Writing and Unrecognized Academic Labor

The Rejected Manuscript

James M. Salvo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000221251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Learning Disabilities

Writing and Unrecognized Academic Labor acknowledges that much of the work we do to sustain the academy remains without recognition. It demonstrates that it is not only published work that influences development and innovation in scholarship.

The book rethinks the "publish or perish" system to show that good, unrecognized work is a vital part of scaffolding the growth of the academy and individual academic careers. It takes openness and transparency as a blueprint to outline plans for not only producing but also reimagining key markers of academic life, such as dissertations without anxieties of influence, conferences without directors, journals without gatekeepers, large-sample peer review, and teaching and learning beyond the university discourse.

A sustainable community model of academic life should have belonged to each of us from the start. Author James Salvo shows us that "nothing will be lost when everything is given away. Thus, we ought to share fearlessly." This book is suitable for all graduate students and researchers in qualitative inquiry and across disciplines who seek a new model for the value of their work.

1
Giving it away from the start

At the parting of the ways, paradise isn’t lost

Let’s not bury the lead. The guiding principle of the present work – a general principle for living flourishing lives together – is this:

Nothing will be lost when everything is given away.

Thus, we ought to share fearlessly.

Now that I have the opportunity to engage in some projects of my own, I’m going to follow this insight strictly. Going beyond simply imagining utopian spaces, I here outline the architecture of how we can build and maintain things that don’t reproduce old-boys networks or unfair hierarchies that benefit only an elite few who control an exploited many. These are the plans and principles for institutional structures that are minimally exclusive, structures that aim to be self-organizing. I believe that self-organizing structures are the only way to eventually avoid re-creating an unfairly ruling elite, one that will only have to be dismantled yet again. This isn’t, however, a pitch for anarchy. Self-organizing structures are but a way to have maximally shared governance. Just as how the greatest ideological trick of capitalism is the club good – something that amounts to convincing everyone that they ought to pay for a non-rival resource – the greatest scam the old-boys network ever pulled was to convince us that they aren’t completely unnecessary. In other words, those who keep their lofty positions of power all to themselves have somehow managed to get us to act as though we’re unable to govern ourselves as a cooperating collective. There are other ways.

In what’s to come, I’ll outline plans for producing (1) dissertations without anxieties of influence, (2) conferences without directors, (3) journals without gatekeepers, (4) large-sample peer review, and (5) teaching beyond the university discourse.

And just to be absolutely clear, this book isn’t an outline of how I will lead. Nor is this a book about how someone else should’ve led or should be leading. It isn’t even a prescription for how to lead addressed to a person yet to come. It isn’t any of these things because the answer to the question about who should lead us is this: the totality of anyone and everyone who’s genuinely committed to doing good. And this excludes folks who are clever enough to know how to not look bigoted or oppressive by paying lip service in the language of resistance – those who secretly and reluctantly only do the minimum because they feel forced to “check a box,” as they’d put it – but who are, in fact, hell-bent on upholding the status quo because it’s to their own personal gain. You can’t have just a few people taking up most of the space. Let’s all leave room for each other because that room isn’t as limited as some might have you believe.

This is a book about how we all can share responsibly by sharing responsibilities. I acknowledge that much of the building and maintenance we’ll be doing will consist of unrecognized work. So be it. At the end of the day, that cost is worth it, for sharing fairly is immeasurably better than this cycle we’ve been unable to break. Still, we need as many people as we can get on board. This is why I feel that no plans regarding what we must build should be secret, no knowledge proprietary. Sharing the blueprints is necessary, for it’s only through sharing and transparency that we, as a community, can grow and develop the good that should’ve belonged to each and every one of us from the start.

