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Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship
Why should books drive the academic hierarchy? This controversial question posed by Lindsay Waters ignited fierce debate in the academy and its presses, as he warned that the "publish or perish" dictum was breaking down the academic system in the United States. Waters hones his argument in this pamphlet with a new set of questions that challenge the previously unassailable link between publishing and tenure.
As one of the most important and innovative editors in the humanities and social sciences, Waters has long witnessed the self-destruction occurring in the academic world because of the pressure to publish. Drawing upon his years of experience, he reveals how this principle is destroying the quality of educational institutions and the ideals of higher learning. It is time for scholars to rise up, Waters argues, and reclaim the governance of their institutions.
As one of the most important and innovative editors in the humanities and social sciences, Waters has long witnessed the self-destruction occurring in the academic world because of the pressure to publish. Drawing upon his years of experience, he reveals how this principle is destroying the quality of educational institutions and the ideals of higher learning. It is time for scholars to rise up, Waters argues, and reclaim the governance of their institutions.
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
43 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 6, 2011
Today, doctoral students and professors trying to get their tenure are under the same pressure: make more publications! I'm taking a professional development course where every guest speaker gives the same advice: don't graduate without having at least 2 publications. I agree with Waters, this frenzy of publication has led to an inflation in books where quantity has overcome quality (to some extent). He is right that many publications are never sold, or even read. He is also right about the way universities have become, corporate institutions concerned with profits, etc. But in his criticisms, he seems to be missing an important point. Today, there is fierce competition among doctoral students as there is no enough jobs for everyone. Many departments receive hundreds of applications for a single position, and therefore, establishing some criteria to eliminate candidates has become inevitable. It is not surprising to see that hiring committees eliminate applicants based on the quality as well as quantity of their publications. As we all know, quality do matter for many schools. Having publication in a top-tier journal carries a lot more weight than having it published in a journal that nobody has ever heard of. While this is the case, yearning for past and attacking publications for the sake of preserving the quality of books doesn't seem appealing to me. I think the problem lies somewhere else, and the current situation with scholarly publications is just the tip of the iceberg.
February 2, 2015
O livro é excelente para se entender alguns dos problemas enfrentados pelos docentes/pesquisadores em um meio acadêmico pressionado pelo ato de publicar a todo custo. Algumas consequências são explicitamente mostradas de forma bastante inteligente e com uma argumentação sólida. Por outro lado, tive a impressão que algumas poucas críticas ao novo sistema é feita de forma pessoal (contra as ideias de um filósofo em particular), deixando com que as emoções superem a razão tão bem trabalhada na maior parte do livro.
Acredito que o livro pode ser lido por pessoas de dentro e de fora do meio acadêmico para, respectivamente, servir como uma fonte de conhecimento desse novo sistema baseado na publicação a todo custo e como um material de reflexão.
Leitura rápida e muito informativa.
Acredito que o livro pode ser lido por pessoas de dentro e de fora do meio acadêmico para, respectivamente, servir como uma fonte de conhecimento desse novo sistema baseado na publicação a todo custo e como um material de reflexão.
Leitura rápida e muito informativa.
February 25, 2019
At the heart of this book is a deep conviction that books can illicit profound and life-changing responses. In today's climate of academic publishing such a deep conviction is bound to produce a cry of lament. Hope is placed in the restoration of judgement in the academy, seizing this perogative back from the academic presses.
October 16, 2020
Like a necessary vaccine.
November 16, 2010
Waters, an editor at Harvard University Press, laments the downward spiral in the quality of academic publishing, proclaiming the impending death of academic publishing because of misplaced priorities and bad practices throughout the academy. As usual with this kind of screen, there’s a lot of truth and some big blind spots as well.
Truths:
* Waters’ main lament is that the professoriate has offloaded our responsibility for making tenure decisions onto bean counting administrators, whose pressure for more and more publications becomes the primary force driving those decisions. He laments that quantity outweighs quality, and that we’re all writing articles and books that no one is reading.
* At the heart of his complaint, though, is the loss of perspective and time that allows academics to be intellectuals who pursue their own ends and write when writing is needed (rather than writing to the tenure and promotion timelines). He laments that we haven’t got time to properly think things through and write significant, important books–we all crank out lame books, apparently.
* He offers a small complaint, too, that tenure and promotion committees expect new colleagues to be writing and working at a clip well beyond what they were expected to do as young scholars.
* The corporatization of the university undergirds much of Waters’ complaint about the current academic publishing model, and his call is really a demand that faculty take back the initiative in shaping academe.
Blind spots:
* Waters makes no mention of the vast and increasing competition for tenure-track jobs. One of the reasons hiring committees expect graduate students to have published already is that there are so many more competing for the positions that the “bar” has raised across the board. This ripples up the promotion chain as people who’re hired for their prodigious writing are expected to keep prodigiously writing (or expect themselves to do so).
* Waters also dismisses or ignores the significant outside pressure to shift the tenure system as well. C.F. Zachary Karabel’s What’s College For?.
But ultimately, Waters’ essay rests on twin pillars of nostalgia and elitism — the idea that scholars of the past were producing important and significant work, and now that we’re writing more and publishing more, the quality of it is much worse and the thinkers are more blinkered. He may be right on some fronts, but in some ways he’s lamenting the demise of the carefully controlled academic publishing regime that marked much of the 20th century. Like dying record companies, he dislikes the polyglot cacophony of the multitudes of young academics trained in an academy where they were expected to start writing immediately, rather than sitting around thinking lofty thoughts.
