If I can only summarize the philosophy of the crisis in a fable, then I may not be allowed to do so in the pragmatic elements. What specifically do I know about the ear of the elephant, then?

Higher Education has radically changed since the end of World War II, to the degree that many of it's institutions and practices are judged to be in dire straits. [Lyotard 1984, pp. 3, 37] [Giroux, 1995.] One example is the system of publication which links scholars in different places and times. In the last decade, librarians, academic publishers, and faculty of many disciplines have become convinced that we now face a crisis in the area of scholarly communication. There have been many conjunctures in the history of academia that have received more attention, but few that represent so many tangible long term transitions for the academic endeavor. The crisis developed slowly over the past three decades, and manifests itself in the form of increasingly crippled features of academic communication.

Researchers studying this issue claim that a transition to a digital medium such as the Internet may hold great promise as a remedy for many elements of the crisis in scholarly communication. This paper discusses the issues involved in such a transition by means of the analytical approaches of two prominent scholars of academic transitions: Pierre Bourdieu (as a sociologist) and Jean-François Lyotard (as a communications specialist). Concepts from key monographs of these authors will be utilized in the analysis.

• Access to scholarly publications has become jeopardized due to the rapid cost escalation and exponential proliferation of academic print publications.
• Funding for academic institutions of communication is declining.
• Publication outlets have been curtailed for scholarly work of junior and even senior faculty in specialized disciplines.
• Many scholars must forfeit their intellectual property to commercial publishers in order to be published.

Higher education has been a victim of its own success. In the past fifty years, the number of post-secondary institutions has more than doubled, from roughly 1,600 to 3,400 today. [Lucas, p. xiv.] A typical institution went from a private college with an enrollment of several hundred to a state insitution of tens of thousands. The number and character of publications increased at a geometric rate after World War II [See Cummings, figure 5.1], and even the largest academic libraries were unable to keep up with the volume of scholarly material being produced. [See Cummings, figure 5.6] Rapid cost escalations far in excess of the average rate of inflation were taking place simultaneously. [See Cummings, figure 6.1]

Scholars require extensive access to research collections of journals and monographs as a core element of the academic enterprise. While libraries have tried to compensate through distributed access mechanisms such as inter-library loan, the conclusion of the major studies is clear. Access to scholalry publications has become jeopardized due to the rapid cost escalation and exponential proliferation of academic print publications. [Cummings, 1992] As a result, acquisition rates of university libraries in the past two decadeshave steadily declined. The trends and statistics of reductions in collection building due to these budgetary facts are well documented by studies of the Association of Research Libraries [ARL, 1989] and the American Council of Learned Societies [ACLS, 1990], among others.

Academic funding for institutions of scholarly communication is declining. Library budgets expressed as an average of institutional budgets have been declining for a number of years. [Barbett & Korb, 1997] [See Cummings, figure 3.5] Cuts in subscriptions at academic libraries have severely affected scholarly access to journal articles, especially at smaller institutions. Academically oriented publishing houses have encountered severe market pressures in the past two decades, forcing them to reduce publication of traditional academic research works in favor of more commercial titles, while simultaneously increasing prices dramatically for academic titles. The cumulative impacts of these decisions on academic publishing are well known and have been regularly described in journals such as Scholarly Publishing. University presses are receiving reduced instituional subsidies for specialized scholarly topics and are being hard pressed to produce more commercial titles. [Thatcher, 1997] While the market for monographs on trendy topics is healthy, the scholar seeking to publish original research in a more specialized field is unlikely to make the cost/benefits cut. For these reasons, many senior academics claim that outlets have been curtailed for scholarly work of junior and even senior faculty in specialized disciplines (an example is the provost of the University of Pennsylvania: [Chodorow, 1997]), because the economic viability (and therefore existence) af the low-volume, specialized academic monograph is seriously endangered. The lack of economic viability of specialized scholarly materials is by the admission of academic publishers directly linked to declining library budgets. [Wasserman, 1997] Especially for junior faculty seeking tenure, this results in a variety of detrimental stresses. The phenomenon of prioritizing tenure-pursuit over teaching ("publish or perish") is a frequently castigated result of this situation. [Lucas, pp. 284-287.] More generally, the decline of the specialized monograph leads to the homogenization and trivialization of the literature. This issue will be taken up subsequently in the discussion of Lyotard and the "terror" of performativity in research.

There are many related trends in the changing demographics and economics of higher education that have changed many of the basic assumptions about the clientele and missions of colleges and universities. [Pascarella, 1998] The net effect of the trends is to place increasing pressure on institutions to cut tenured faculty positions in favor of part-time and otherwise non-tenure track instructional staff. [Zimbler, 1997] Whatever else is thought of the institution of tenure, de-emphasizing it has the effect of de-emphasizing the research component of the academic endeavor, and also the associated production of shared research communication for peers. As younger academics become increasing vulnerable to the erosion of tenure and associated job entitlements [Rosenblum, 1997] , there is increased pressure to avoid experimentation in the form of electronic publications, because of potential uncertainty about the contribution of such publications toward the tenure opportunities that remain. [Guernsey, 1997] This issue will be elaborated in discussion of Bourdieu's generations of academics and cultural capital.

Finally, many scholars must forfeit their intellectual property to commercial publishers as a requirement for having their work accepted for publication. [Okerson, 1991] This leads to a vicious cycle of access barriers which potentially ends with the scholar's institution having to pay many times for the scholar to access and use their intellectual work. The scenario runs as follows. First, the university pays for the scholar's salary and research activities directly. Then, when the work is published, the university pays for the library to purchase the journal or monograph, as well as the associated overhead of library staff and infrastructure to seek out these materials. Finally (if copyright requirements are obeyed) the university pays for subsequent reproduction of the scholar's material when being distributed to students. If copyright laws are flaunted, the university may leave itself open to lawsuits from publishers, potentially incurring even more astronomical expenditures. This wasteful (some would say outrageous) circle of expenditures for an intellectual property that the scholar is often willing to give away for free in exchange for recognition by colleagues. [Okerson, 1996]

The problems affecting scholarly communication are by turns daunting, deeply tangled, and discouraging. It is all the more refreshing that there are some hopeful alternatives to traditional print systems aborning; namely the Internet.