What’s wrong with academia
I ‘ll tell you what’s wrong with academia. I just got a letter from ProQuest, trying to sell me three copies of my own dissertation for $125. Their PR people, no dummies, easily anticipated my first question, viz. what on earth would I do with three bound copies of my own dissertation. Turns out, I could keep one copy for “my own use” (viz., doorstop), and give the other two as gifts to “colleagues” or “my family.” An interesting idea: vingt ans après, I could finally get my revenge on the great-aunts who knitted me all those peculiar sweaters when I was small.
Anyway, this amazing 40% discount off of ”regular academic pricing” was apparently already offered to me at the time of filing, but I didn’t take advantage of it—either out of sheer pigheadedness or, as ProQuest charitably suggests, because I was distracted by “the final rush of paperwork and completion of other degree requirements.” Lucky for me, ”opportunity knocks again.”
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Opportunity Knocks Again |
Pricing |
I don’t know why exactly I find this so grotesque. It’s not really that anybody who actually wanted to read my dissertation could just ask me for a Word file, which would not only be “green,” and fully searchable, but frankly I would give them a much better rate (shall we say, dear aunts and colleagues, unlimited lifetime access for $38.50).
No, what I find grotesque is rather that… it’s my own dissertation. I mean, who do they think printed out those four copies on acid-free archival bond paper (a substance not known, materialist readers, for its low price or feathery lightness) and lugged them around the Stanford campus for two hours, looking for the Temporary Registrar’s Office? And now they’re trying to sell it back to me? It brought me to mind of those company stores, that made coal miners write such sad songs.
I loaded sixteen tons and what do I get
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don’t call me cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.
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Chinese coal miner taking a bath (Reuters). |
Tags: academic life, comparative literature, dissertation, Stanford
August 1st, 2008 at 12:56 pm
Elif, this post is hilarious. There is something both brilliant and distinctively academic about the practice of selling you your own work, for a bargain price. Also, ProQuest seems to have found a way to wedge itself into a certain ambivalence that some of us have about our dissertations. What is it, exactly? A process to be completed or an actual thing? If the latter, do I want the thing in my house? Freud’s fort-da game comes to mind, although I suspect I’m badly misusing that analogy. When I quit the academy–only to slink back years later–I didn’t think I would have any need for my dissertation. So the only “copy” I had of it was on a Macintosh floppy disk. Then, upon the aforementioned slinking, I decided I should have a copy, the disk being both unreadable and lost. I ordered a copy from that place in Ann Arbor, and it arrived, a pile of loose pages, in a US Post Office envelope. It remained there unopened until I lost it again.