The Truth Hurts

I’ve joked with my wife for years about returning to school for a Phd in an obscure humanities specialty. She has found it progressively less amusing with the birth of each child.

And I thought the legal business was bad. I suppose a law degree/PhD in humanities would be the double whammy!

More people will read this blog today than ever will the journals a professor gets published in.

More people will read this blog today than ever will the journals a professor gets published in.

While I realize this is maybe slight exaggeration (people skim the journals in their own field to an extent in order to send in snippy little notes and put downs about each other’s articles, or see if their own work was cited) I have to wonder how we got to this point. Is it just the bloating of academia as compared to 100+ years ago? There’s limited space in truly selective and widely read journals, so second string journals spring up to publish those who can’t get published in the big ones?

Did the concept of publish or perish originate back when it was a matter of writing for actual readers among the general, educated public, and then slowly depart from reality as the process became self sustaining and self justifying?

I have to disagree that no one reads journals. I was reading journal articles all the time in grad school, sometimes in depth. True, a lot of that reading is spent on the “influential” articles of the past, but presumably someone had to comb through them to decide which ones were good. Besides, it’s not just the influential ones that get read — in one’s particular field of research, how is it possible not to read (or at least scan) everything? You’d risk plagiarism otherwise.

Well, there were journals where I went to law school whose subscribers numbered under three digits (their articles were available electronically through Lexis or Westlaw, although they were not frequently viewed even there).

It’s true that there are a number of articles in every field and sub-specialty that are (by academic standards) widely read. But that is a very small percentage of the total output. As a field develops, most of the new ideas inevitably deal with more and more specialized topics that are of interest to fewer and fewer people. Some journals are still widely read, as are some articles. But most journals and most articles are read by very few people.

“I have to disagree that no one reads journals.”

With who? No one said it. Pointing out that grad students and professors read journals is like pointing out that lonely teenage girls read horribly written fan fiction.

As a field develops, most of the new ideas inevitably deal with more and more specialized topics that are of interest to fewer and fewer people. Some journals are still widely read, as are some articles. But most journals and most articles are read by very few people.

This seems right to me. The purpose of an academic journal is not to publish material aimed at a general readership. Rather, the purpose is to publish short, highly specialized work aimed at a readership composed of specialists trained in a given field. That readership is relatively small (a few thousand for top journals). One typically cannot get published in a good academic journal unless one shows a strong familiarity with the up-to-date literature, so most people outside this readership presumably would not be equipped to understand the bulk of what’s in these journals. Academic books, while still largely specialized, tend to be aimed a larger readership, many of which reach a lot of non-specialists (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene).

More people will read this blog today than ever will the journals a professor gets published in.

That’s too broad a claim. In my field (philosophy) alone, the top journals are read by thousands as they fall off the presses. A blog post at TAC? Read completely by a maybe a hundred to two, if you’re lucky. Now, there simply are too many journals out there, just as there are too many Ph.D. programs in virtually every field in the humanities. It’s very difficult to get published in a top journal, since the the demand for quality work is very high. Publishing at a blog…?

Good thing I knew all that without having to ask my profs., which is exactly why I didn’t pursue a PhD. You can just observe it in their lives….

More people will read this blog than ever will the journals a professor gets published in.

If publishing journal articles were all one does with a Ph.D., then few would consider it worthwhile. But that’s only a small part of it. The teaching component, I think, makes it incredibly worthwhile. If you go to a decent Ph.D. program, you end up instructing tens of thousands of students across your career in person. I have met very few academics who are unsatisfied with their career choice (in fact, I am sure career satisfaction is much higher overall in academia than in fields like law or business). I am very happy (so far) with my decision to work toward a Ph.D.

that your dissertation will not prove to be one of the groundbreaking works that all subsequent scholars need to cite.

Oh, I am deeply hurt. Clearly my work will completely revolutionize the way we view Thomas Jefferson, and in turn the way we view American political thought, leading to a paradigm shift in American politics.

That is if I even look at the thing again.

It was intended to be a humorous exaggeration, so I freely concede it was overbroad. Although, this blog will be viewed by around two thousand people today – and on a good day around 8,000, so it wasn’t that much of an exaggeration. Notice I said the blog, not an individual post.

You did say blog, sorry.

If it makes you feel better, more people will read a humanities journal piece than they will a student-written article in a law review.

“and I doubt the typical reader at TAC would be interested in a specialized, academic piece (dissertations are supposed to make original contributions to a given field).”

Depends. I’ve been surprised by how many hits some of the more technical legal posts I have done have gotten.

Paul, as an experiment you should post a small section of your dissertation here and on Almost Chosen People and see how many hits you get.

I have a friend who is a professor of history at a Big Ten School, and he also writes popular military history under a pen name, some of which have sold quite well. He has told me that the research for his academic work and his popular military histories is completely the same. He merely wrings out the academic jargon from the work that he publishes for profit and writes in a clear style, something he said which is frowned on when attempting to publish a piece in an academic journal.

“Hmm. So instead of trying to publishing my dissertaion I would be better off releasing it piecemeal here.”

Perhaps. But would we be better off?

(in fact, I am sure career satisfaction is much higher overall in academia than in fields like law or business).

FWIW (coming from someone who’s a bit of an outlier in his set in having gone into business rather than academia), my impression is that this is true for those who manage to land tenure track positions, but much less so for those who get trapped long term in post-doc or adjunct land, and finally end up having to look for a substitute career in the mid to late 30s. For those folks, their run at academia has already landed them deep in debt, disrupted their personal lives and left them with the same earning potential in the business world as a BA right out of college. I think a lot of the bitterness expressed about academia comes from those folks rather than the ones who make it into tenure track positions.

…Which is to Darwin’s earlier point, that the publish-or-perish system for tenure departs from reality. There are probably many young academics who would prefer to have a stable career based mainly on teaching, not research, but the system doesn’t reward that. Personally, what deterred me from the academic rat race was the prospect of having to rely on my cleverness* (or lack thereof) to put food on the table.

* If you read economics or public policy journals, you know what I mean. It’s those cute, clever twists on a tired, old subject that get you published. “Hey, look! I found an instrumental variable! Let’s do a pointless empirical paper on something nobody cares about!”

Based on the article that David Jones linked to today about the conference assembling to understand the great mystery of the day, the Tea Party Movement, it seems there should be plenty of demand for humanities postgrads. For the sake of the civilized world this nut must be cracked! Who else can do it but the brightest and most learned? I would refer your alienated humanities friends to these orgs. Apparently they could use some good help.

From the article:
Co-sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues, the Institute of Governmental Studies, the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science, the Sociology Department, the Gender and Women’s Studies Department, the Haas Diversity Research Center, the Townsend Center for Humanities, the Center for Race and Gender, the Center for the Study of Social Change, the American Cultures Center, and the Berkeley Undergraduate Political Science Association.