It seems to have worked, anyway. There's a story about the end of L'affair de Open Access on today's Chronicle of Higher Education website. Everything seems to have been handled quickly, through channels, though of course I'd like to think that the e-mails and blogs about it helped nudge Iowa's administration along a little bit.
Okay, so it doesn't have the same ring as "the thrilla in Manila," but it'll do. The University of Iowa's ill-considered (by which I mean, bone-headed) decision to digitize and post on the Internet the entire contents of the theses of their graduating students is causing a mini-firestorm in the blogosphere and beyond. You can read about in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Huffington Post, as well as in blogs by Seth Abramson (a student poet at Iowa who is also—worse luck for the university—a lawyer) and my former student at Iowa, Sugi. And you can read what I've already said about it by scrolling down or by going here and here. Kembrew McLeod, the good professor of communications at Iowa who, along with Loren Glass, is fighting this new policy, has written a couple of posts about it, which you can read here and here.
I haven't heard anything publically from the faculty of the Writers' Workshop, but I'm hoping that they're working behind the scenes to change the minds of the folks at the Iowa Graduate College. The former director, the late, great Frank Conroy, was a difficult, complicated man, but he was also a supremely pragmatic and efficient problem-solver, and fiercely protective of the Workshop. If this policy had been instituted on his watch, he would have picked up the phone within minutes and called the dean of the graduate school and the president of the university, and the thing would have been rescinded before lunch.
Kembrew McLeod has sent out this update on the University of Iowa's plan, in partnership with Google, to scan all of the university's dissertations, including creative ones, and make their full content available for free on the Internet. Turns out there's good news and bad news.
The good news is that there appears to be no plan to digitize past dissertations, so those of us who were worried that our copyrighted work was going to be made freely available on the Net can calm down and stop worrying. If you really have a burning desire to read the early draft of my first novel, you'll still have to go to Iowa City to do it.
The bad news is that the university is apparently not backing down on its plan to require upcoming graduates to sign away the publication rights of their theses. While I'm now personally off the hook, this still leaves current students (and potentially all subsequent graduating classes) in the jackpot. So perhaps it might help the folks responsible for this new policy to consider the following: if I were an ambitious young writer trying to decide which MFA program to apply for, I might think twice, or even three or four times about applying to a school that would steal the copyright of all the work I did for two years. And as a graduate of the Writers' Workshop, a published novelist, and a sometime creative writing teacher who writes his fair share of letters of recommendation, I'm certainly going to let anybody who asks for a recommendation to Iowa know that they may have to sign away their most valuable right as an artist in order to attend. If this policy stands, I'm inclined to steer people away from Iowa entirely.
And I don't want to stir the pot or anything, but where's the Writers' Workshop stand in all this? Right now, as far as I can tell, the fight against this policy is being led by Loren Glass of the Nonfiction Writing Program. Certainly folks in the fiction and poetry workshops have as much to lose as all the other writers at Iowa. Might I gently suggest that the director of the workshop weigh in on this subject?
Here's something alarming, at least for writers who graduated (like I did) from one of the various University of Iowa writing programs: like a lot of universities, Iowa has cut a deal with Google to publish online, for free, the contents of all its dissertations. Starting this semester, all graduate students who are writing dissertations or theses are going to be required to sign away permission to post their work, in its entirety, on the Internet, through Google's ad-driven Print program. Right now this applies only to new graduates, who are required to sign off on a form when they submit the first drafts of their theses. (This is a process known to grad students everywhere as "first submission," which has a kind of ominous ring to it now, under the circumstances.) But apparently the plan is to publish all the theses in the Iowa library eventually, including the work of everyone who ever graduated from the Writers' Workshop. You can read all about it in an open letter from Kembrew McLeod, an associate professor of communication studies at Iowa, who has kindly given me permission to post it.
I can understand that for those who are writing or have written scholarly dissertations, this may not be a bad thing, but for those of us who graduated from the Writers' Workshop or one of the other creative writing programs at Iowa, it's pretty infuriating. In my own case, my Iowa thesis is an early version of my first novel, The Wild Colonial Boy. That early version is called Strayed Away, and it's roughly 95 percent the same as the published version, which (I'd like the University of Iowa and Google to note) is under copyright, still in print, and available for sale.
But while this ill-advised plan is bad enough for those of us who have already published our theses, it could be a disaster for those who are still trying to publish theirs. It may have a chilling effect on editors, who may wonder why they should pay to publish something (a novel, a story, a play, whatever) that people can read online, for free. And there's also the fact that some folks may not want their early work broadcast to all four corners of the globe. Some may, of course, but the point is, it ought to be a choice, not a graduation requirement. Things are hard enough for creative writers without taking control of our own work out of our hands. Hey, Google: whatever happened to "don't be evil"?
It's also true that hard copies of all of Iowa's graduation theses are publically available in the graduate library (except for a few famous ones, like Flannery O'Connor's, which are kept under lock and key in the special collection). I don't have a problem with that, just as I don't have a problem with the fact that people can read my books for free in public libraries. I don't even have a problem with Google or Amazon allowing readers to see a few pages from each of my books. I have even given away one of my own stories, for free, on this website. But the point is, it's my work, to do with as I see fit. For a university—and not just any university, but the home of the Writers' Workshop!—to allow copyrighted creative work—which is hard enough to market as it is—to be disseminated, in its entirety, around the world, for free, is way beyond the pale. If Iowa takes itself seriously as "the writing university," then it needs to treat its writers, both its current students and its alumni, with a lot more respect than this.
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