On the eve of the millenium, Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press wrote (PMLA 2000) an elegantly phrased, yet challenging, indictment of the book-criterion of tenure in literature departments. It had become a way of shifting the burden of tenure decisions from departments to university presses, he said. The result, he said, was that university presses were under "pressure to publish books that have little other justification than to build up a tenure case."
Thirty years ago, reputable publishers could expect college and university libraries to buy between 1,250 and 1,500 copies of any book that had successfully gone through the rigorous scholarly review process. That number has dwindled now to about 275 copies worldwide.
I wonder to what extent "essays" (or "papers", as we call them) are treated the same way in philosophy now. Is the market for refereed journals driven by supply, and is supply in turn driven by the quest for jobs, tenure, and promotion?
If the answer to this question is affirmative, is it healthy? I don't know what the circulation figures show, but twenty years ago when I was an editor, circulation for the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, a top twenty journal, was about 900. For the Journal of Philosophy it was about 4000. Figures like these were demand-driven. Today, I take it, journals are far more supply driven, and smaller circulation figures are acceptable. Many niche-journals are profitable because commercial producers (a) bundle them with must-have journals, and (b) charge an exorbitant amount for a package that includes components that most university libraries would not pay for if they were marketed separately.
However that might be, I wonder why journal referees have become a proxy for scholarly assessment. Waters described the syndrome this way:
One did not need to look directly at a colleagure and say that the group of us read your work and found it wanting . . . so please rebut us or you must go . . . One could say [instead] something like this: although we all know that you are a wonderful person, unfortunately the university presses of America have decided your work is not significant for reasons they know and have no doubt shared with you; therefore, you must go.
Substitute 'Elsevier and Springer' for 'university presses of America' and you have what I perceive to be the situation at many public universities today. My co-blogger, Eric, speaks from time to time against "philosophy as normal science." Some day soon, I'll take up his topic. In the meanwhile, let me speak up against philosophy as tenure-generator. Philosophy should begin in wonder.
ADDENDUM (Thanks to Michael Kremer, in comments below)
Written in 1991, the Preface to Michael Dummett’s Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics reveals something of the historical background. Talking about the “incentives” to research in Thatcher’s UK, Dummett writes:
The plan of the ideologues is to increase academic productivity by creating conditions of intense competition.
And about graduate students:
Nervously conscious from the start that they must jostle one another for the diminished number of posts, they are anxious to jump the first hurdle of the Ph. D. degree as quickly as possible, and then rush to submit their unrevised theses for publishers to turn into books.
The current state of journal publishing is a run-on effect of developments like these: commerce seizes the opportunities offered.
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