From: Bill Cohen <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2013 18:19:59 -0400

Sandy's points are well-taken, and arise from the voice of
obvious experience.  A skilled editor can bring remarkable
revisions, fleshing-out, and refocusing to some or even many
types of dissertations.

In this age of do-it-yourself book publishing, the advantages
of "a second perspective" and "another pair of eyes" may be
devalued, but that does not mean they have disappeared.

 Bill


On 7/28/13 5:13 PM, LIBLICENSE wrote:
>
> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 19:02:41 -0500
>
> My hesitation about Jim's proposal is that during my 45+ years in
> acquiring books for two university presses, I have had the privilege
> of working with authors of many revised dissertations that turned out
> to be major successes in every way, both in sales and in critical
> reception. Just to mention two among many off the top of my head,
> Susan Okin's WOMEN IN WESTERN POLITICAL THOUGHT and Peter Evans's
> DEPENDENT DEVELOPMENT played critical roles in their respective fields
> of feminist political philosophy and comparative politics and became
> staples in many college classrooms, selling in the tens of thousands
> of copies.  Had the authors been told to shelve their dissertations
> and move on to new work, the world would have been deprived of the
> considerable intellectual value these books brought to their
> respective disciplines. I daresay they would not have been
> "discovered" as UMI products and turned into books if the authors had
> not been encouraged to do so, both by their academic advisors and me
> as an acquiring editor. The latest such example I can give is a
> revised dissertation in the field of history itself, which was awarded
> the top prize of the Latin American Studies Association at its annual
> convention in 2012:
> http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-03769-1.html. I think
> Jim does a disservice to such authors in suggesting that they only
> "lightly" revise their dissertations.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
>
> P.S. Whether the AHA's new policy is well justified or not I do not
> want to address here. The Chronicle will be following up the original
> story with more discussion to come. Stay tuned....
>
>
>
>> From: Jim O'Donnell <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 19:37:58 -0400
>>
>> Academics are buzzing about the American Historical Association's
>> recommendation that history dissertations be eligible at author's
>> choice for an embargo from open internet dissemination for up to six
>> years.  (Text below my sig.)  To one who in my provost days read a lot
>> of tenure dossiers, this seems a one-variable attempt to address a
>> complex problem.  It is essentially the members of the AHA, as senior
>> faculty reviewing junior colleagues, who have created the dependency
>> on the university presses, who have in turn pushed back by insisting
>> on publishing only books that are really worth publishing as books,
>> whatever their former history.
>>
>> Wouldn't we be better served by a system that encouraged people to do
>> good work in graduate school and put it behind them to climb new
>> mountains as quickly as possible?  Instead, we have folks who spend a
>> decade lightly revising a book and then discover that their thirties
>> and half their forties have elapsed in the meantime and somehow fresh
>> ideas and fresh ambition have gotten harder to find.
>>
>> It's probably unrealistic to evoke the days when the dissertation was
>> in fact published -- printed, bound, distributed to libraries, at
>> candidate's expense -- and the scholar could move on to fresh work
>> immediately.  I knew a man, born 1925, who got his PhD at Catholic U.
>> in Washington in about 1960 and was the first rebel who refused to do
>> this and sent his off instead to the newfangled "University
>> Microfilms" (as then was), which had sprung up as the low-cost,
>> high-tech path to swift publication; but access to work on a microfilm
>> in Ann Arbor was cumbersome and rarely achieved.  With vastly easier
>> access, it would be easy to speed up the process dramatically; and
>> greater transparency would put pressure on advisors and students to
>> make better dissertations.
>>
>> Jim O'Donnell
>> Georgetown U.