From Treasure to Trash: The Changing Meaning of Books in the New Social Economy of Higher Education

Abstract

This paper draws on the findings of an autoethnographic study to discuss significant changes in the character of US institutions of higher education in recent decades. The autoethnography incorporates two forms of evidence: first, a dataset generated from the author’s experiences, observations, communications, and interactions over a 40-year career as a college professor in a wide range of academic settings, and second, a specific event that occurred just weeks before the author’s formal retirement from full-time academic employment. The latter event proved to be analytically important as a crystallizing experience for making sense of the larger body of data collected over the author’s academic career. The event serves as a dramatic illustration of profound changes in how various academic constituencies have come to define the meaning and value of academic books. The paper proposes that the changing meaning of books among key academic actors can be viewed as an important signifier of broader social-economic trends in higher education in the postwar era.