I‘m convinced that it’s not a good idea to advise newly minted scholars to revise their dissertations into first books. Doing so is an unwise career move and a poor financial decision—a paltry return on a substantial investment of time and effort.
Publishers will continue to publish revised dissertations that address broad topics, contribute new knowledge, are well written, and will sell. Increasingly, however, those will be the exceptions. Perhaps this not-so-good news could be turned to an advantage, especially if graduate students are urged early in the writing process to accept the fact that their dissertations should remain just that.
Recent changes at universities and libraries are having a startlingly negative impact on the fate of monographs in general and on revised dissertations in particular. Several factors are in play.
First, the value of revised dissertations in decisions on promotion and tenure is diminishing. We know that universities are making tenure more difficult to obtain by demanding more publications and awarding tenure to fewer faculty members. That higher bar increases the investment of time and effort required to revise a dissertation, as well as the competition to publish the resulting monograph. At the same time, publishers are less likely to buy monographs, because libraries are buying fewer of them.
Part of the reason for that is the so-called serials crisis. Ironically, much of the weakened demand for revised dissertations began not with monographs themselves but with the sharply rising prices of periodicals in the STEM fields. These high prices have affected the very existence of scholarly monographs since the late 1980s. The Association of Research Libraries has reported that monograph expenditures remained essentially flat for the previous 30 years (prices rose, but unit sales did not). But the cost of serials—chiefly those STEM periodicals—rose more than 400 percent over the same period and have sucked up funds from libraries’ acquisitions budgets at the expense of the monograph.
The dissertation should be a stage of the educational journey, not
to be retraced.
Another factor is universities’ changing attitudes toward libraries. An article published this year in Library Journal caught many people’s attention because it amounted to an assault on a presumed tenet of tenure at a major institution. The administration at the University of Saskatchewan had decided to “reconfigure” its seven libraries by cutting them down to three. A dean spoke out against that decision and was shown the door. An uproar ensued. The rehiring and subsequent return to the faculty ranks of the dean, and the resignation of the provost who had been behind the debacle, left unclear whether the plan to shutter the four branch libraries was still in play.
Libraries everywhere are under increasing scrutiny and pressure to adapt and be more campus-relevant. According to Saskatchewan’s acting dean of libraries, Ken Ladd, in that same article, “The vision is to free up some of the stack space and repurpose it into new things that are needed to support teaching, learning and research on campus.”
On many campuses, relocating books to off-site storage facilities has become commonplace and is the most practical solution to the decline in book use and the costs of maintaining a print collection. Without shelf space, it’s hard to collect books. And even with most publishers trying to provide e-versions of their books, the multiplicity of platforms, devices, delivery mechanisms, tools, and packages—and researchers’ general dissatisfaction with e-books—has made e-book collections a poor alternative. Particularly given the increasing interest in “patron-driven acquisitions” of e-books—purchases made only when it is clear that someone wants a book—attention to collecting books in any form, digital or otherwise, seems to be waning.
As far back as the 1990s, the costs of shelving books have pressured libraries to cut monograph purchases. Anecdotally, publishers lament, “We used to be able to print and sell 1,000 cloth monographs; now we’re lucky if we sell 250.” Additional factors, like exploding interlibrary-loan rates and emerging policies governing shared collections further minimize the likelihood that monograph purchases will rebound. Perhaps more than anything else, the urgency to satisfy new users’ expectations that everything be digital is discouraging libraries from collecting print or even e-books in the traditional, build-a-collection sense.
That trend shows no sign of reversal. The University of Utah’s associate dean of libraries, Rick Anderson, doesn’t sugarcoat his view of print monographs when he states that “university presses all too often publish books that no one needs to use or wants to read.” Insults like that, whether or not based on fact, become credos for libraries that are running out of shelf space and money while being pressured to keep people coming through their doors. The fundamental mission of academic libraries has shifted away from building scholarly book collections, and the trends suggest that this recalibration of the library’s mission will be permanent.
