One’s Induction into the Ranks of
Regents' Professor of Arizona State University
My grandfather was foreman of the Lincoln (NE) Journal pressroom, at a time when the workers still gossiped about the masculine attire of the Journal's drama critic, Willa Cather. At age 14, my father was an apprentice printer in the newspaper's composing. In 1963, his union, the ITU, struck against the appearance of computers; he never worked another day as a printer. In 1992, when I called up a long manuscript in MS Word and changed the font with a few key strokes, he smiled but said nothing.
I recall clearly the excitement of seeing my name printed at the head of my first published paper in 1962. My first book was set into type in 1968 in Northern Ireland; even then, business went looking for the cheapest labor. My professional life has been preoccupied even more than most with writing, editing, and publishing. Ink was in my blood…what now, plasma?
Two revolutionary changes of the last twenty years have altered the course of my life no less than that of my peers. Small computers and cheap telecommunications represented to me the means to reach wider audiences with the fruits of research. Commercial interests in academic publishing have created what has come to be known as the "serials crisis," namely, a 250% increase in the unit cost of academic journals since 1986. Profits in academic publishing are approaching 50%. U.S. scholars, for the first time, are experiencing what other researchers and students have felt all along. The notion that the public, who pay to have research done in the first place, should pay again to read the results has become not just an irony, but a threat to democratic ideals.
In 1993, I created the first peer-reviewed journal in my field, education policy. Now in its twelfth year, we have published over 300 articles, all of which are free-to-read. We are now publishing in Spanish & Portuguese as well as English. My colleagues and I have created six scholarly journals, all of which subscribe to the principle of "open access." The ASU College of Education is the world's leading source of open access to peer-reviewd research in the field of education; each weekday, nearly 4,000 persons visit its file servers to download articles…students and professors and journalists and teachers and parents from the U.S., of course, but from South America, and Indonesia, and India, and Africa…places where scholarly publications were once an unaffordable luxury.
It is no mistake that things like this happen here. ASU is entrepreneurial in the best sense of the word. ASU cannot be the grand old ivy covered university. Its history is too short. There are few deep ruts to get caught in; we are free to move along new paths. There are many universities where we could not have bucked tradition to work for open access to scholarly research. ASU is not one of them. I owe this university much, and I would have said the same thing before today.
And I owe thanks on this special occasion to many individuals; forgive me if single out only three: Terrence Wiley, my department chairman, managed to convince the Regents' Professor Selection Committee that the medal would not be depreciated if hung around my neck; and I thank David Berliner, my friend and colleague for our 15 years at ASU, whose optimism for public education and whose unshakeable faith that research will find the true facts have repeatedly dispelled my natural cynicism; and finally, Sandy, my wife, a distinction for which they don't award medals. Thank you, dear.
~ 22 January 21, 2004
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