Department of Responses and Cool Ideas: More From The World Of Academic Publishing

Here's some follow-up to Wednesday's post on reforming scholarly publishing practices:

*As a cosmic reminder that some journals do not live to torture us, yesterday I received notice that an article had been un-ambivalently and swiftly rejected by a top journal. Right on! They turned it around in less than a month. Follow-up question: When an article is rejected, what do you do, dear? Answer: Thank the editors sincerely for their professionalism in letting you know so fast, and so politely, and send it off immediately to a specialty journal.

Another question: do the editors of this journal read Tenured Radical? Were they making a point? I posed this question at home and it was strongly inferred that my ego was wandering way off the reservation. Again.

*A friend who is a senior scholar and an experienced journal editor wrote in response to the post to say that s/he was in complete disagreement about eliminating "revise and resubmit" as a category. To elaborate: "some of our best...pieces [are] the result of great reviewer direction and energetic author redrafting. To do away with that would effectively close out grad students from journal article publishing, and they do some of the best work." That sounds right to me, so let me refine my critique: readers should not use the category of "revise and resubmit" when they really mean "reject." How's that for a fair compromise?

*One of the quickest turnarounds I have ever experienced was editing a round table on feminist blogging for the Journal of Women's History. From the time the proposal was accepted to it's forthcoming appearance in winter 2011 (subscribe now and reserve your copy!), it will have taken 18 months, only six of which will have been devoted to the publishing process (as opposed to writing, editing and review.) Does the increase in "special issues," clusters and round tables suggest that many hands make light work? Is it possible for journals to squeeze the time frame on publication without sacrificing quality by committing to relevant topics that demand timely publication? What might this teach us about the possibilities for shortening the publication timetable for articles that come in over the transom?

*There is an argument to be made for publishing a variety of pieces that have no central theme or connection, particularly in prominent journals, published by professional associations, that by necessity speak to very diverse audiences. The biggest complaint I received, across fields, was that by the time work actually appears in journals it is often longer cutting edge, or the book project that it is part of has appeared. So how about if journals just held their referees to a faster timetable, and also used the Internet to publish shorter pieces, or articles that actually need to come out quickly or have their relevance eroded? Forums, like the ones you have seen here on this blog, could also pick up on exciting books that people need to know about now -- not two years from now; and book reviewing could be entirely web based. Over half of the pages in two top journals in my field are filled with book reviews -- books that came out years ago.

*When in doubt, start a cool new journal. Joan Wallach Scott tops the masthead of History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History; you will see a few other members of the Differences crowd on the editorial board. For those of you not on the H-Net Announcements listserve:

History of the Present is a journal devoted to history as a critical endeavor. Its aim is twofold: to create a space in which scholars can reflect on the role history plays in establishing categories of contemporary debate by making them appear inevitable, natural or culturally necessary; and to publish work that calls into question certainties about the relationship between past and present that are taken for granted by the majority of practicing historians. Its editors want to encourage the critical examination of both history’s influence on politics and the politics of the discipline of history itself.

'Tis a journal after the Radical's own heart. Good luck and God Bless, that's what I say. It's biannual, and issues will be carried by JSTOR as they are published, so no more paper coming will be into your home -- unless you have a journal fetish and you want it to do so.

The Social Network: Or; Does Networking Really Matter To An Academic Career?

One of 17 ways to visualize Twitter.

Why do we tell young scholars to "network," and what  do we mean by it?

As I was finishing up Samuel Delany's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) last night, I came across this gem of a quote on p. 138:

I feel that my career benefits regularly from the results of my networking.  My ultimate take on networking is, however, this:  No single event in the course of my career that I can cite has been directly caused by networking.  Nevertheless, the results of networking have regularly smoothed, stabilized, and supported my career and made it more pleasant (there is that term again) than it would have been without it.

In general I would say (and I would say this to young writers particularly):  Rarely if ever can networking make a writing career when no career is to be made.

Delany, as many of you know, is a queer science fiction writer who has also written a fair amount about the sexual landscape of New York City.  To put this quote in context, Delany is writing about the redevelopment of the Times Square district in the 1980s and 1990s, and its consequences for human relationships.  In the second half of the book, he works out the distinction between the formalized set of connections that "networks" represent (in this case he is talking about writers' conferences, and the science fiction events that are a part of his professional life), and what he calls "contacts."  The latter category, he argues, are informal, unpredictable, and are produced through a spontaneous, democratic generosity that is far more likely to produce a significant change in one's circumstances.

