(First a brief disclaimer. Generally speaking I like the MLA, I think its core mission, to advocate for languages and literacy education is an important one. And for those who don’t know my PhD is actually in English, so I feel a certain affinity for the scholars there. And recently the MLA has made a turn to promote what I feel are important issues to in the field, like open access journals. Indeed, I think Rosemary Feal and Kathleen Fitzpatrick (new head of scholarly communications) deserve a lot of credit for taking the MLA in the right direction, but . . . .)
Open-Washing
The Modern Language Association released the Job Information List last week (known as the JIL) , but it is probably more accurate to say they released the database. The term list here refers to the bygone era of analog job lists and publications; now job seekers log onto a website, and view jobs posted by the MLA. Except they didn’t really open up access to the database, what they did was allow those with MLA membership to access the database. In other words if you have a membership or a member of an institution which has a membership you can see the list, and if not, well no job database for you. Just to be clear this isn’t to post jobs, this is merely to see the jobs. In other words the database is paid access.
Last year the MLA claimed that the job list would be open access, as in available to anyone, so to some the fact that accessing the database still required a subscription seemed problematic. Later Rosemary Feal, the executive director, explained that the database was still restricted access, but that anyone could receive access to the .pdf copies of the list, published twice this semester (once in Oct, once in Dec.) So, in short the database is closed, but a published version of the database is available to the public. The MLA website says, “printable PDF files of the JIL are available free of charge on the website.” What that section doesn’t mention is that those are not updated as frequently nor available at the same date as the online list. And given the current competitive job market, the ability to access this list in a timely manner is crucial.
What ensued was a heated discussion between myself (and many others who I will let add themselves to this list if they want) on Twitter and Facebook about this policy. To us it seemed an unfair policy (why lock down the list) and a disingenuous claim to state that the list was open (when in fact only a limited version is being made available to the public)-this in my mind is know as “open washing.”
So, I am going to call bullshit on this one. This list is not open and MLA’s policy of maintaining a restricted access to the database is unethical (and they know it). Why? Let me explain.
All About the Benjamins
The MLA claims that access to the database is a service which it provides its members. If you join, or your host institution joins you will be given access. In the analog days of job hunting this somewhat makes sense. There was a cost to distributing the list, to printing it an mailing it and getting it in the hands of anyone who wanted it, jobseeker, curious academic, member of the press, faculty members etc. But now given the affordances of the digital network the cost of distribution is trivial, and while not zero is pretty darn close (bandwidth does cost).
So why does the MLA still restrict access. The answer is pretty simple: money. One has to pay both to get a job listed and to access the list. Why? The rational seems pretty clear to me. If the MLA opened up the list, i.e. didn’t require one to be a member to access the list, the number of member institutions would go down. Presumably there are a lot of institutions which would cancel their membership if the list were free. The subscription rates here are confusing, and a bit complicated as the relationship to the ADE and the ADFL make it even messier. But on the about the JIL page you can read about the policies. Looking at the recent 990 though it is pretty clear that membership and subscription to the JIL is a pretty large chunk of income for the MLA. (It’s not clear to me how much of the income is subscription and how much membership. I am not a forensic accountant and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but the numbers are large see 4a-4c.)
Clearly the motivation here is for the MLA to make money both by insuring that those who use the list to post a job, and that graduate programs that use the list to help students get placed pay for access. But it also is pretty clear to me that they make more money off the list than it costs them to run it. In other words they are using the list to leverage institutional buy-in. The list serves as a motivation for an institution to join the MLA and support its efforts.
Before we go any further let me say again that I support the MLA. I think it has a worthy mission, that it does a lot of good work as an advocacy group on behalf of professors (see the role it played it resisting Foreign Language Cut Backs). And indeed in the job market the MLA probably plays a good regulatory role, setting norms of behavior that are in the best interests of the candidates (for example institutions have to agree to a certain set of standards and behaviors to use the MLA). So the MLA clearly provides a service to the community. But that doesn’t mean that the ability to access the list is a service that job seekers ought to pay for.
