I am not that long out of graduate school, so I well remember hearing that your dissertation should be under contract with a university press if you wanted to get any job interviews. For tenure, we were told, you’d need two books; for promotion to full professor, three or more.
Everyone, we assumed, should plan on producing a book every three or four years. With tens of thousands of professors in the system, that’s a lot of books being written, far more than anyone can read, even in relatively small subfields.
I’m a generalist with a lot of interests. I spend more on books than I do on food. But these days, when I open the latest sale catalog from a major university press, I seldom find more than a few books that I would consider buying, even for 80 percent off.
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” said Samuel Johnson. And I think most professors should accept the truth of that observation, at least in our present time.
You have probably heard the saying, “Promotion committees don’t read books. They weigh them.” As a result, too many of the books published by university presses serve no purpose besides credentialing professors. But for at least 30 years, since the academic job market collapsed in the early 1970s, the relentless drumbeat of the profession has been “publish, publish, publish,” as if we were rowing a Roman trireme. Never mind whether anyone is willing to plunk down cold, hard cash for your mandatory brilliance.
It doesn’t surprise me that editors at university presses rarely respond to e-mail messages. The average inquiry from an aspiring academic author probably merits little more respect than the daily spam e-mails pushing cheap Viagra. And yet the unsolicited proposals keep coming, even as the university press budgets shrink to microscopic proportions of their former selves until they vanish out of the known universe into the world of -- I don’t know -- anti-matter publishing. It surprises me that we don’t hear about academic editors going postal from time to time.
As Lindsey Waters, an editor of Harvard University Press, has long argued, the current system of faculty promotion -- basically outsourcing evaluation to university press editors -- can no longer support itself without big infusions of cash that are not forthcoming, probably ever.
It’s time for most us -- and I am thinking in particular of younger academics -- to abandon the genteel pose of being aloof from the sordid marketplace. We should stop acting as if we were monks, destined for a lifetime of cloistered self-denial. Or romantic poets who die penniless and forgotten in their own time, but whose genius and poignant suffering will, one day, move the world to tears.
If we are going to avoid being blockheads, we are going to have to start writing books that more people will want to buy as something besides remainders.
That transvaluation of values will not be easy to achieve, for there is a strong sense among younger faculty members that stepping outside the academic village is disreputable and dangerous. Publish with a trade press, or worse, a commercial publisher, and you might as well kiss your academic career goodbye. The senior scholars will drive you away with pitchforks and pruning hooks.
Of course, there is a dearth of exemplars who might prove the contrary: that one can enter and build an academic career by writing for the educated mainstream.
I have a colleague who is working on a visual-history project -- her first book -- and, apparently, few university presses can publish it in the kind of format that would do justice to the material. And few such presses are likely to invest much in promoting the book.
But after hearing my colleague give a lecture, a distinguished trade publisher jumped on the project immediately. It seems like an excellent opportunity for my colleague to produce a beautiful book that might reach a wide audience.
Yet my colleague wondered, “Is this respectable?”
At first I guffawed, but perhaps my colleague was right to worry, depending upon her career aspirations. A serious book, rigorously edited, that is read by 10,000 people rather than by 100 -- and that required no subvention -- is often discounted because it was published by a commercial publisher rather than a university press.
As a graduate student, I remember being warned that writing for mainstream audiences would become a red flag in my Google portfolio that I would never be able to escape. And Ph.D.'s who contribute to the blogosphere have been warned by the famous Ivan Tribble to watch their words. In many quarters -- particularly at research universities -- anything but scholarly articles in refereed journals and university press books indicates a lack of seriousness and commitment to the profession. And that attitude often trickles down to many lesser institutions that would be better served by more flexibility with regard to faculty work.
Somehow, speaking to anyone outside of one’s narrow specialty can be construed as a damning breech of academic punctilio. Given the imbalance between job candidates and academic positions, such an infraction can be enough to eliminate one from contention, or at least that is what many academics have come to believe. In a radically imbalanced job market, paranoia runs rampant.
It is comforting to know that professional origanizations such as the Modern Language Association have started to discuss the matter in public, perhaps a decade late. But somehow the discussion reminds me of the legendary MLA resolutions against the nuclear-arms race during the Reagan era. No one who matters is listening, and, even if they are, who will be the first to disarm?
Senior professors and administrators, who published under less-constrained circumstances, are not likely to be sympathetic to the predicament of job candidates, particularly when there are so many of them around. Indeed, most of the faculty members hired in the 1970s and 80s remember all too well that the demands placed on them exceeded the demands placed on professors hired in the 50s and 60s. It’s just human nature to pass on escalating expectations, particularly when economic circumstances permit one to do so.
It’s hard to imagine university presses actually shrinking so much that hiring and promotion standards will change in the next decade, at least not at the research universities, which are all competing with each other for publication tonnage. More likely, reforms, if any, will come so slowly that the economic conditions that prompted them in the first place will have changed yet again, and the result will be some new and, as yet, unimagined form of generational injustice.
No, the book-plus standard for tenure will continue, perhaps sustained by the use of ever-larger subsidies, weaker editing, and smaller print runs, until the publication of most books -- excluding the flagship productions -- with a university press will become of little more significance than having photocopies of your college memoir spiral-bound at Kinko’s.
Yet at the same time, I have hopes that, as the current cohort of new Ph.D.'s moves into positions of responsibility, its members will recognize that there is more than one way to skin a dissertation. Some venues for online publication, for example, will probably become as respectable as print publication within 10 years, provided the screening apparatuses of the leading print journals are transferred mostly intact. Increasingly, scholarly books may be “published” that way as well, with a high level of selectivity associated with certain presses and editors.
But it also seems likely that the reduced costs of online publication -- for both articles and books -- will produce even more unreadable and unprofitable publications than ever before. How will those be graded in the evaluation of faculty portfolios?
The complexities of that future are almost too much to think about, though it’s something I’ll be glad to undertake in lieu of maintaining the status quo. Fortunately, in the meantime, there are other venues for publication besides the academic ones, and they can be very profitable for authors and, I think, for their publishers, their students, and the reputations of their academic institutions.
I think becoming a columnist is the best thing I’ve done with my academic career. I’m sure it has frightened some prospective employers (pseudonymity seldom lasts), but it has also led to talks with agents and publishers. And, finally, it is beginning to lead to contracts to publish books that I think are as serious as my academic work but aimed at a much larger audience.
So far, the experience has been more rewarding and intellectually exciting than most of the crabbed, obscure writing I did when I was trying to prove I was a competent scholar. I find that thinking about a general audience makes me a better teacher than my academic writing ever did. My theory-soaked younger self must have sounded like a man from Mars to most undergraduates.
I no longer feel beholden to the petty rivalries and resentments that characterize academic life. It’s like being born again. Imagine it for yourself: There are people out there -- possibly millions of them -- who are willing to pay for the pleasure of reading your work. Those people could give your ideas, expressed in a single mainstream book, the impact of a lifetime of scholarly writing. You can also earn the posthumous respect of Samuel Johnson, as well the relatives who warned you that professors tend to be paupers. Poverty and obscurity, as the world sees them, are not necessarily signifiers of academic virtue.
My experience as a writer in the last year is something like that moment in the 2004 film, The Village, when a blind teenage girl named Ivy ventures through the terrifying woods that enclose her 19th-century farming community to obtain medicine to save her dying fiancé, Lucius. Eventually, after escaping from a member of her village disguised as a forest monster -- the one she had been warned about all her life -- Ivy reaches a stone wall and climbs it. On the other side, is the modern world: It is the “real world,” from which the elders of her community long ago fled to build a utopia that, in time, became a den of resentments, rivalries, and secrets as bitter as the life from which they had escaped.
After Ivy returned with the medicine, I wonder if she and her husband stayed in the village. Or did Ivy tell Lucius of her discovery, and they went away together to live in the 21st century with all its freedoms and conveniences? Perhaps she kept her secret or passed it along to only a few kindred spirits whom she recognized, the way teachers often do with their students.
Once you realize there’s a world outside the academic village, almost any future seems possible.