Delany's view that cultivating connections did not make careers surprised me, to say the least, since I have always viewed the mainstream literary world as highly networked.  Those of us who fail to break in may not be writing what a larger audience wants to read, but we often don't know (or command the respect of) the right people either.  When I was living in New York full time in the 1980s, the people who got published were also the people who were adept at getting invited to parties, meeting important people, and aggressively using those people to move up the chain.  Fran Lebowitz was, and still is, a classic example of such a person; but a great many other well-published authors, who are far less amusing, also fit that category.  Perhaps it's just an outsider's perspective, but I still see major book contracts being delivered into the hands of some people and not others because they are able to work their networks effectively and get in to see the right people. 

But what about the history world?  What role does networking play and should we counsel younger scholars to put time into it?  Has my own career benefited more from networking or "contacts"?

To answer the last question first, I would say that I would have to add a third category of connections that are neither contacts or networking, but something in between:  more dynamic and spontaneous than networking, and more durable and sustaining than contacts.  For example, I first met Historiann in a cab, a cab which she reminded me many years later when we sat down for lunch over beer and oysters, I paid for.  I was a professor with a travel budget, she a graduate student, and the cab cost the same regardless of how many people were riding in it.  I have no memory of paying for the cab, but it sounds like something I might do, as it fits my general philosophy of social welfare in which resources are redeployed to those who will, in turn, redeploy their own resources to others when they succeed. 

Fast-forward any number of years, I have become Tenured Radical, and I get an email from the author asking me to look over a new blog, Historiann, which quickly became one of the hottest history blogs around.  Since then, we have become friends and done three different projects together, none of which has probably changed our lives, but which have, nonetheless, been very pleasurable and satisfying.  So is this contact or networking?  Did the cab matter?  Would we have met in the blogosphere anyway?

Who knows.  I think the tougher question, since we are all free in the blogosphere to pursue the friendships and intellectual exchanges that we desire (and it would be interesting to hear more from Delaney about whether he thinks the Internet has altered his paradigm), is:  in the more constricted realm of the job market and academic publishing, does networking matter?

To this I would actually say no, it doesn't.  This isn't a reason not to go to conferences, of course, and I would urge all universities to fund conference attendance for graduate students and younger scholars to the fullest extent that they can.  I think it works against the stultifying tendency of the academy to keep untenured people in as subservient a state as possible for the longest possible time.  It encourages friendship rather than naked competition (many of my closest friends, and those who I still seek advice from, are women who I met through the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians as a graduate student.)  Finally, it encourages people to keep up in their own and related fields, to be challenged by others and respond to those challenges, and to become socialized.  These are all good things.

But I have never known anyone who could attribute their academic success to the fact that they were well-connected.  In fact (brace yourself for a downer):  some of the best connected people I know have suffered repeated setbacks, on the job market and in publishing, despite their ability to network and excellent reputations.  Networking is also different from having letters from influential people, whose opinion is respected by others and who testify to your excellence.  Such things count, as do the phone calls that people place before making a Big Hire, to the people they really trust (I've made those calls and received them.)  But there are simply too many people involved in any given decision for even the most influential people to have a decisive role in your future.  Paradoxically, it is not infrequent that when someone invested in your success is accidentally in a position to help you, s/he will recuse hirself from the decision entirely in order to ensure that the decision is perceived as just.   

I'm not saying that this makes academia the cradle of democracy.  I'm just saying it doesn't work that way.  Delany's best observation is:  "Rarely if ever can networking make a writing career when no career is to be made."

Where I would say that networking has helped me enormously is my ability to get things done.  The more people you know in your field, the more effective you are.  The more widely known you are as an honest person, or a fun person to work with, or someone who understands the principles of fairness and reciprocity, the more likely you are to make other people feel that you are worth spending their limited time and energy on.  In a more local sense, I find my networks among mid-level administrators at Zenith to be an invaluable resource for problem solving, information gathering, and getting channels unclogged.  If this post teaches you nothing else, it should be this:  administrative assistants hold the keys to your kingdom; information technology people are gods and goddesses; and the registrar's office is a temple.

The ability to get things done not only makes life more pleasant, and far richer when you consider time consuming projects like program development and the hiring of new colleagues, but it frees up time to write.  It also brings interesting and novel projects -- book series, journal articles, special issues, conferences, and Internet-based exchanges -- to fruition.  This, I think, reveals the basic value of networking:  when it works, it isn't about you.  It's about you in relation to others.  Scholarship, at its most effective, is about exchange, not about the grandiosity of one person.

And that's why it is worth paying attention to.