The MLA wants to claim that the list is a service provided to members, join the MLA and this is one of the benefits. But that’s not at all what is going on here. Instead the MLA has set itself up as the primary knowledge broker in the trafficking of information about jobs. What the MLA has is the place that job listers post because it is the place that job seekers (at least in MLA fields) go to find jobs. And because it has this important informational resource of the job list it is able to use it to leverage institutional support (AKA make graduate institutes who want to help students find jobs pay for access and/or membership). This isn’t a service, this is holding information hostage.
To see how this is the case imagine the MLA job list went poof tomorrow, as in completely disappeared, as in wipe the site off the internet, burn all the print editions, the JIL is no more. What long term effect would this have on job seekers? None. Why? Because the jobs listings would move elsewhere, The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, HigherEdJobs, heck even Monster.com. All places where job listers have to pay but job seekers would have free access. In other words to a large degree job seekers would be better off if the list just disappeared. Consider also how other professional organizations such as the American Historical Association and the American Mathematical Association provide free access to the list for job seekers, only charging to list a job.
Why then is the MLA locking down this knowledge? Indeed the MLA recently has made moves to open access knowledge, giving authors open access rights over articles published in the MLA. So it is odd then that the MLA would chose to lock down information they didn’t even produce. In this case the job ads are all authored by institutions, the MLA merely curates the database. What is particularly vexing about this situation is as the cost of distribution has gone down the price of access has gone up. Clearly the MLA makes more money than it spends on this list, it is using the list to fund operations, using its position and control over the list to force other institutions to pay the rates it dictates both to list jobs(fine with me) and to access (a far more spurious endeavor).
I get it, the MLA is invested in preserving the current job ecosystem where it serves as the broker, and collects on both sides, being a knowledge cartel is a good racket. But that doesn’t make it ethical or justifiable.
So when you raise this, what is the response of the MLA? Well they will claim that everyone who needs access has access. But as many have pointed out, there are hosts of contingent faculty, faculty who have been away from the market, who aren’t fresh out of grad school, who might not have such easy access. It isn’t precisely clear from the MLAs site that one is supposed to be able to access the job list via one’s graduate institution into perpetuity. Or the MLA will say that they will get access to anyone who needs it. But this also isn’t clear. Why not display a button, icon, or text that says “don’t have access, click here.” That would let job seekers without access fill out a form and gain access, sponsored by the MLA. The MLA is counting on the idea that graduate institutions will provide access to everyone, which is clearly not happening. For years there has been a sort of informal trading among individuals, where those with access share with those who don’t have it.
But more to the point is it is ridiculous to on the one hand require paid registration, and then on the other hand say everyone has access. Paid access is by definition a gate keeping function meant to restrict access. The logical fallacy here is large enough to drive a truck full of rhetoric professors through. Either everyone has access, or the MLA gatekeepers the list. Right now they are acting as gatekeepers even if they want to claim that everyone has access. (P.S. Doesn’t the fact that the MLA describes the .pdf list published in Oct & Dec as “open” serve as an admission that they recognize that the online database is not open?)
I realize the MLA’s business model is based (in part) on profiting from this list, but revenue is not an excuse to act unethically. But even more the MLA is missing an opportunity here. A list which is open to all job seekers is far more valuable in the long run than one that is closed. If you are a job lister you want your job to be published to the widest possible audience. An open list with a larger viewership is more valuable to those listing positions, and as they realize this they are likely to move to posting the jobs in places that aren’t locked. If you were a department and only had the financial means to post the job in one place, would it be in a list with limited viewership or one with open access? And increasingly job openings are becoming open by proxy, as places like the AcademicJobWiki or social media are used to share jobs, nearly all jobs are listed on the home institutions website. So, what the MLA does is curate these jobs, and if someone else can do this for better, for cheaper, and provide access to more jobseekers the MLA is rapidly going to be obsolesced. And if the MLA ceases to be the place where job seekers go, and hence job listers go they will lose leverage over recommended hiring practices etc. (a place they are providing a service).
A Better Way Forward
From a strategic point of view it makes more sense to play the long game here and open up the list, serving as the aggregator for all English jobs. Charge job listers, not seekers to have the job listed. Open up the database, heck even make an API so others can use the data. Imagine what could be done, what job seekers could do: Create a mash-up of the data with google maps so you could see ads by geographic location, or someone could write a program that would allow you to look for jobs as an academic couple (jobs in nearby geographic areas), something Inside Higher Education already does.
