Having worked both as an academic and a manager at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I find that Craig Offman's piece rings very true. Unfortunately, the situation he describes is characteristic of the way multimedia encyclopedias are produced. Encyclopedias have always been deeply commercial ventures disguised in academic garb, and print encyclopedias were often as rushed and badly managed as Encarta Africana. The digitization of encyclopedias has only increased that trend; and in a period also characterized by a greater reliance on outsourcing and temporary labor and greater attention to marketing, the results have been predictably bad both for people who work on these projects, and for the products. Usually the devotion of serious writers and editors, who don't want their names to be associated with shoddy work and are willing to put in the overtime necessary to do the job right, is the only thing that keeps this work on track. Good products can come out of these efforts, but despite the system, not because of it.

It also comes as no surprise that this style of content production should find its way into the university. Academia has long benefited from skilled, underpaid labor in the form of graduate students; more recently, it has subsidized faculty superstars with underpaid adjuncts. (It's no coincidence that the superstar system was built in the same decade that saw the explosion of adjunct teaching.) Now corporate alliances with universities are giving profit-making ventures access to that pool of talent, but what those on the shop floor will gain from this brave new world is unclear. In simpler times, their low pay was made up for (at least in principle) by career-advancing training in new research techniques, mentorship or co-authorship on scholarly papers. Whether they'll be able to benefit from future efforts to commoditize their intellectual labor -- when universities and "dot coms" begin turning leveraging Web sites into money-making ventures in distance learning, for example -- remains to be seen.

-- Alex Pang
Project Manager, SiliconBase
Stanford University
Stanford, Calif.

Offman writes, "In today's university, academics in the science and technology departments can easily turn a profit from their intellectual work. With the help of a technology licensing office on campus, an academic can become an entrepreneur, often collaborating with a company to distribute his or her invention/discovery in the form of a marketable product."

Offman doesn't cite any examples or other support for the facile argument he makes here -- probably because he is entirely wrong. Employees of a university sign a contract with the university, giving the rights to all inventions and other intellectual property to the university. So academics, especially in the humanities, aren't making any money. Why would they have to rely on corporations for support if they did?

Offman implicitly condemns academics for being remote with his repeated use of the term "ivory tower," yet he also condemns Gates' very public dissemination of knowledge. I wonder if Offman has ever read any of Gates' work, which is highly accessible and interesting, not at all the stuff of the "ivory tower."

If this Web page is supposed to encourage people to think, why does it use such superficial, ranting rhetoric? Why not offer facts and analytic tools rather than cheap and obvious rhetorical strategies?

-- Amy Vondrak
Syracuse, N.Y.

Nothing Personal: No pierced nostril for Barbie
BY AMY REITER
(06/16/99)

Exactly how is Sen. Inhofe responsible for the private, unauthorized behavior of some of his staffers? How does their behavior make him a hypocrite? If he hires a homosexual, does that make him a hypocrite also? According to that view, he must avoid hiring homosexuals in order to be moral.

Actually, we all know why this is being publicized. This story is being used as a club in order to beat Inhofe by those who disagree with him politically -- nothing more.

-- Paul Osborn

Nothing Personal: The nearly nekkid netrepreneur
BY AMY REITER
(06/17/99)

Regarding the "Look out! He's got a fish!" item: One thing which I think we can all agree is really funny is a man assaulting his partner. It's pretty funny when he just uses his fists, but when, in his rage, he gets all inventive -- well, that's for sure going the extra mile. The thing that made this so incredibly hilarious was the way it was accompanied by stories about the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Nancy Richards-Akers at the hands of abusive partners. Genius!

Today's Salon was a class act all the way.

-- Melissa Curley

Drunk like me
BY STEVE BURGESS
(06/16/99)

In Burgess' last paragraph, he goes badly astray. Jack Trimpey's "venom" toward AA is by no means misplaced. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous, countless people have been led down a destructive path whereby their chances for recovery are chained to an arbitrary process that forces them to think about booze constantly.

For example: On the rare occasion I feel tempted to drink, I merely swat the idea away like an annoying fly. A member of AA, on the other hand, must go through an unnecessarily drawn-out process of running the steps through their mind, gnashing their teeth as they wait to get to a private phone, get to such a phone and call their sponsor, endure their sponsor's so-called wisdom and, finally, run off to a meeting. My method takes about 24 seconds; AA's consumes nearly 24 hours. While I'm sure that Burgess' experience was more pleasant, mine was more typical: I faced sanctimonious, smug peer pressure and self-righteous demands that I get a sponsor and "work the steps". Thank God for Jack Trimpey (yes, I'm a Christian, and I still dislike AA) and his egalitarian ideas for rational recovery.

-- Rob Anderson

The great Silicon Valley soap opera
BY JANELLE BROWN
(06/17/99)

Apple did not, in fact, steal the ideas for the Mac from Xerox PARC: They purchased the rights to use them, and they have never denied that PARC is where tools like bit-mapped displays, mice and GUIs were invented.

-- Steve Hull
salon.com | June 24, 1999

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