Publish and Perish

Christopher Shea writes on this subject in the Ideas section of today’s Sunday Globe. According to the findings of the Modern Language Association, colleges and universities want faculty to publish books. Not journal articles, not critical reviews, books. So junior, überambitious faculty are forced to crank out the pages in order to obtain that brassiest of all brass rings, tenure.

As an undergraduate, I squeezed my profs dry trying to find out what I had to do to secure such a college-level teaching position. Publications, I’d ask, What’s that all about? “You’re granted a sabbatical and you go off and research an something in Dickens you’ve always been interested in. Hopefully, you can take all that work and turn it into an article.”

In other words, if you published, great! But if you didn't, it wasn't the end of your career. At least not at the state university I attended. Also, sabbatical time could be devoted to something as impractical as developing a new course, or visiting other writing centers in order to come up with a plan to revamp yours. Twenty years ago, the drive to publish was no way near as rabid as it is today. In fact, two of my greatest professors deliberately chose a career paths in which publishing was not the intent. For them, the real work went down in the classroom.

The emphasis on book-length monographs is excessively absurd. Today we have English departments rife with jumpy-nervous thirty-somethings scrambling to convince some university press to print their 400-page exegesis on the ontological significance of footwear in The Wings of the Dove. A treatise, by the way, that no publisher has the slightest interest in publishing, no library the funds to buy, and no student, not one, the time to read.

Embedded in this trend is an ugly truth: flooding the market with critcal dreck is more important that what goes on in the classroom. What matters is for a university to have a crop of neophytes with X-number of books to their credits. The page count goes up and the quality of classroom instruction risks going down. Many students now realize they are low priority for Professor Sunshine. There are many causes to why our colleges are producing woefully under prepared students, but this seems to me to be the most unneccesary.

Once upon a time, I had dreams of teaching at a university. But after ten years of adjunct hell I felt damn lucky when I landed a job at a community college. To many of "The Priests of Academe," that makes me some kind of intellectual humunculus. Sadly, those jumpy-nervous thirty-somethings do not realize the reason I look so distorted is because they can only see me through the confines of their Habitrail.

Here's Hoping...

For the first time in, say, sixteen years, I feel optimistic about our state government. I choose to be optimistic and hope that Patrick grabs hold of some of those goals he's been reaching for. I hope that he will prove the cynical talking heads wrong and bring about effective change. I hope that he will breathe life into the public education system. I hope he will encourage new businesses to set up shop in the Commonwealth. I hope that the thousands of our citizens he brought in from the cold will engage with civic life in a meaningful way. I hope we all stop kvetching about our problems and start talking about solutions.

Here's to hope.