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?
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