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 Educationand 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minutes and called the dean of the graduate school and the president of the university, and the thing would have been rescinded before lunch.
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Cultwriter
In which I mostly write about books, movies, and TV. An all-purpose spoiler alert: Sometimes I will talk about these works on the assumption that the reader's already read or seen them, so if you haven't, be forewarned.
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