood MN $79,763 $0 $1,113,134 7.17%
CTG CA $398,456 $295,819 $51,854,000 1.34%
Son of Semele CA $10,800 $10,800 $64,169 33.66%
Goodman IL $370,000 $346,000 $18,344,522 3.90%
Redmoon IL $63,366 $41,921 $1,366,809 7.70%
ATC AZ $144,092 $117,230 $6,687,654 3.91%
ATP AZ $78,859 $0 $1,113,791 7.08%

So, I return to Bishop’s statement about not making any money off the commercially successful shows.  He makes A LOT of money, but his and Gersten’s salary combined represent less than 2% of the total expenses of the organization.  The smaller the company, the higher the proportion the AD’s salary is of total expenses.  Would paying Andre Bishop less lead directly to increasing the compensation of, for example, a playwright trying to make ends meet?  Probably not.  But, what if nonprofit companies that make revenue off commercial productions were required to re-grant some portion of that revenue directly to artists to develop new work (altering somewhat Diane Ragsdale’s proposal of a few weeks ago)?  Or were required to re-grant it to small arts organizations in the community?  As the (eco)system stands now, Bishop’s statement to the contrary, the organizational incentive is to produce more commercially viable productions to support the production of….more commercially viable productions.

The three companies producing on Broadway plus Center Theatre Group share not just size in common.  They also earn a higher proportion of their revenue from box office receipts than the other smaller companies.  Yet, they still garner direct public grants and benefit significantly from the tax-exempt status of their (especially real estate) assets.  One could argue (and perhaps with more research I will) that the amount of grant revenue such organizations receive should be capped by either a dollar amount or percentage of total revenue freeing up funding for the smaller companies not only on this very short list but throughout the country.  Or, in order to be eligible for grant revenue, would need to make some programming free, as Mixed Blood has done with its Radical Hospitality program.

Finally, a point I made poorly in 140 characters on twitter: there are market forces at work in setting executive compensation in any sector.  I am not saying that is a good thing or a bad thing, just that these forces exist.  In a world where the head of NYCB makes over $600K and the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art over $800K,  that the head of LCT makes close to $500 doesn’t seem so outlandish.  Unless, of course, you, like me, are one of the 99% making less than $506,553.

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Data Dump

Posted on November 30, 2011 by lindaessig

An interesting discussion developed last week in the arts/theatre blogosphere around the issue of data.  Do we have enough? Do we use it? Should we spend any time looking for more of it? The last was answered with a resounding “No!” by Scott Walters, who threw down a gauntlet of sorts by challenging us to use existing data to change our behaviors, especially when it comes to social justice issues.  Diane Ragsdale made the excellent point that organizations often ignore the implications of data reports that they themselves commissioned. (Be sure to read the comments on both posts from Clayton Lord, an arts data expert.)

Into the middle of this discussion between people who read, use, and respect data, drops Marie Claire.  Yes, Marie Claire, the fashion/lifestyle magazine, on whose website was a “report,” supposedly based on a London School of Economics study that concludes that “People in Britain are most happy when having sex, doing exercise and visiting the theatre.”  The theatre/audience development sector of my twitterverse exploded with ideas  (and lots of jokes) about how the sex-exercise-theatre trifecta could be exploited to boost attendance.  London School of Economics?  There must be data, right?  This would be an extraordinarily good kind of data, one that puts theatre on the same plane as sex — actionable data! I followed the LSE link on the Marie Claire website but could not find the study at all.  I used my university links to research databases and couldn’t find anything there either.  Even without finding the actual research report (if it exists), the study is statistically suspect: only iPhone users who download the app are counted; only Britons; no indications of controls for age, gender, income, etc.

As access to and authorship of  information and data becomes democratized, how will people sort through the good from the bad?  The rigorous from the frivolous? I’ve been thinking lately that with so much information available for free, and resources like Ted.com posting meaningful lectures on line, the university professoriate as we know it will cease to exist in 10-20-50 (pick a number) years. Perhaps the faculty, we in the over-educated and often over-worked meritocracy of the higher education system will need to redefine our role as one of differentiation, of helping people understand that the study from Grantmakers in the Arts is more robust than the one published by Marie Claire.  Perhaps we will become garbage pickers on the trash-heap of data dumped into cyberspace.  Or, perhaps I’m just having a bad day.

As a postscript, I note that there is an analog here to another recent blogosphere/twitterverse conversation about criticism incited by what many, myself included, thought was a rather naïve comment from Michael Kaiser about the “trend” of online popular criticism being “scary.”  Interestingly (at least to me) was that the discussion revolved exclusively around criticism by professional arts journalists versus criticism by the general public as written and read by many on blogs and websites.  Yet, there is serious, theoretically grounded, criticism produced by scholars all the time, but it’s read by the very few.  Perhaps if we could get past the firewall of academic publishing and the tenure and promotion decisions based thereon, more people would read and engage with this work too, and we won’t be relegated to another kind of trash heap.

Computer Garbage Pile from iStockphoto.com/LyaC
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