Let me re-iterate, a business model is not justification for closing access, not merely because this is an outmoded model likely to lose purchase in the coming years, but because it is a model that often hurts the most marginalized of our community. Academic knowledge exchange is changing, and with it should change our professional practices, and advocacy institutions. No one understood this better than the MLA when they hired Kathleen Fitzpatrick to be the director of scholarly communications. Kathleen is most famous for a call to perform digital scholarship to leverage the digital to alter our institutional practices lest we face obsolescence. Which I think many would agree is what is going on here with the job list.
(Copied from a Facebook Discussion on Scott Eric Kaufman’s Page):
Note: Subsequent to this discussion, a group of english academics launched mlajobleaks.com, which makes the job list available to anyone. Let me say that although I have been accused of being the mastermind behind this project I am not. While I might know the parties involved, and might even have provided “material support.” I shouldn’t be given credit (or blame) for this. However I encourage all the parties involved there, and hope that the list continues to be publicly available.
The whole situation points to how difficult it can be to inaugurate change. Not only does MLA hold some kind of inexplicable monopoly on job postings (which benefits no one but the MLA), it also has a bizzaro monopoly on job interviews, which also benefits no one. Everyone goes to MLA to conduct these interviews. Let’s say it costs an average of $1500 to go (flight, hotel, registration, meals, etc.) and you have four people interviewing 16 candidates. The interview process has cost $30K. Now, it’s true that most candidates interview in multiple places, but it’s still costing around $10K to run an interview.
Cost of doing the same interviews on Skype? hmmm. Now I realize there is some argument for the benefit of FTF, but how much is that benefit worth. The ones who are hurt most by this are graduate students of course. They are the ones who make decisions like “I am going to wait to go on the job market until next year because I can’t afford to make multiple trips to MLA.”
The damned job list could be replaced with a wiki tomorrow–just post your job ad on the wiki. Ensure authenticity by linking to the same posting on your university’s HR website. Voila, no more need for the MLA to charge everyone for being the information bottleneck.
I was going to make the same point that Alex makes vis a vis the costs of the JIL vs. the costs of the conference itself for both interviewers and interviewees, especially all those years that we were forced to compete with holiday travelers for both plane seats and hotel rooms. The list is the tip of a very lucrative iceberg that has supported the MLA for a long time.
I wanted to second your comments about opening up the job list database, which for all intents & purposes is the same (inc. the crappy interface) that they used in the mid-90s. A much richer set of metadata about the jobs could be gathered by MLA (and made available to searchers) if the arbitrary scarcity of the print list is set aside and MLA were to take their curative obligation seriously.
Thanks for this post!
Two quick thoughts: besides a wiki option (and maybe this will come out of the mlajobleaks site), how about craigslist or something like that? Let’s not forget that it really wasn’t the availability of news and information that sunk local newspapers; rather, it was the end of classified ads as a result of craigslist. A free and very powerful web site completely sunk the business model of small to medium-sized town newspapers.
Second, I’ve been on several searches in the last 6 or so years and we have done all the screening with either the phone or with skype. It’s not as robust as a face to face MLA interview, but given that the cost of skype is effectively zero it just makes no sense to do anything else.
So if Dave’s analysis of MLA’s business model is close to right– that is, if MLA really is making a significant amount of its money from the JIL and people interviewing at the conference– then it seems to me that the MLA is likely toast. And no amount of current progressive thinking in relation to things like digital humanities is going to change that.
So much to say. So little feeling like saying any of it. Are there no female academic bloggers covering this topic? Why are y’all the only ones in my feeds? (Hm, what does that say about the vehemence being put into it?) Sigh…
First, I am extremely uncomfortable anytime anyone asks ONE person to stand in as the savior of any field. I don’t know how Kathleen feels about this, but, jesus, give the girl some room to breath. She’s working her ass off over there, and she’s only been there a year!