* * *

The primary insight of this book comes from John Cage. It can be found in Silence: Lectures and Writings:

But this fearlessness only follows if, at the parting of the ways, where it is realized that sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend. This turning is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity – for a musician, the giving up of music. This psychological turning leads to the world of nature, where, gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together; that nothing was lost when everything was given away.¹

Apart from its epic knowledge drop at the end, I like this passage not only because it’s nicely posthuman in the way that it doesn’t cordon off humanity from nature but also because it challenges what it means to be a composer. Why are we so certain that the minimum criteria of being a composer – perhaps a musician in general – is that one’s output consists only of what’s completely within one’s own control? What if we were to give up on this notion? What would music be like? And moving from composer and musician to editor and writer, what might this mean?

In some sense, to make an analogy here doesn’t quite fit. If the musician simply follows the composer, then the musician submits to the will of the composer, and it’s the composer whose will is fully realized. However, one might argue that if one is a writer, then one is less a musician but more of a composer themselves, for clearly we think of a composer – at least in the traditional sense that Cage questions – as being a sort of writer. I feel, however, that this latter argument can only be comfortably made given that one has never been the recipient of a rejection letter.

Regarding publishing, because of the way things have been set up, the writer can’t help but feel that they’re not completely in control. A writer may write what they please, but in order to become a published author – in order to be recognized for one’s work – what one has written must conform to an editor’s own will. If this is so, then at best, when staring down a blank page, one writes not only for oneself but also for what one imagines to be the will of an editor. At worst, say if publication were an absolute necessity, one may find oneself writing only for what one imagines to be an editor’s will. Then, upon receiving a revise and resubmit, one writes for what no longer must be imagined. And by this extension, one can also write for the will of imagined or actual peer reviewers. And by that extension, one may find oneself writing for the will of folks who might eventually review one’s tenure or promotion portfolio, for one’s non-reviewer peers, even for online trolls given that altmetrics are now a thing. The way things have been set up, the writer who’d be recognized as author must potentially submit to several wills.

Is there a way out of this? I think maybe there is. Either we completely give up on the notion of publishing being of the highest value – and for the academic, this would involve major changes to the institution of the university – or folks finding themselves in the position of regulating the flow of information change the rules such that even the academy’s slow to change institutional practices might hurry up a bit. Publishing is indeed a valuable product. It’s necessary. However, this isn’t to say that we’ve gotten everything right about it, nor is it to say that it’s the only valuable thing. There are several valuable processes and products in which we partake, all along in our paths through academe, especially in our capacity as content producers.

Gatekeeper, doorperson, collector

For anyone acting in a capacity of deciding on what scholarship gets disseminated – publisher, editor, reviewer, yes, but also anyone regulating any particular medium for scholarly content producers – let’s start from a simple premise. Gatekeeping: bad.

It’s better that anyone responsible for regulating the flow of scholarly information see themselves as more of a doorperson. What does a doorperson do? A doorperson opens the door for people who have business inside, only refusing access when (1) one clearly has no business and (2) the inside is filled to capacity. Thus, a good principle for deciding about scholarly dissemination is to first ask oneself: Could this piece of scholarship have any business being disseminated to the scholarly community? In other words, regardless of whether I agree with what’s contained in this scholarly piece of work, is it the case that to the best of my own judgment, the scholarly content potentially has something good to contribute? If the answer is yes, then one should make a reasonable effort to disseminate it. Doorpersoning: good.

Still, there are a few things yet to consider. If one is a doorperson editor who edits a publication with a limited page budget, one finds oneself having to reject otherwise good manuscripts because there’s no room inside. Furthermore, one editor and maybe a few reviewers are perhaps too small a sample size to determine whether an article has value. Sure, one could paraphrase Churchill here and say that all this may be the worst possible of all systems but the best one we have, but I’m not sure that that’s exactly true given the possibilities offered by digital media.

