Why Are We Hiding University Research from the Church?

A few months ago, Mike Cope referred me to a book that broke new ground regarding deacons: Diakonia: Re-Interpreting the Ancient Sources by John Collins.

A quick search of Amazon turned up two pages where the book is sold.

The first page listed the book for sale at $33 and also offered to rent the book for $29. Seriously.

The other page listed the same book for sale at $80 by a publisher who has surely sold zero copies of that book on Amazon.

How very odd — until you realize that the second retailer sells in the academic market. Oh … and book rentals are for students at universities. You see, academia has nothing to do with the free market.

It’s a good book, I’m sure. It’s a 337-page paperback that appeals to a very narrow market segment. I mean, how many people really want to read 337 pages about a single Greek word?

And so … why so expensive? And why not available on Kindle? I mean, why force me to wait days for shipping when the publisher could make the same net money selling it for less electronically? Well, it’s published by the Oxford University Press — and academic publishers have little interest in the popular market. They’re all about selling to university libraries.

I next went looking for a 20-page article summarizing Collins’ work, by Paula Gooder, only to find that the publisher wants $30 for just the article. Seriously??

I can buy N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church — one of the most influential works of theology in the last 10 years — for $3.99 on Kindle and $16.29 in hardback. It’s a much more influential and important book, much better written, has much more content, and is in far greater demand. So who repealed the laws of economics?

Here’s how I’ve got it figured —

* In the “popular” book market, prices are determined by supply and demand. Moreover, outside of the academic “publish or perish” world, many scholars write theology for the sake of the church. And so they make their works readily available — either at fair market prices or for free. After all, the goal of writing theology is to better the church.

* In the academic world (“world” not “market”) the goal is either to gain tenure or to impress fellow academicians. I mean, if the goal were to benefit the church, these materials would be priced where someone might actually buy them. Indeed, even if the goal were to make a profit by selling to church members, the materials would be priced at their real value. But they’re actually priced far above real value. Why would a rational person do such a thing? Why price so that no one outside of academia would buy your book?

Well, who buys academic journals and books about a single Greek word? University libraries. And how do you persuade university libraries to pay lots of money for your journal or book? Well, you grossly overprice it to the outside market and offer the university a “discount.”

As George Monbiot at The Guardian has revealed,

The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen, Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930.

I am, of course, just guessing, but I can think of no reason to grossly overprice periodicals, articles, and books to the general public except to give university librarians the impression that they are getting a bargain.

And so, the university libraries pay too much for these materials, thinking they’re getting a deal. The electronic versions of the periodicals and articles are then made available to students and professors for “free” (actually bought with overly high tuition and overly low salaries) under contracts that make the electronic versions of these materials unavailable to anyone else.

Journals now consume 65% of university libraries’ budgets! The publishers have done quite well for themselves. The publishers can have profit margins of 36%! After all, the professors gladly give them free articles, and peer-review professors gladly donate free services, all so that their work product will be hidden behind a price-wall from all but a privileged few in academia.

Hence, the many thousands of scholarly articles about God and the Bible written by professors each year are published in obscure journals only available to those in the academy.

Who paid for this research? Who pays the salaries of the professors? Students, donors (many of which are churches), and as to state institutions, taxpayers. Why should tuition and donated dollars be used to enrich publishers at the expense of the church at large?

For Christian universities, with an expressly stated mission to serve the church, supported by church members through tuition and donations, it is plainly anti-missional to give their work product away to a publishing industry that makes the materials outrageously expensive to the church. Give me one argument that it’s missional for nonprofit institutions to give their knowledge about God to publishers who make access to those material unaffordable to nearly all churches and church members.

As was recently explained by Brad King, a professor at Ball State University —

In the Academy, professors traditionally are expected to do research and then publish that research in one of a number of peer-reviewed journals.

A growing number of faculty, including myself, have begun to reject that road to tenure.

The reason: the academic publishing system is built around a 1-2 year publishing process that requires the best and brightest minds to turn over all of their intellectual property without any compensation for that work.

Only the best and brightest minds in academia would be dumb enough to do that.

I mean, if the goal of theology is to better the church, and if you’re writing articles that would benefit the church, then the articles should be made as available as possible to the church. And this means placed on the Internet for free or for a nominal price. (I give my books away via the Internet under exactly this philosophy.) Certainly, the pricing should reflect free market economics, not a tariff on university library budgets.