It's Safe To Go Back To the Annual Meeting; A Radical Guide To Days 1 and 2 of The 2011 AHA

I just want to say:  gays were not involved in logo design or color choice.

Last year there was quite a hullabaloo about the American Historical Annual Meeting out in San Diego. Doug Manchester, who owns the hotel the AHA chose, had given gobs of money to Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative.  He also got a lot of that money by running a union-free work place.  It was what you would call a lose-lose choice for the AHA, and resulted in a lot of people flying out there to picket, and a lot of other people having to give their papers by sneaking in and out hidden in laundry trucks.  (No, not Really!  That was a joke!)  This year there are no worries: you can come into the hotel without worrying that you will have to cross a queer picket line, or worse, that the hotel bar is off limits to Good People.  We historians are meeting in the People's Republic of Boston, a city that is unionized up the yin-yang and where everyone is free to gay marry.  Go here to find out how to gay marry while you are in town; or slip over the Connecticut border and do it there!

But maybe you have never been to an Annual Meeting, you are a graduate student, and you aren't sure what to do after you gay marry.  Sure, you can run around to cool panels with famous people on them, and you should definitely go to your friends' papers and show up at your own panel.  But what else?  Read on:  I can't link everything worthwhile on this great program, but here are a few that caught my eye in the first 48 hours.

Thursday there are some great teaching workshops going on all day. You don't have to be very far along in your grad school career to attend one or more of these since they could keep the first few years of your teaching career from being a confusing hell.  Try How to Create An Undergraduate Course and How To Become An Effective Lecturer on for size, as well as Wise Use of the Methods Course in the afternoon.  Hint:  for those of you with conference interviews, attending these workshops is a bonus, since it might give you some ideas that would allow you to take the teaching part of your interview in a direction that is new and unexpected.  Imagine a conversation that begins with you saying, "Yesterday I heard Derek Musgrove talking about an interesting technique that I would like to try out.  For the survey, I think I would tweak it a little (blah, blah, blah.")

Thursday afternoon?  How about, instead of reading on this blog that, hypothetically, it would be great if historians were trained for careers other than teaching, find out what those careers already look like at Careers in History:  The Variety Of The Profession.

Friday at 9:00 A.M. the Book Exhibit opens.  This is a critical venue for meeting, greeting, and being introduced to others.  Remember the Radical Rules of the Road when in mixed company:

• Greet your graduate mentors but do not cling to them.  In fact it is best, when you see them, to look as though you have somewhere very important to be.  Practice saying into the mirror:  "Gosh, it's really great to run into you -- I'm off to the Chapel Hill booth to meet up with a friend/an editor/someone on my panel.  Have a great meeting!"  Only break this rule if they happen to be with someone very important in your field, in which case, keep a keen eye out for an introduction.  Count slowly to five in your head:  if the introduction is not forthcoming, skate out of there.
• Leave any and everyone before they leave you.  If you see someone's eyes drifting over your shoulder, even slightly, say warmly:  "I've really got to run -- so nice to have had a chance to say hello," then skate.
• If there is someone you know, but are unsure whether to greet or not, casually pick up a book and leaf through it.  If said person greets you, look very surprised and say: "OmygodIcan'tbelieveIdidn't see you!"
• If someone important calls you by the wrong name, let them.  If they do it twice, correct them.  If they keep doing it, forget it. There is one historian, who will remain nameless, who has greeted me for twenty five years as if I were Isabel V. Hull of Cornell, and I no longer correct her. 
• If you run into someone you just did a hotel room interview with, you don't have to act like you are employed by an escort service and pretend you have never met them.  Smile and nod; if you are close enough to speak say hello and say you had a good time in the interview.  Even if you didn't.  
• Have one sentence to say about your dissertation if a senior scholar asks.  One.  "I'm writing about the transgender community in Havana after the Cuban Revolution," for example. Most people are just asking to be polite, although in the rare instance that the person really is interested in it, be conversational -- do not launch into your interview speech.
• Never, never, never ask a senior scholar what s/he is working on unless you are dinner partners.  Your just-to-be-polite question is:  "Are you having a good meeting?"
• Check compulsively, but discreetly, to make sure your fly is not open. 

At 9:30 Friday, there is a workshop on interviewing.  I cannot stress enough how important this workshop is, particularly for those of you who are not yet on the job market.  Interviewing is not just about saying, doing and wearing the right things, although it is that.  It is about reading your audience and responding to the questions that are actually asked while delivering the information you want your interviewers to have.  Much of the workshop consists of mock interviews held in a large ballroom that is not unlike the gang interviewing room in the basement where you might, one day, actually be interviewed.  The people who pose as interviewers are kind and helpful, and will honestly critique your performance.