What if we retooled the process of scholarly production? Why shouldn’t it be the case, for instance, that we use digital repositories like Research-Gate not for post-publication peer review but for peer review itself? In other words, why not post manuscripts in a digital repository first? This way, scholarship is available to the community as soon as it’s deemed ready by the author. This has the virtue of timeliness, something preferable to good work sitting around in a journal’s backlog that may be two to three years if it’s without online prepublication. The good articles get recommendations from readers. Thus, peer review isn’t limited to just a few people but is expanded to a large scholarly community online. If we do this, then what would be the task of the editor? The editor would scour the repository for articles that they may like to publish, using the number of recommendations and comments as a guide. The editor’s task is to become an expert curator. Furthermore, what if an editor had unlimited space to collect? If the digital repository is unlimited, why should any subset of that repository be limited if also digital? Collecting: maybe the best. This might be true for traditionally structured journals, but it can be even more true for a differently structured type of journal, a journal without an editor but which is assembled by a crowdsourced set of vetted reviews. The journal itself becomes the collection not of a single collector, but more on this later.

Sleep furiously, colorless green ideas

Here’s a riddle from “A Crazy Mixed-Up Day: Thirty Brainteasers,” a text Walter Benjamin prepared for a youth-hour radio broadcast. It’s couched in a story about a person named Heinz. Heinz has awoken sleepily, for he had been troubled by a riddle during the night. He then goes to find his friend Anton, an “absent-minded professor type,” who enjoys riddle solving.²

If each day a bookworm eats through one volume in a series of books, how long will it take for it to eat its way from the first page of one volume to the last page of the next, provided he eats in the same direction in which the series of books is arranged?³

Before I call absent-minded professor types nerdy bookworms, let me preface that I’ve always identified as both myself. At least my mom had identified me as the latter almost every time I went out to play. “Why do you dress like an old man?” she’d say. “Don’t the other kids make fun of you?” Granted, I didn’t go out to play very much. I spent a lot of time trying to read through all the volumes of our encyclopedia. I started this project over several times, each time in earnest to yet an even higher degree. I know a bunch of stuff about aardvarks.

Many of us bookworms grow up to become absent-minded professors. I’m not certain that it isn’t our bookishness that’s responsible for several of our methodological practices. For instance, why was it that most of my peers sported mullets or teased bangs and combined acid-washed denim with neon-colored T-shirts? They looked out into the world and saw that that’s what everyone in their peer group seemed to be doing; then they put that knowledge to work. For them, this came naturally. As for myself, I only notice those things now when looking at old high school photos. Like I do today, I apparently wore oxford button-downs and gray or navy chinos.

Back in the day, I didn’t really notice what’s now overwhelmingly noticeable. I was too single-mindedly busy trying to learn how to play jazz. By that time, I had given up on my dictionary project, and I had read all but one volume of our encyclopedia. We bought single volumes at a discounted price from the grocery store each week, but one week, we didn’t go. But again, my point is that in my single-minded focus on my extremely narrow interest, I missed a bunch of everything else.

Noticing what everyone was doing – which seemed to come easy for almost everyone else – took a lot of effort on my part. I had to go about it in a way that approximated scientific rigor: “What is it, exactly, that makes gray chinos nerdy? Is it the material, the color, the looser cut, all, or a combination of these? In my granddad’s time, they weren’t nerdy at all, and all the cool jazz folks wore them, too. But it appears that values have changed. What brought this about? Is it a single thing, or is it rather a constellation of things coming together in this historical present? Furthermore, is this change in values geographically confined? Perhaps I should go to the mall and carefully observe the cool kids. I shall have to take field notes.” Anyway, having inserted some sufficient suspense, here’s the answer to Benjamin’s riddle:

The bookworm needs only a moment to get from the first page of the first book to the last page of the second, because in a properly arranged library, the first page of the first book is right up against the last page of the second.⁴

This might also be the answer to a riddle we have ourselves, although not necessarily one that we’ve been trying to solve. The bookworm performs what seems to be a time-warp jump but only if you figure that it’s eating from left to right from the perspective of the front-facing edges of a bookshelf. It could be eating from left to right from the perspective of the back-facing edges. Similarly, my fashion sensibilities had been both behind and ahead of their time...