If we are looking for ways to measure success, I think we need to emphasize the larger health of the culture as a whole. Susan rightly points to places where measurements are possible, such as open access, diversity of digital content, and linkages established and maintained in the community.
I think the note we may want to strike is one of enrichment. I believe that education and research share a common goal of enriching the lives of people. Economic measures can overlap in places with this larger agenda, but are widely used only because they are simpler, not because they carry more meaning or usefulness. "Enrichment" suggests economics without directly invoking it.
Alternative terms that have been used, particularly for research and education in the arts and humanities, include "ennobling" and "uplifting." I hesitate about these because they are metaphors with significant defining others. If there is a nobility then there are peasants. If there are uplifted people then there are people who are not uplifted. But if a culture is enriched then there is a benefit to everyone and not just to selected people.
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This is, I think, a really important point. I don't know whether it's actually easier to understand economic causes and effects (certainly the folks in charge of maintaining economic stability don't seem to be doing very well with that one) than it is to grasp other kinds of phenomena, or whether we just think so because money is so important to our culture that a lot of effort goes into it. Whichever is the case, as you say, economics seem to trump other notions of value by virtue of the apparent ease of quantification. The term "enriching" is an important reminder of what's left out of such ways of framing value.
And yet, I would like to try to trace the connections between scholarship and the arts, both in terms of enrichment and, yes, economically. On the weekend, I was out at the Eden Mills Writers Festival, which I have been attending most years since 1991, and it is a wonderful convergence of writers, readers, academics, public intellectuals, publishers, local food businesses, and locals including kids selling crafts, etc. Presumably most people there are enriched in some way by the process, and those ways probably vary greatly. But I am struck, as someone whose background is in Victorian lit, at the conjunction of practicing and publishing writers with scholars who write about their work.
I'd like to know more about the basics of that relationship: how much do textbook sales help keep books in print? what proportion of sales do they represent? is there a critical mass, so to speak, in terms of the amount of criticism on a particular text that means that it is more likely to get taught? can we link open access to scholarly work to increased profiles for writers? We often hear academics, among others, on the CBC talking about books: do academic blogging, open access criticism, or other forms of online scholarship have similar or different effects than other media?
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