Crises in Academia Today →

This business of ‘publish or perish’ has been a catastrophe. People write things which should never have been written and which should never be printed. Nobody’s interested. But for them to keep their jobs and get the proper promotion, they’ve got to do it. It demeans the whole of intellectual life.

— Hannah Arendt

The epigraph above comes from a panel discussion titled “Values in Contemporary Society” in Thinking Without a Banister. The discussion took place on July 13, 1972 between Hannah Arendt, Paul Freund, Irving Kristol, and Hans Morgenthau; it was organized by Kenneth W. Thompson, the vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

At the end of the conversation, Arendt comes to reflect upon the current state of higher education. Thinking about problems of academic integrity in teaching and writing, she argues that the principle of “publish or perish” has had devastating consequences for pedagogy and academic work. She says:

The one who really loses is the person who has a passionate interest in matters of the mind, who is an excellent reader, who can establish contact with his students and make them understand that his subject is important, but who will not write. Or, if he is forced to write, will not write well. And, by doing something which he is forced to do because of ‘publish or perish,’ he will become a lesser person.

At the end of the discussion Arendt asks what an organization like the Rockefeller Foundation might do to raise the prestige of excellent teachers who do not publish but instead are dedicated to the craft of teaching. Truly great teachers deserve recognition alongside great writers, but today both are being undermined by the driving forces of academia. [I]

Her indictment of “publish or perish” is striking today. Even with multiple publications, it is difficult for most aspiring professors to find meaningful employment with the decline of tenure track jobs and the rise of adjunct positions which carry heavy teaching loads and little job security. There are few institutions that encourage those who above all wish to be great teachers.

There are many problems plaguing academics, but building upon Arendt’s criticism of the imperative to publish, I want to briefly identify a few that seem increasingly urgent now, in part because they act as a form of academic censorship.

First, the pressure to publish leads young scholars to write for a specific, limited, and disciplinary audience. I have seen how hiring and tenure review discussions significantly depend upon the prestige of the journals in which candidates publish. Aware of this, academics read journals that they know they must submit to in order to get hired and then structure their writing around the journals that they are expected to publish in. A colleague once told me that she believed she was hired only because of an essay she had published in Political Theory, and that it was the most painful thing she had ever written, striving to write in a voice that wasn’t hers, just so that she could get a job.

Instead of encouraging creativity and thoughtful research, the job market demands that the intellectual pursuits of candidates conform with narrowly defined terms of fields and disciplines as they are laid out by respective departments and journals. As a result, much of the best academic work today is being published on non-academic platforms. Alternative institutional spaces are being created to provide intellectual homes for those who cannot bear the ways in which academia is structured by these market forces; market forces that, ironically, have little relation to a market for readers.

In 2000 Sheldon S. Wolin warned that political theory was succumbing to the 24/7 news media cycle which was organized around endless cycles of production. He wrote that the space and time needed for thoughtful reflection was being eroded by demands for constant output. The pressure to publish in itself acts as a kind of censorship, foreclosing space for critical thinking. And in the age of digital technology, which has sped up the rate of production, the proliferation of bad scholarship seems even more rampant.

The endless proliferation of publications is consistent with the ways in which graduate students are taught to make themselves marketable candidates for when they “go on the job market.” The language does not hide the motivating forces that structure academia. In graduate school, I served on an interdisciplinary hiring committee and was responsible for organizing lunches with the candidates and students. During one lunch, a job candidate asked me what my fields were in political science. I responded saying, “historical political theory and contemporary political theory.” She looked at me aghast and said, “You are not marketable.”

This logic of marketability is passed down from one generation to the next, by begrudging academics who were forced to jump through the same painful, institutional hoops. And while many acknowledge these problems, few desire to change them. There is an unspoken principle that says: “I suffered and so you must suffer too. It is what we all do.” This is a form of ritual hazing that undermines the integrity of intellectual pursuit. Instead of being treated as individuals, graduate students are treated like products produced by departments, prepared to go on markets.

And finally, to Arendt’s point of undermining the integrity of teaching, the imperative to publish drains time and energy from an aspiring teacher. Just as importantly, it encourages disciplinary and overly professionalized scholarship that will rarely appeal to a wide range of students. Above all, it threatens the self-worth of those energetic and exciting teachers who are simply not gifted at writing the kinds of prose in vogue at institutional journals.

The publish or perish mindset is mirrored by an equally destructive academic practice, the solicitation of near constant evaluations of teachers by students. Student evaluations act as a form of censorship in the classroom by negatively influencing pedagogy. Every teacher learns quickly how to ease up on assignments and make classes fun in order to improve their evaluations. I was once called into a department chair’s office and scolded for assigning a 20-page research paper. A student had complained to the chair that it was too much work, that I was expecting too much of the class. He told me that I should shorten the assignment and then remarked emphatically: “Samantha, it isn’t too difficult to just make students happy.”

It was made clear to me at that institution that my job was not to teach, but to make students happy. Student evaluations do not reflect a professor’s ability to teach. At many institutions, they are economically incentivized. Departments with higher student evaluations receive more funding. The more students in a major, the more hiring lines are possible. And students are drawn to departments based upon professor evaluations. Knowing this, they treat professors like service providers that they are paying for a certain good: course credit. Student evaluations reduce teaching and pedagogy to a crude exchange relationship. Forget incentivizing professors to become excellent teachers for the sake of teaching.

Arendt was right that professors who want to become excellent teachers lose in this system, but intellectual work and students lose too. There are few academic spaces that exist today that push back against these models of higher education. It’s time to carve out a few more, and to push back against the institutional structures that erode academic excellence. And if nothing else, perhaps strip away the economic language around teaching and scholarship that reduces these activities to market values.

Endnotes

[I] It is likely that Arendt’s statement in 1972 had something to do with her second husband, Heinrich Blücher who died in 1970, Blücher never graduated college but was an intellectual of the first order. He taught at Bard College for many years, helped institute the College’s First Year Common Course, and was a beloved teacher and mentor. But Blücher never published his own work. Shortly before her death, Arendt spoke of plans to go through Blücher’s notes and recordings of his lectures to edit a volume of his work, to bring it to public light.