There’s a bright side to the dismal prospects of revised dissertations’ becoming books: the possibility of finishing a Ph.D. sooner rather than later. The current median time of nine years to complete a humanities degree (according to a recent report from the Modern Language Association) is far too long, especially in a field where only 60 percent of Ph.D.’s find jobs in academe.
Measuring the cost-benefit ratio in any time-to-degree calculation should include the tendency of graduate students to regard the dissertation as a book, a mistake inadvertently fostered by their advisers who probably revised their own dissertations into books. Advisees may also imagine an audience and impact for their work that far exceed the reality of the six committee members who may (or may not) read their dissertations.
Graduate students thus persist in writing what they regard as a book, and so they overinvest their time and energy.
Of course, anything is possible. Landmark, game-changing dissertations have been written, but the odds that one will change the course of a scholarly conversation are inordinately low. The payoff of the dissertation is the degree, not the dissertation itself. So counseling advisees to complete their degrees sooner rather than later rebalances the role of the dissertation in the life of an academic career.
It may seem counterintuitive to advise students against revising a dissertation when the demand to publish, for a job or for promotion or tenure, has never been greater. But the time and money spent to remain in graduate school probably won’t offset any “gain” in having conceived of the dissertation as the basis of a first book, especially in today’s publishing climate.
A better alternative may be a peer-reviewed journal article derived from that dissertation. The value of such an article might carry as much weight in one’s career as a book, and with the increasing devaluation of the revised dissertation as an item to be collected, there’s little sense in revising it. Besides, universities and academic societies are beginning to emphasize employment for Ph.D.’s outside of the traditional tenure-track route. If new Ph.D.’s get jobs outside of academe, the time and energy spent writing a dissertation with a view toward revising it later are potentially wasted.
A few months ago, Daniel Smail, chairman of Harvard’s history department, organized a panel on the future of the history Ph.D. The panel comprised Robert Townsend, director of the Washington office of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Caroline Winterer, director of the Stanford Humanities Center; and Robert Darnton, Harvard’s librarian and a cultural historian. In the course of the conversation, as reported by Ann Hall, director of communications at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Darnton called for radical change. For example, the profession should consider cutting the average time to a degree from eight years to four, with a series of articles replacing the traditional book-length dissertation. “Let’s end the overspecialized, trivial Ph.D.,” Darnton said. “Let’s develop thought and new modes of communication that will create new modes of knowledge and scholarship.”
With fewer and fewer jobs available in academe and with the trend toward funneling students to alt-ac careers, it makes even more sense that the majority of dissertations will not need to be the basis of first books. Rather, the aim should be to write the dissertation and complete the degree as quickly as possible.
Revising a dissertation properly can be a time-consuming and frustrating task. It has shackled many a scholar both in pursuit of the degree and after receiving it. Many agonize over revising works that should never be revised. Some spend years and never complete the revisions. Others eventually finish the revisions but cannot find a publisher.
Shouldn’t the successful dissertation be proof that a scholar has been equipped with the research and critical-thinking skills necessary to tackle another subject? Perhaps the new study will be related to one’s dissertation topic, but it needn’t be a rejiggering of that original thesis. Such an approach acknowledges that the capabilities of the newly minted Ph.D.’s extend beyond the limits of the dissertation. They can develop new knowledge and mastery over another subject area, becoming potentially better teachers, communicators, or researchers.
The dissertation should be a stage of the educational journey, not to be retraced, but to be used as a steppingstone to edge further down the path. Publishers, including this one, will continue to publish revised dissertations. It is, after all, intrinsic to our scholarly mission to foster, publish, and promote first books. But technology, economics, and new modes of communication are transforming scholarly communication, and publishers will publish even fewer revised dissertations than they have in the past.
It is time to recast the real value of the dissertation. It should be a tool that equips a researcher with the critical-thinking skills necessary to create, in Darnton’s words, “new modes of knowledge and scholarship.” The payoff for graduate students will be a quicker and more economical path to a Ph.D., a shorter step to applying what has been learned in the doctoral process, and an opportunity to find, as soon as possible, an individual voice in the academy.
