Publish. Perish?

During the September 2011 dissertation deposit period—my first as Acting Chief Librarian at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center (CUNY)—I found my inbox visited by a humanities faculty email expressing anxieties about my institution’s requirement that graduating doctoral students upload a PDF of their dissertations to ProQuest Electronic Thesis Depository. I traced my colleagues’ anxieties to warnings reported by other academics on various listservs. For example, English professor and academic career advisor Kathryn Hume posted a blog in August 2011 entitled “The Perils of Publishing Your Dissertation Online.” She baldly warns: “You could ruin your chances of getting tenure if your thesis is freely available.” ¹ Hume’s blog cites American literature Professor Leonard Cassuto’s similar concerns where he advises in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Don’t make your dissertation available online. Book editors seem unanimous on that point for obvious reasons. Many university libraries routinely add dissertations to their electronic holdings. If yours does, then opt out. If your thesis is already online, then have it taken down. Information may want to be free, as the earliest hacker generation first avowed, but if it’s free, then you can’t expect a publisher to pay for it, even in a later version.” ² These warnings are born, of course, through historical experience with academic review for tenure and promotion. At the same time, the concerns presume a self-evident and uniform truth. This is to say, Hume and Cassuto echo longstanding sensibilities associated with the arbitration of academic authorship and institutional protocols, specifically those related to scholarly publishing and academic review.