On the other hand, if you’re trying to drive a wedge between the Christian universities and the church at large, so that the universities and the churches that support them are as disconnected as possible, then the universities should keep their work product out of the hands of the church at large — making it ever harder for the regular church member and his preacher and his elders to understand what’s going at the universities they used to support.

Right? I mean, what could be more self-destructive than concealing the work product of the universities from their supporters — unless, of course, you’re writing articles you wish to hide. And in some universities, I think the appeal of this publishing model is exactly that — the churches and elders and Bible class teachers and members don’t see the low view of the Bible being taught at the schools they support. (This is largely not a Church of Christ problem, but it’s a real problem.)

And so here’s my proposal —

* The professors of Bible, theology, mission, homiletics, and all related fields should never, ever publish an article in a traditional journal — because it’s contrary to the mission of the university and the very purpose of doing theology to do so — and, much more importantly, because it harms Christ’s church to hide truths about his word and his church from the church at large.

* Work with sister institutions to create an easily searched and indexed website to publish peer-reviewed articles on the Internet. Make the information available for free (or not much) to all comers. (Post ads if you wish. There no sin in making a profit — so long as you do so consistently with Christian principles. I bet the university’s development office would pay enough for a prominent ad to cover the entire cost of the site.)

There are missionaries across the globe, living on starvation wages, who need your work product to be better at their jobs and that there are preachers desperate for a deeper understanding of God’s word who can’t afford a comprehensive library. Your articles would help them do their jobs better.

I mean, if your work has no value to the church, publish wherever suits you. But if your work matters, get it into the hands of the people who support your university by making donations and by sending students to your school. Do theology for the church, not for the academy and certainly not for the publishers.

* As to articles previously published, the moment the journal no longer has exclusive publication rights, post the articles to the free site.

* If you are a university president, don’t wait for the professors to change their old habits voluntarily. Make this university policy. It’s your job to make certain that your employees act consistently with both the university’s mission and Christian principles.

I’m sure your mission statement is entirely inconsistent with concealing your work product from most of the Christian church. Here’s Abilene Christian’s mission statement:

The mission of Abilene Christian University is to educate students for Christian service and leadership throughout the world.  This mission is achieved through: 

• Exemplary teaching, offered by a faculty of Christian scholars, that inspires a commitment to learning;
• Significant research, grounded in the university’s disciplines of study, that informs issues of importance to the academy, church, and society;
• Meaningful service to society, the academic disciplines, the university, and the church, expressed in various ways, by all segments of the Abilene Christian University community.

I have immense respect for ACU and I’m not accusing them of anything at all. To my knowledge, they’ve done nothing inconsistent with what I’ve just written. Rather, I’m saying that the typical Christian university mission statement acknowledges the university’s obligation to the church at large, and if their professors’ research is hidden behind a cost barrier, the mission isn’t being accomplished.

If nothing else, the universities should publish their own periodicals and keep the profits in house. It wouldn’t be hard to do. I mean, either benefit the churches or benefit your university, but don’t just throw money away.

(It really upsets me thinking of all the tuition preaching students pay and debt they have to incur to take a job that’s typically underpaid or even part time. Take the money and use it to give scholarships to preaching students. Please. The universities are subsidizing the wrong people and the wrong mission.)

Get together with like-minded institutions, cancel your theological periodicals, publish all new materials for free or for very little, and take the millions you save and give scholarships to preaching students. (And just imagine the good publicity you’ll get for being a trendsetter and leader in this way.)

* Start a project to publish all theological articles that are no longer in copyright. Maybe you can get Google to pay for it.

You might even work with a major Internet outlet to create a single, easily found and searched portal for your research. Google Scholar comes to mind, but Yahoo might be excited to help, too.

Or maybe a Bible software company like Logos, Accordance, or BibleWorks would assist in order to make these materials available as part of their software offerings. They could charge far, far less than the publishing houses and make a nice profit, and then your research would be indexed by Bible verse to be easily found and used.

I mean, there are many models that would work much better for all involved — except the publishers.

Last point: the federal government decided a few years ago that medical research conducted with tax dollars (which is nearly all of it) must be available to the general public for free. And that decision has done nothing but good for the medical field. Rather than wasting money buying periodical subscriptions, the money now goes to research and education. And, to my way of thinking, theology is far more important than medicine.