Hack
A worn-out horse for hire; a jade. A writer hired to produce routine or commercial writing.
Obviously, he wasn't hiring himself out, but let me just speak to what has been said about his work as an academic, because I think it confirms that "worn out horse for hire" and "routine writing" definition.
The committee said it in 'polite' academic terms. Timothy Burke said it a little more brutally. What Dennis means by it, I'm not sure. But I'll tell you what I think it means in academic-speak. But let me preface this by saying this:
1. It's about hackery in academia, which isn't necessarily hackery elsewhere. Thus, one's worked can be judged "good" elsewhere, but not in academia. Consider for example a case of a Cornell psychologist who, IIRC, didn't get tenure (or something) because some of his work is popular and produced in trade paperbacks. [1]
2. Dont' get offended. I'm not dissing anything and I'm not saying that the basic ideas aren't good. Though I will tell you that, if I can stomach reading him, I may have to incorporate this into my analysis of the drawbacks of the lefty thought I mentioned in my last post b/c he sounds like a perfect candidate for it. Thus, in my personal opinion, I'm leaning toward the thought that the theory of social life he deploys does suck. :) It doesn't follow that you have to toss out other valuable insights, only that you might have to toss out the metatheory like dirty pampers and keep the baby.
In academia, you are not thought highly of if you have a really long list of publications and they all basically say the same thing or expand on the same few ideas. In some circles, this IS considered cheating, though it's certainly not going to get you fired or brought up on charges or anything of the sort.
Look at it like this: people do it, and when they do, you will see their applications get shot into the waste bin. I have seen this happen. No one sanctions them, they just don't get hired, they dont' get tenure, they don't get advanced to full professorships, and they don't get citations and citations are a measure of how good you are.
As an aside: One way the dean used to measure the value of each dept was by consultingthe citation index to see how many times other scholars cited the works of scholars in the departments in his school. One scandal of a few years back was exposed when it was revealed how many academics gamed the citation index by, yep!, citing themselves and their previous articles. Thus, one thing I was taught was to watch out for this as a sign of 'hackery'. It was considered kinda like trying to game Google by getting fake links to your web site by posting at lbo a lot and dropping your sig file! :))))
The university, in its report, politely dissed churchill (though I'm interested in other interpretations here) for what is considered academic hackery. While academics don't write for money, they write for proof of their productivity and such productivity wins them things like Full Professorships which are awarded on the basis of productivity and come with extra money.
Thus, what is hackery is riding the same tired old horse only putting on different outfits and saddles to do so. Since this does happen, and far too much, it wasn't something the committee could speak toin the sense of sanctioning him, but they did speak to it, I think, in the sense that they politely ridiculed him in academic speak.
As the American Historical Association says about violations of plagiarism, which is really hard to prove, is that the best way to sanction people who do these things is, well, consider them hacks. Read it, it's kind of hilarious: we'll keep them on board so we can collectively shun them. :)
As a grad student, I once wrote a piece for publication and then slightly modified it for another publication. However, I was told that I couldn't publish them both without MAJOR revisions. If the basic point of each article was the same, it's considered cheating to have them published in both places but used the same work. Why did I do that? Because I'd seen, oh hey, George Ritzer do it! And Arlie Hochschild.
At the American Sociological Meetings, I hadn't noticed that there was a limit on how many papers you could present. I submitted three and was invited to present all three. Whoops! I could only present two, though I could present another as one member of a co-authored paper. I asked the research director to put his name on it as co-author (he hadn't done a thing but read it) so I could present it. Unethical -- surely.
It is, in fact, considered cheating to rework the same essay or book and publish under different titles and pubs, just as it is to present the same conference paper more than once. It's called "padding the CV". It's not technical a violation of a code of ethics in my discpline, but it's considered 'hackery'. Quickly writing of the same damn thing in order to gain from it by padding the CV and thus make yourself look more productive than your peers.
Now, you can get away with it a bit, but if you never do anything more than recirculate five or six basic pieces ofwork, then you're considered a hack. A bit of a fibber. A bit of a faker. Someone who wont' humble rest on his real productive capacity and who tries to game the system to outpace their peers.
The whole point of being a scholar is to be a scholar, which means developing a consistent (not all over the place) body of work that develops a theme, extending them into new areas in a consitent way that has some rationale. it's not to sit around and propound on the same fucking thing over and over again. Like Zizek! :)
I have my own criticisms of this and the problems with it, but I'm putting that aside to answer the question of why you can be a hack in scholarly circles if you work doesn't change much and if you bounce around on all kinds of topics. The point of academia is specialization. Believe me, as someone who once wanted to go for a social science degree instead of a disciplinary based degree and as someone who is inclined to eclecticism anyway, I don't like it. But, there's something to be said for having a deep knowledge of one area. Churchill may have that, but since he delves into a little of this and that .. it's considered hackery. And I have been carefully told by mentors not to follow in the footpath of scholars who do that because I couldn't afford to do that.
So, his writing might make for wonderful polemics and it might makes for marvelous literatures which we fundamentally need to sustain a social movement, but it ain't considered scholarship.
This from the report (below) is academic-speak for "hack". I'm curious what other people familiar with decoding academic-speak think. I could, of course, be all washed up!
Professor Churchill has an atypical but impressive record. His academic writings lie in the interdisciplinary field of American Indian Studies, a branch of ethnic studies. His Curriculum Vitae lists a large number of academic publications: a dozen solely authored books, various co-authored books, more than 20 articles in journals that he says send submissions to reviewers before publishing them, and over 70 essays in collected volumes, college-level textbooks, or other magazines. Professor Churchill has also edited or co-edited books containing essays written by others and published reviews of some 60 books and films. Although there is a good deal of overlap in the issues, ideas, and information presented in his writings, he has nonetheless published an unusually high volume of work. Professor Churchill is one of the most widely read and influential writers in this country who deal with American Indian issues. His books are well known in Indian country as well as on college campuses. His academic publications are nearly all works of synthesis and re-interpretation, drawing upon studies by other scholars, not monographs describing new research 7 based on primary sources. That approach is an appropriate and potentially valuable type of academic work. His writings, which generally include a strong historical component, cover a wide range of topics. Central themes are racism and what he sees as deliberate genocide against Indian people in the United States, but he has also written on how Indians have been presented in films, how Indian children and young people were affected by compulsory boarding schools run by the United States government, and how Indians have resisted ecological damage.
[1] sounds weird, right? Gut instinct is to say, "Oh, the elitist snobs!" But that isn't really what's going on. It's that, in order to condense complex scholarly work into a format that a trade publication will deal with, you often have to eliminate all the little things academics do in order to make it really really clear that their conclusions are tentative, that there is more work to be done, that other people objects and this is why, where you take on your critics in an analysis that, frankly, a lot of regular readers could give a shit about. Not b/c they are dumb, but because such material is _for_ those in the scholarly community who care about the generation of knowledge in that area of study. Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org