Second, shit don’t happen overnight, people. Yes, I think the JIL should be open. Yes, I think the metadata suggestions that Collin makes are excellent ideas (if totally scary for some schools to think about implementing). But who’s gonna build a db capable of that? And how quickly? This is, as we all like to hypothesize, a monolithic organization. They’re not ignoring us. I bet they’re already having meetings about it. (Or are planning to in the new year. After all, they ain’t gonna change it overnight in the middle of job season. That’d be even stupider. They HAVE to solve the membership issue.)
And what part of the JIL budget is going to pay for the JIL assistant? Cuz you know there’s one (or more) person(s) who are the PEOPLE curating your badly written job ads. Add metadata to that, and who makes sure it’s all put in correctly? At least until the schools are forced to do it themselves? Bandwidth and “delivery” are not the only expenses.
and, for the love of god, why is this whole topic making me so ANGRY?!?
Cheryl,
First let me re-iterate that I respect Kathleen and Rosemary a great deal, I think they both do a lot of great work. In fact that’s why I start the post that way. For me personally Kathleen’s scholarship has been immensely important, and I don’t mean this as an attack on any one person. And I don’t think one person should stand in as the savior of the field. Indeed, the MLA responds to its members (often) so that if the members asked for this at the meeting it might help to push the list to open up. And that’s one of the motivations for the post here, to draw attention to the issue to persuade people this is an issue that needs fixing.
It’s true that shit doesn’t happen overnight, if the MLA came out today and said, we plan to move to a totally open list in two years, I think that would be a good thing. But they haven’t instead what has happened is a sort of Open-Washing which I could argue was worse than the prior situation. So how quickly should this happen, my preference would be for speed, but we could quibble about these details later, for now let’s just go with getting a plan in place.
The evidence here is pretty clear, the decision to close the JIL is a monetary driven one, not a principle driven one, so lets start by being honest about that.
In terms of the technical details you raise here, it would be relatively trivial to reformat the database of jobs to work in a way that let other users query the base. A simple database structure and API. I am serious when I say this would only take a month. No I don’t think it is free, but I do think whatever the MLA charges organizations to post would more than pay for this type of transformation. Ideally one would rewrite the database in a way that would make it cheaper than the current model to run, at least in terms of person hours needed to keep it up.
I think the point you raise about the gender dynamics here is a fair one, why is it that most of the people speaking up about this are men. I’ll offer one explanation (among many that are probably true), because of the sexism of the academy there are more men in positions of power who feel comfortable speaking up, and to raise this issue I think one has to feel relatively secure in job prospects and in their institution, something because of both machismoness and sexism of the institution is likely to adhere to men. I will say that when I write about this I often get a host of emails, or DMs, or otherwise non-public responses which thank me for raising this issue, and those messages of support are pretty gender diverse, but also from people who say they don’t feel comfortable being as up front and yes as “agressive” as I am being here.
Finally I’ll go back to the zero point for me on this, the reason it makes me so ANGRY. This is totally a business decision by the MLA, but when asked about this I haven’t seen anyone speaking for the MLA who will admit this (although Kathleen came really close in that facebook discussion) instead its always framed as a question of “serving” members. That’s when I call BS, this policy hurts members and hurts some of our most marginalized members, and to me that is worth getting upset and raising a discussion about.
First of all, I don’t think this issue is about Kathleen Fitzpatrick or Rosemary Feal. Dave makes a point of indicating that they’ve both done good work. However I don’t know enough about MLA’s org chart (thankfully) to know how a decision of the JIL would be made, so I wouldn’t be pointing at any particular individuals within MLA as bearing responsibility for making this change. I don’t think Dave is either.
I can’t imagine that there would be any great technical hurdle in making the current JIL public, so that’s a bureaucratic issue.
As far as changing the way the database operates (as Collin suggests on his blog), I would imagine the biggest hurdle would be overcoming the garbage in, garbage out of the users/departments submitting the ads. In fact, there might be a kind of disturbing effect in shifting our idea of the job list from a pile of text to a dataset. We’ve probably all sat in department meetings where faculty quibble over particular word choices (as if the applicants really care). Turning that little word-smithed work of art into a series of data points probably won’t sit well with the ethos of the MLA membership. It’s like a distant reading/close reading debate, only this time there’s actually something at stake.