Does this expectation result in less skillful scholarship? Possibly, especially as aimed at the old rubrics. But the old rubrics also assumed complete disciplinary knowledge. The “comprehensive” exams in which the scholar demonstrates that s/he has read everything in his/her field no longer apply, as it’s literally impossible to have done so. People taking their comps now read lots, to be sure. But not everything. In the digital world of ubiquitous scholarship, we’re database miners, scholars of the network. Our ivory tower has broadband.
Truths:
* Waters’ main lament is that the professoriate has offloaded our responsibility for making tenure decisions onto bean counting administrators, whose pressure for more and more publications becomes the primary force driving those decisions. He laments that quantity outweighs quality, and that we’re all writing articles and books that no one is reading.
* At the heart of his complaint, though, is the loss of perspective and time that allows academics to be intellectuals who pursue their own ends and write when writing is needed (rather than writing to the tenure and promotion timelines). He laments that we haven’t got time to properly think things through and write significant, important books–we all crank out lame books, apparently.
* He offers a small complaint, too, that tenure and promotion committees expect new colleagues to be writing and working at a clip well beyond what they were expected to do as young scholars.
* The corporatization of the university undergirds much of Waters’ complaint about the current academic publishing model, and his call is really a demand that faculty take back the initiative in shaping academe.
Blind spots:
* Waters makes no mention of the vast and increasing competition for tenure-track jobs. One of the reasons hiring committees expect graduate students to have published already is that there are so many more competing for the positions that the “bar” has raised across the board. This ripples up the promotion chain as people who’re hired for their prodigious writing are expected to keep prodigiously writing (or expect themselves to do so).
* Waters also dismisses or ignores the significant outside pressure to shift the tenure system as well. C.F. Zachary Karabel’s What’s College For?.
But ultimately, Waters’ essay rests on twin pillars of nostalgia and elitism — the idea that scholars of the past were producing important and significant work, and now that we’re writing more and publishing more, the quality of it is much worse and the thinkers are more blinkered. He may be right on some fronts, but in some ways he’s lamenting the demise of the carefully controlled academic publishing regime that marked much of the 20th century. Like dying record companies, he dislikes the polyglot cacophony of the multitudes of young academics trained in an academy where they were expected to start writing immediately, rather than sitting around thinking lofty thoughts.
Does this expectation result in less skillful scholarship? Possibly, especially as aimed at the old rubrics. But the old rubrics also assumed complete disciplinary knowledge. The “comprehensive” exams in which the scholar demonstrates that s/he has read everything in his/her field no longer apply, as it’s literally impossible to have done so. People taking their comps now read lots, to be sure. But not everything. In the digital world of ubiquitous scholarship, we’re database miners, scholars of the network. Our ivory tower has broadband.
November 22, 2008
Interesting but incoherent. Waters writes against the publish-or-perish ethic of the contemporary academy, calling on scholars to rescue the book from intellectual irrelevance. But he throws too many clashing ingredients into his recipe for better academic publications. His pamphlet expresses dissatisfaction very well, but it is an entirely conventional dissatisfaction (laden with bargain-bin allusions to Fordism, Thatcher, and G. W. Bush) that offers little insight.
For example, Waters attacks a profit-driven market model for scholarly publishing. Then he complains that too few academic books actually get read, as a result of their pointlessness, and suggests therefore that universities judge the quality of publications in part according to whether anyone finds it useful to cite them. It seems to me that the latter model would subject scholars to the tyranny of the consumer no less than the former, however upscale the latter's consumers might be. Eventually Waters gets around to suggesting that scholars should not be expected to publish at all except when they have something important to say; he condemns the administrative urge to measure and rank scholars. But then he calls on departments to spend more time actually reading the written work of their applicants, celebrating the process of "judgment" as essential to the academy and even urging scholars to make "innovation" a central goal. One does not need tea leaves to predict that the result, for the vast majority of scholars trying to find a stable post in a university or a platform for publishing interesting ideas, would be exactly the same.
For example, Waters attacks a profit-driven market model for scholarly publishing. Then he complains that too few academic books actually get read, as a result of their pointlessness, and suggests therefore that universities judge the quality of publications in part according to whether anyone finds it useful to cite them. It seems to me that the latter model would subject scholars to the tyranny of the consumer no less than the former, however upscale the latter's consumers might be. Eventually Waters gets around to suggesting that scholars should not be expected to publish at all except when they have something important to say; he condemns the administrative urge to measure and rank scholars. But then he calls on departments to spend more time actually reading the written work of their applicants, celebrating the process of "judgment" as essential to the academy and even urging scholars to make "innovation" a central goal. One does not need tea leaves to predict that the result, for the vast majority of scholars trying to find a stable post in a university or a platform for publishing interesting ideas, would be exactly the same.
May 12, 2009
So short I thought I hadn't read the whole thing and end up reading part II again (even after I realized I was in familiar territory). Short little pamphlet about academics, publishing, teaching and the way things are going to end badly for everyone involved. Worthwhile read for anyone in publishing/ libraries/ academics to get a somewhat radical view of some problems created by the hyper-inflated publishing of monographs over the last 25 years under the guide of helping with tenure.
April 10, 2009
Very highly recommended to anyone involved in academia, or who just cares about scholarship. This is a brave description and polemic on the travesty of deans and departments having sold their souls for expediency and profit (and laziness), and shows that because of this, scholars have lost control of their work. Extremely good; erudite, entertaining, barbed, and utterly relevant.
October 21, 2008
I was initially jazzed to read this, seeing as I work in academic publishing and intend to make a career of it. i was a bit disappointed in that waters doesn't really make much of his status as a dual academic/academic publishing "insider" thus far. more details when i actually finsh
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews