Publish and Perish

My grandfather was born in 1909. Too young for the First World War and too old for the Second, he served in the U.S. Navy between the two. He finished eighth grade before leaving to work, returning to school — through correspondence courses — only in the 1950s. I remember him, though, as an old man prone to quoting Scripture and Shakespeare and singing lines of Handel’s Messiah (interspersed with saltier fare). His brushes with institutional education notwithstanding, he always struck me as self-taught in a way that is now difficult to fathom.

What I remember about him best are his things: his trumpet, with a mute that fascinated me; his tools, including, exotically, a glass cutter and some beekeeping gear; the decorations of his and my grandmother’s small-town New England house — an old wooden relief of an eagle, a framed map of Connecticut. When he died, I inherited — or chose to take — two of these things. One was a worn-looking hammer I still use. The other was a small, lined, leatherette notebook, the first page of which bears the penciled heading, “Thought for the day.”

Right under that line is the first and last entry in the notebook: “Nothing so far.”

Besides being dryly hilarious, the blank notebook is a wonderful monument to writer’s, or maybe thinker’s, block. But it’s also a reminder — that good work, probably good work of any kind but certainly good thinking, can’t be forced or even routinized in a reliable way. That idea may flatter the procrastinator and the academic poseur, but it is still true. And it’s one reason why the reigning model for academic work, in which “productivity” is measured in numbers of articles and citations rather than their qualitative content and influence, seems unlikely to foster genuine scholarly reflection.

The productivity imperative is damaging for academic disciplines, including but by no means limited to the humanities. It is also, I think, a fatal lesson for students to learn. I can’t count the number of times when, as graduate program director, I fielded questions from current or prospective graduate students who assumed not only that publications were a necessary part of completing the Ph.D. but that they might even be necessary to get into a doctoral program in the first place. I started off by telling them: “Of course not!” My first article was based on a seminar paper I gave in my last year of Ph.D. study, and I only thought to submit that because the convenor suggested it. “You’re in graduate school to learn how to do the work that leads to publishable research,” I would tell them, “not to show that you already know it.”

But the questions kept coming, along with stories of contrary advice from colleagues and higher-ups, so I began to wonder whether I should change my tune. And though we in the United States and Canada (where I teach) do not yet have a U.K.-style Research Excellence Framework or equivalent mechanism for counting publications, our university administrations — eagerly abetted by consultants on the hunt for contracts — are beginning to show interest in the use of bibliometric instruments such as the Hirsch index for decisions about tenure and promotion. And then there’s Delhi University’s recent announcement that, yes, peer-reviewed publications will be required of students before they can receive their doctoral degrees. Most North American schools aren’t there (yet), but shouldn’t we be preparing students for where we are headed?

In a word, no.

One of the most embarrassingly revelatory moments in my own graduate career came when, in a first-year European-history seminar at Columbia, Caroline Walker Bynum asked us to describe our research process — all the time-consuming steps from asking a question to finding sources to completing a piece of writing. After we’d described all the stages that seemed obvious to us, she pointed out one omission. We’d left ourselves no time to think.

Simply publishing work may, in fact, not require much deep or extended thinking. (Which is not to say that it’s easy, only that it can be more or less mechanical. Article referees, tell me I’m wrong.) You don’t need to go full Thomas Kuhn to see that a fair amount of academic publishing is of the hole-filling variety. But doing your first truly original work, finding your own way into a field — or between fields — is another matter. That takes the kind of time — and here I mean as much the quality as the quantity of time — that cannot be reduced to a moment in a production process, a slot in a schedule, without being compromised.

I’m not suggesting that a Ph.D. should take a decade to do. The kind of time I’m talking about can — must — be found while reading, while traveling to archives, while struggling with a dissertation that will be one’s first and possibly defining essay in a discipline: These are, after all, what one needs to think about. But I do not believe that finding this time is compatible with worrying incessantly about a publication schedule. If that clock starts ticking on Day 1 of graduate school, as we seem to be telling our students it should, I don’t think the kind of time I’m talking about will ever be found. We tend to speak of students who are “adrift” in programs, rather than progressing crisply from milestone to milestone, as lost. That’s often true, as attrition rates attest. But, to alter the metaphor slightly, some space for “floating” — from one interest, approach, field, language, or purpose to another — is essential. It is often in that unregulated, unmarked, unmeasured space that students come to realize and begin to articulate how their interests and their ideas might touch larger audiences and wider worlds.

As much as it is our job as professors to get our students through our programs, it is also our job to defend the space our students need to become scholars. Passively taking our pedagogical cues from “the way things are going” in the university is an abdication of our unique responsibility to prevent them from going that way. Even if, perhaps especially if, academic jobs are not in most of our students’ futures, we should at least fight to maintain this space or claw some of it back where we can — not least because it is our space as scholars, too.

Ted McCormick is an associate professor of history at Concordia University, in Montreal.