In the same time slot is Getting A Job At A Community College, which is unfortunate.  But if you have been on the market for several years, if you realize that teaching is your bag, if you are part of an academic couple -- why not find out?  And learn a little more about the kind of institution where the majority of students start their college career?

Other Friday events that look promising are the International History publishing roundtable, which has an all-star cast, including Susan Ferber of Oxford University Press; Social Science Research Council info session; Revisiting the Teaching of Religious History

And of course, if you want to meet Tenured Radical go here.  Women historians and feminists of all genders will want to attend the Coordinating Council for Women in History reception. 

I Killed My Book: And Other Highly Personal Thoughts On Writing To Begin the New Year

What would life be like if you started over again?

Sometime last fall I made decision to kill a book that I had worked on for a long, long time, a book that people still ask me about.  This is how it went.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I began Tenured Radical back in 2006 because I was in a Bad Way and trying to Work Out $ome $hit.  At the time,  I had gone through a major institutional trauma and survived it, just barely, and at a high cost to those close to me.   Central to this institutional trauma was a rather profound and vicious trashing of The Book.  Blogging became a way of returning to the book, a project that had become so utterly soiled by its use as a vehicle for expressing contempt for me that I couldn't look at it without becoming enraged or suffering a profound sense of loss.

For a time, blogging worked to jump start what constituted a rescue operation rather than what could have been the satisfactory completion of an intellectual project that I was pleased with and whose progress gave me pleasure.  I did go back to The Book; I revised nearly all of it.  But it gave me no pleasure, and somehow I could never finish it.  Every time I tried to finish it, I would get stuck and become depressed.  In the meantime, in the parallel world of public life, I was more or less bouncing back.  I was snapping out blog posts, building the readership for Tenured Radical, developing relationships with other bloggers that led to collaborations and even print publications, getting my posts reprinted and linked to by a highly respectable web trade press, starting a monograph series with a friend, writing op-eds, blogging for the New York Times, finishing academic articles and nonfiction essays. One of my articles won a prize, of all things -- an article that had been rejected by several journals before being accepted.

Mirabile dictu -- about three years ago, on a whim I do not even recall conceiving in any deliberate way, I started a new book.

I went to Kauai.  I went to Paris.  I went to South Africa. I wrote my ass off everywhere I went.

The revival of my writing life -- not as good as before but better than before, dude! -- meant that I was also able to extract myself from other bad professional dynamics that were haunting me.  If for no other reason, I needed the time to write rather than to brood on the hypocrisy and evil-mindedness of others.  I have applied for jobs, not because I was desperate to leave the scene of the crime, but because I was finally able to imagine myself as an autonomous person who was not bound by other people's unwelcome judgments and expectations.  In turn, at Zenith, I was able to extract myself from the big swirly hole of unresolved grievances.  (Here is a lesson learned:  it is often the case that academics do you dirt without ever believing it was personal, even when it was personal.  Holding this reality, and the opposite reality of deliberate cruelty you experienced or observed, in your head at the same time, can be a little mind-blowing.  But try it, because in my experience it actually works better as a strategy for getting on with life than imagining that people who dislike you through no fault of your own will apologize, or make up for, what they contributed to making your life hellish.)

You can be an academic and also be yourself. Try it.

But back to the book I killed.  I thought it was possible to write two books at the same time, particularly when one of them was nearly done, and I was so excited by the other one that the energy from Project 2 would have to leak over in some positive way to Project 1.  But in the end, it didn't.  In the end, the project that became the object of such controversy was ruined for me.  The other problem was, not only did people keep asking me about Project 1, but the effort I was putting back into bringing it back from the dead was taking away from other things that mattered to me more. 

One day last fall, I wondered how long I could continue on with the fantasy that I was going to devote a significant chunk of what remains of my life to finishing a book that had so many bad memories and bad feelings associated with it, and that upon reflection, had been written by an entirely different person.  I then went into negotiations with myself, and the outcome was an alternative fantasy that seemed viable: breaking up what I had done into five separate articles and publishing them.  By that afternoon I had pulled a chapter, re-written it, and sent it off on its long, tedious journey towards publication.

Who knows?  Maybe some day some one will say to me, "Jeez, you oughta pull those articles together into a book!"  And then I will whip out the last, aged, essay, labeled "Introduction" and preserved from hard drive to hard drive, and do it.