Easily Distracted

Last night, I was searching through my iPod for some of the African music I’ve ripped from my CD collection, to play briefly in class today. Unfortunately, some of what we’ve got is on old vinyl records that I’ve never transferred into digital formats, and in particular a couple of albums by Franco.

So I took a whirl onto iTunes. I normally avoid buying from iTunes, but in this case, it was a quick, useful way to get two Franco tracks onto my iPod for class today. I could have spent only a fractionally greater amount of time and gone over to our music library to get the one Franco recording we have in our collection, though.

I was thinking about this a bit later, though: it made me think of all the times that I’ve bought things primarily for classroom use, sometimes to compensate for rushed or insufficient planning on my part. Books, mostly, but sometimes other media. I don’t really keep track of this, nor do I seek reimbursement. I’m kind of careless about that kind of thing in general: it’s part of my absent-minded professorhood.

However, I’m curious about whether this is totally aberrant behavior. You hear from time to time about K-12 teachers who buy supplies or materials for their classes, either because their own schools absolutely won’t or simply because it’s more convenient and doesn’t involve having to hassle with the bureaucracy for an oddball or idiosyncratic teaching plan.

Oso Raro and Tenured Radical underline one of the biggest problems with the tenure system in academia: its mystery.

They’re both trying to write about a controversial tenure case at the University of Michigan, to understand the seeming mismatch between the public transcript of the candidate’s accomplishments and the private decisions of the candidate’s colleagues. The problem is that there is no way to know about the second. A person who is denied tenure can go public with his or her reading, but the people involved in the denial can’t, regardless of whether they acted in good faith or not. Maybe there’s something we don’t know. Maybe there isn’t, and the public reading is all that we need to know that something went wrong. The uncertainty drives both outsiders and insiders mad with distraction. It makes it hard on the people being tenured or denied tenure: you want to go public, reveal, to say, “There is nothing unknown here, no private secret”.

The more you know about how tenure works as a system at your own institution, and at others, the less you can speak about its workings. I don’t feel I can talk in even heavily redacted terms about cases I’ve known directly (here and elsewhere) because that violates an essential commitment to confidentiality. The more cases you’ve seen in your own institution and throughout your discipline, the more you can imagine that there is something important about a given case that no outsider knows, but also the more you can imagine that something unfair happened in any given case.

The problem isn’t just mystery, though. It’s also mystification, the extent to which the parochial imagination of many academics leads them to believe that there is something different about the professoriate. In some ways, there is absolutely nothing unique about the confidentiality of the tenure system. When middle managers and professionals in other workplaces are fired, the same asymmetry of information applies. The person who is fired can choose to make a public stink about it, and that will circulate to the extent that the person is well-known in their profession or their community. The organization doing the firing often can’t say much about it for legal and professional reasons. By comparison, the tenure system is typically less arbitrary, more procedural, more knowable. If I were a vice-president at a bank–or even a senior administrator or adjunct faculty at a university–I could be terminated in much more unexpected, unfair or capricious fashion. You can object to the practice of firing people for anything but serious, documentable non-performance of their duties, but at that point, you’re really objecting philosophically to any labor market, objecting to termination as the whip hand of any kind of labor.

What makes tenure more fraught is not its secrecy, but its proceduralism. If I’m the bank vice-president, I can tell friends, colleagues and future employers that I was fired over a matter of principle, or by a boss whose ego was threatened, or because my bank was downsizing, or for other arbitrary reasons, and have all those narratives be perfectly credible. The existence of a lengthy dossier with evaluations from local colleagues, outside experts and students, a dossier evaluated in two or three or four separate confidential processes, seems to make the decision less arbitrary.

What makes tenure more fraught is also its consequences. There are a lot of banks and a lot of bank vice-presidencies, and a lot of other jobs that a bank vice-presidency might lead to. In some fields of academic study, there are perhaps no more than fifty to one hundred jobs total worldwide for which one might be qualified, many of them occupied by tenured faculty who can be expected to teach in those positions for the next two decades or more. For each open position, there will be many candidates, and anyone with a tenure denial on their record is at a disadvantage. Academics train for six or seven years, search for jobs for three or four years, teach for another six or seven, and then face the possibility of having to start over, in some cases with a near-total loss of the time invested in between. And that’s if you get lucky enough to get a tenure-track position in the first place, since the conditions of academic labor outside the tenure-track are exceptionally poor.

With or without tenure, however, confidentiality is still going to be an issue in academic life, as it is in all modern institutions. How do you document processes and decisions which by their nature cannot be documented? Motivations which remain unspoken, choices that happen by passive assent to an implicit narrative, secrets and silences: all institutions work by these processes as well as by public transcripts, transparent deliberations, honest actors.

Margaret Soltan linked to an essay by William Deresiewicz, and somehow it got under my skin. I’m having one of those weeks where my to-do list is like the hydra, blossoming items faster than I can accomplish them, so I don’t really have the energy to patiently reply to the Deresiewicz essay itself. It’s a surly little essay. Deresiewicz complains that the teenagers have taken over the English Department. I don’t accept the complaint, but even if so, better that than the kind of prematurely curdled old fartism that he’s serving up.

I’ve found some of his commentary in the past better than this piece, particularly his interesting essay on the erotics of teaching. I think he personally can do better if he wants to complain about the state of academic literary criticism, even in a short article.

