Our unfettered academic egoism
danah boyd recently posted a brilliant piece about why she’s not ready for the academic job market. My main reason for finding it brilliant is that much of what she says is exactly what I have on my mind these days - I also hope to complete my PhD next year, have the burning desire to do more research and fear being tied down in the long, grueling and bureaucratic process that is tenure track. Says danah:
I have been watching friends go through the tenure process and it makes me sick. There’s no room for innovation, for playing outside of the rules. You have 7 years to publish X articles in the *right* journals in the *right* way. My favorite phrase associated with this is “Least Publishable Unit.” In other words, what’s the minimum contribution you can make to get a good publication out of it. I don’t write like that and I don’t want to. I also think that most of the “respected” journals are so locked down as to be inaccessible to broader audiences. I want to be an academic, not a hermit. I believe that academia is an institution built on knowledge creation AND dissemination. My goal is to write for public audiences, to make knowledge palatable and interesting and accessible. I want to contribute big ideas that will make a difference, and to leave the mini-contributions for my blog.
Things are different in many ways on this side of the pond, but not necessarily any better. On the way to professorship we have the Habilitation which is essentially Dissertation 2.0. Again you write a book (normally a longer one) and again you present and defend your findings, only this time before your entire Fakultät, which generally means that a lot of tenured professors from a number of different disciplines get to judge your work. Think someone from philosophy making a call about the work of somebody from Japanese or Asian studies and you have the right picture.
And then, as danah points out, there’s all the antediluvian ritual associated with publishing in academia.
There was a time, now strange and long gone to the wired and paperless of us, where getting something published also meant that it had won the approval of peers, or at least the approval of an institutional publisher willing to print a few copies. Those times are gone now - getting it out there no longer means that it as been approved, that people agree with it or that it’s good. And quite frankly, I don’t see the problem with that, because I’m a grown-up and in my field I can generally tell a good article from a bad one, peer-reviewed or not. I’m not saying that peer-review is not useful for separating the wheat from the chaff. But I believe that access is the most important thing and that writing for the “right” journals because that’s what your supposed to do is wrong when they exist in walled gardens that are only accessible to a select few. I will continue to self-publish because danah is spot on: academia is an institution built on knowledge creation AND dissemination.
Digital technology affects us in all areas of life by empowering the individual on an unprecedented level. That means that institutions and social conventions lose influence to a degree - we no longer depend on printing presses and the goodwill of entrenched institutions in quite the same way we used to. But while comparably there’s a lot of personal freedom in academia, there’s also a lot of pressure to fit in, because the quality of what you do is always judged by your peers. The dissertation is basically the initiation trial you have to go through, even more so in the U.S. than here, and for some it turns into a one-way street.
From the NYT article:
For those who attempt it, the doctoral dissertation can loom on the horizon like Everest, gleaming invitingly as a challenge but often turning into a masochistic exercise once the ascent is begun. The average student takes 8.2 years to get a Ph.D.; in education, that figure surpasses 13 years.
Eight years. Jesus. If all goes well I’ll be done with my thesis a year from now. I doubt that my investigation into corporate blogging will change the world, but on the upside it should be concise, readable and not outdated by a decade.