As for the gender issue. I don’t know who else is or isn’t discussing this particular topic. I don’t think the fact that there are five people commenting on a blog post and only one is a woman can really tell us anything about how the larger field might respond to this issue. So maybe it is a gendered issue, but that’s not clear from this one web page.
As someone who managed years ago to find their way to a job using the MLA list (on paper!) during what seemed, by the standards of those early 1990′s days a tough year, I can affirm that these days are far far tougher. Many of my students, friends and colleagues who are searching today face much steeper odds. And I agree it is an absolute crime for the MLA to restrict access to its job listings; the potential employers pay, and that ought to be enough — it surely is in most professions. True, via ADE and other means many grad students have access — so why not open it all the way? I myself feel the MLA is a useless, complacent institution which I left years ago — what it really is is a combination of “Fantasy Island” for the tenured or tenure-tracked, along with a bizarro version of project runway for the job seekers — it serves few useful purposes in this present academic world.
Guys,
As I mentioned on Steve Krause’s (or someone’s) FB feed a few days ago, the MLA conference has changed a LOT in the last three years. A LOT. So, when Steve said he hates (not his word, I’m sure, but his sentiment) the MLA and hasn’t been in 15 years and won’t ever go, my response is: Whoa. Wait a sec. This org, this convention, IS actually changing. And is changing more quickly than most academic organizations! So, ya know, Because We Have Always Hated MLA is, well, a rather old-school, traditional, ivory tower view.
Anyone who has access to my FB feed can see my thoughts on this matter. But my security settings are not wide open for a reason. (Because some of my colleagues once inadvertently used something I posted on FB as a way to put a scare on my tenure case.) Certain kinds of privacy are important to me, such as people not screenshotting my Comments and using them in a totally wide open public forum without my permission. Open washing, you say? Hmph.
Remember: I agree with the end-game here, that the JIL should be open and more usable. But your ways of going about that remind me of, well, me. (Hell, I didn’t win the Troublemaker award for nothing. But I also didn’t win it by ONLY being a troublemaker. You gotta DO something too.) Raise a ruckus. But acknowledge that the answers are not simple, the situation is complex, and your ruckus will be more heard.
Whatev. My two-bit advice into the ether. I look forward to seeing y’all at MLA
[which, btw, I am paying for out of my own pocket, in a year I'm on 50% pay, because I work for an affiliate org and am required to be there. Sucks ass, but I'll attend the DH sessions and learn some shit.] Maybe we can arm-wrestle over beers.
Wow, I’m impressed I managed to use only ONE emoticon in that whole comment. Good job, Cheryl!
There are two separate but related discussions here, and I think it is worth having both, but recognizing them as separate is important. First is the issue of the job list, second is the issue of the conference. I am willing to talk about improving the conference, but overall I am with Cheryl on this one that the conference is good (although I agree with Alex that there are ways to make it better, primarily through thinking about separating the conference from the job hunt, but that’s a longer conversation). I don’t think my post says I hate the MLA, and have always hated the MLA, in fact I think it says quite the opposite.
Which is just a way of saying that my critique here is limited to the issue of the job list. I frequently attend MLA, and will probably continue to do so.
And as a point of reference the screen capture is used here as a quotational method. That is it was more rhetorically effective to have the photo, not the typed out quotes. Anything posted here was not part of a private conversation (believe me there is lots from private conversations I would like to use here), everything posted here is publicly available. So, I don’t think that critique is very fair.
Dave, just to clarify (not that it matters that much), but my comment about MLA haters was referring to Russell’s post regarding the general sentiment by a lot of people who haven’t been in a decade but still think the conference sucks.
As to the screenshot, here’s a Professional Tip of the Day (the kind of post I make regularly on my private FB account to help potential authors see how editors think):
When considering citing a conversation from a sometimes-open/sometimes-closed social networking site, the most ethical option is to always ask permission of the people involved.
And a follow-up PToD: Editors aren’t the only ones with shit lists.
I know, I’m on a few myself.
Sincerely,
Cheryl.