I don’t disagree that English as a discipline (and the humanities in general) are in intellectual disarray, and that many departments are adrift in terms of where to go next, or how to distribute their resources. The answer to that problem has got to be something other just turtling back into the high literary canon.

Deresiewicz arrives at a diagnosis of deep disorder though the usual lazy survey of job ads and paper titles. He says he’s “taking the temperature” of the field, but you’d know you had a quack for a doctor if your doctor took your temperature and diagnosed cancer from that alone. You can’t criticize the teaching and publication of a scholar by looking at the language of the job ad that led to that scholar being hired, but that’s what Deresiewicz does. He compiles a list of fields that he finds trendy or worthless merely by name, complains that the optional extras at the end of some job ads are intellectually incoherent. Oh my no! he exclaims. Someone wants “digital humanities” in the English Department, and my god, someone out there is trying to hire specialists in science fiction or children’s literature. What have we come to? Children’s literature! Like the kind of thing those dreck writers Mark Twain and Charles Dickens wrote. Science fiction! How ridiculous.

He does admit that most of these ads are attempts to add competencies or subjects that aren’t represented in the departments which are searching. This might suggest that the writers and subjects which he thinks of as core areas of literary competency are still core areas. He also knows as well as I do (I hope) that the little laundry lists of optional extras at the end of academic job ads are usually a political exercise, an accommodation of different pet interests and desires among the faculty in any given department. They’re never coherent even when they come at the end of an ad which is soberly focused on traditional literary subjects in American or British literature. Those little sentences often aren’t philosophically or theoretically coherent even when they come at the end of a job ad in a sober, internally unified discipline like economics or physics. (This is why I prefer it when departments write much more minimalist ads, even if that often draws a larger pool of applicants.)

Deresiewicz invokes Gerald Graff at the beginning of his essay. Graff has been very sensitive in his writing to the problem of disciplinary and epistemological drift in academic curricula. It’s true that the humanities have a problem with people who are teaching and researching from fundamentally different perspectives who don’t talk to one another or bother to try and construct a dialogic relationship between their disparate practices, the kind of relationship that is a bridge for students who are moving from one classroom to another. The solution to that problem isn’t superficial ridicule of a laundry list of topics and areas of study: it only makes the problem worse. Why should anyone who doesn’t share Deresiewicz’ own practices or interests sit down with him to talk about what they do if all he can offer in return is scorn and the axiomatic belief that his own interests represent the once and future core of a properly composed English Department? (Or in reverse: why should someone with Deresiewicz’ interests sit down with someone who categorically hates the very idea of the canon?) If faculty in the humanities are drifting away from one another and from any conception of a shared discipline, it is precisely because the prospect of sitting down to work out a shared vision seems to be full of risk and hassle with little prospect of success.

I agree with Henry Farrell’s skepticism about Tyler Cowen’s view of the motivation for doing peer review.

Cowen argues that in a truly open-access system, the major motivation for doing peer review would likely fade away, that the reason why people do it now is essentially to build a small reserve of cultural capital that’s particular to an influential journal, that if you don’t do it for that journal, you’re afraid that you’ll be shut out of publishing in it later.

This doesn’t seem at all right in my experience. Maybe that’s because the humanities and some of the social sciences are more directed towards a fetish about the book, and have less of a sense that any given journal is a central reservoir of disciplinary prestige.

When I agree to referee, however, I really am not and never did think about building a relationship with that particular journal. I honestly think one of my motivations is just to do my share of a job I know needs to be done, to be a good citizen. (I’ll freely add that I must annoy the hell out of editors, as I’m frequently late on these tasks, partly because I say yes naively to many queries in the fall and then find myself so anxious about the to-do list that I get a bit paralyzed. YES I’M ALMOST DONE WITH MY REVIEWS, if you’re reading. This is just a little break. Really.)

My second motivation that I’m conscious about is that I’m often trying to help out a friend, a colleague, or some new person in the field who is the author of the article I’ve been sent. That still holds even if it’s a blind review: I’m aware that there’s somebody out there who needs this done, and I hope I can do it in a way that’s helpful. This does not mean I always write positive peer reviews, but I try not to be destructive or petty.

That, however, strikes me as being at least another major motivation that some people have to do reviews, namely, to exert a fairly tight-fisted control over their own disciplines or specializations. I suppose that’s a status-return of a kind, but it’s the kind that economists often have trouble understanding, because it is more about power and less about reward.

The closest thing to what Cowen’s writing about that I can think of is that very junior scholars may agree to peer review as a way of becoming a known figure in their disciplines. It’s not so much that you’re looking for the quid-pro-quo of access to the journal for which you review, but simply that you want to get your name into circulation. Peer reviewing when you’re a newly minted Ph.D. is also a kind of induction into the deeper mysteries of academic sociology, just as sitting on your first search committee can be. You learn by being a peer reviewer what goes on when you yourself are peer reviewed.

Finally, at least for me and maybe for other faculty at undergraduate-only institutions, peer reviewing is a way to stay in touch with work that is coming from graduate students and junior faculty, to get a sense of the movement of scholarly work in your field. The time lag in academic publication cycles means that if you wait until you read something that is formally published, it’s usually about six to eight years behind many conversations within research universities.