A Duke Journal (Self Indulgence Alert)

I spent my first full day at Duke today, working in Special Collections at Duke's Perkins Library on my John Hope Franklin Grant. So far so good -- technically I applied to work on South Africa in the 1980s but really I am looking at several collections related to a handful of topics on which I am working, including bus boycotts; my book on sport, race, and politics; and my comparative bus boycotts project.

As always happens with research, the things I assumed I'd find have proven disappointing but the things I assumed would occupy a passing glance have proven invaluable. No matter what happens with the digitalization of archives I will always believe that nothing compares to digging through the boxes. Those fools who talk about how we MUST make higher education more efficient have never been in an archives and have never sat in a seminar. Education and scholarship are oftentimes by their very nature inefficient, and that's a good thing.

Duke will always hold a place in my heart. This was the first school to recruit me seriously to run (well, jump) track, and while Williams won out for a host of reasons, when I wandered Duke's campus for a while I certainly knew that I could have spent four years here and have been happy. And although he is a giant douchebag, the Thunderstick went to Duke, and despite my better judgment, he is one of my best friends and when he was a senior and I was at UNCC there were a few drunken weekends on this campus. In fact the last two days likely represents the longest sustained period of sobriety I have ever spent at Duke. And to think, I have another week here.

Duke Bound (Self Indulgence Alert)

Tomorrow I'm off to spend ten days in the Triangle area of North Carolina. I have a travel grant from the John Hope Franklin Research Center at Duke University and I'll be conducting research starting Friday and will be giving a talk next week (details to come).

Insight Into a Failing Business Model

If you want some sense of the absurdity of the current pricing model of scholarly journals you need look no further than a recent email I received from Taylor and Francis after I inquired about buying an issue of one of their journals:

The single issue price for 'Soccer and Society,' Issue Numbers 1-2 is:

Institutional Rate: $200

Personal Rate:$60

Yes, you read that correctly. For one issue (and yes, it appears to be a "double issue," but seriously now) of a journal of which you have probably never heard (and that I was only vaguely aware existed) they want to charge an individual $60. I can live with higher institutional rates, though journals have skyrocketed those costs as well, passing the expense on to rich institutions, yes, but also pricing less rich institutions -- which is to say, the vast majority of institutions -- out of the market.

And I guess this pricing model is an ingenious idea because Routledge has actually turned the double issue into a book. And is selling it for $125. Because apparently they want no one reading their journals and books. Cunning.

So Can I Root For Duke Now? (Self-Indulgence Alert)

Looks like I'll be spending a bit of time at Duke's John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture. In the mid-90s I went to Duke a few times to visit the Thunderstick, and before that Duke was the biggest name school athletically to recruit me for track, so I've always had a soft spot for what might be America's most loathed university (college basketball edition.)

Burning Scholarship

When I saw this story, about a Columbia University historian who lost a decade's worth of research to student radicals in the 1968 uprisings at that campus I experienced pangs of what can only be called sympathetic pain. For all of the legitimacy of protest in the 1960s, some of the worst and most indulgent excesses of the late years of that decade seriously undermined the legitimate claims.

Impact: Factor

For those of you in academia, and especially in the humanities, you will find this Stefan Collini article in the Times Literary Supplement on the ways in which research is being assessed in the United Kingdom particularly important.