When it was working, it was a gift economy
July 27, 2022 11:38 AM   Subscribe

Why is humanities scholarship struggling? Peer review in those fields is apparently slowing down and getting harder to accomplish. Maybe it's because of changing faculty attitudes.

Or perhaps it's due to a deeper problem within American higher education:

The operational necessity of institutions chasing tuition revenue is fundamentally at odds with the purported mission of educating those students and producing new knowledge through faculty research. We can’t ask institutions to produce a public good while structuring them like competitors in an increasingly intense marketplace.
posted by doctornemo (38 comments total) 22 users marked this as a favorite
 
Or perhaps it's due to a deeper problem within American higher education:

Or, the decades-upon-decades of overt disrespect in our popular culture for anything remotely considered “liberal arts” or “humanities”? I mean, when haven’t they been the butt of cruel jokes in popular media? Our culture shits on anything not directly aimed at turning a profit.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:53 AM on July 27, 2022 [49 favorites]


I will RTFA but first will speculate it has something to do with the valuation of ‘the humanites’ by the MBAs that have been put in charge which tracks closely with the ability of said MBAs’ ability to even understand, let alone value and care for, all that the presence of humanities education can bring about.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 12:14 PM on July 27, 2022 [13 favorites]


Humanities have always been considered utterly worthless. What's different now?

Also, this is all unpaid labor? And you're wondering why people might not feel like they wanna do it? I'm sure no one can pay because humanities are worthless...and thus, the cycle continues. (I note the guy who asked for consultation money hasn't gotten offered a penny.)

Once again, this is why I'll never work in a field I love and care about again, because humanities are worthless.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:17 PM on July 27, 2022 [3 favorites]


Not a single mention of the massive reduction in tenure-stream jobs? Seriously? Just a mild scolding that we all need to be doing more unpaid labor "for the discipline"? (referring to the third article)
posted by daisystomper at 12:25 PM on July 27, 2022 [44 favorites]


This is true in the health sciences, too (not paying peer reviewers to stamp quality studies as peer-reviewed).
posted by honey badger at 12:38 PM on July 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

A tide of fascism in Texas is at his armpits and rising fast, and he thinks the problem is lack of infrastructure in humanities scholarship?

As I understand it, Gov. Abbot is floating the idea of eliminating public education altogether in Texas.
posted by jamjam at 12:49 PM on July 27, 2022 [4 favorites]


As an erstwhile academic librarian and current full-time non-tenure-track instructor (not an adjunct; I have an actual full-time teaching gig with benefits) in higher ed...

... academe did this to itself by valuing REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-surch above absolutely everything else about working in higher ed. Above shared governance. Above outreach and public scholarship. Above unions. Definitely above teaching. Absolutely above service (such as but not limited to peer review).

Did academe yell when intro courses started being taught by TAs and adjuncts? Did they hell. It meant more time for their REEEEEEEEEEEEEE-surch, so they cheered it on. Oh, gosh, turns out teaching is far more visible to key stakeholder populations such as legislators, alumni, and donors? Oopsie. Did academe yell as the REEEEEEEEEEEE-surch requirements for tenure-track employment and tenure itself got more and more ridiculous? Nah. They cheerfully kept ratcheting them up.

This is every bit as true in the humanities as anywhere else, though the exact way it played out does differ somewhat by discipline.

My position, as an incredibly useful cog in the teaching wheel (I do a bit of research around the edges, but it's tolerated rather than required), is far more secure than many of theirs, and that's on THEM, not me.
posted by humbug at 12:58 PM on July 27, 2022 [37 favorites]


Humanities have always been considered utterly worthless. What's different now?--
jenfullmoon

But that's not true. In my Dad's day (late 1940s) a humanities degree was the normal step toward a business or legal job or advanced degree. There was still some concept of the importance of a well-rounded humanities education for becoming a good leader.

Having grown up in what has become Silicon Valley, I've watched how software and tech has become King, and we see the results of that with tech companies seeming to have no concept of how their industry is affecting the world (and their own companies) in negative ways.

We need to have a new respect for humanities as a basis for leadership, even if it takes global disasters to get us there.
posted by eye of newt at 1:00 PM on July 27, 2022 [23 favorites]


Picture Seymour Skinner muttering to himself in the Assistant Associate Vice Provost's Dean's Provost for Excellence's office:

"Could it be that when we told them that some things were important by steadily rewarding them and that other things are worthless by never rewarding them, they paid attention and are doing the things we told them they should be doing?

No. It's the assistant professors who have a bad ethic of individualism."
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 1:09 PM on July 27, 2022 [43 favorites]


Peer review is wild. It's like if you took your car to mechanic and one mec said: "we noticed all your doors have rusted out, you should fix those" and another said: "LOVE THE RUSTED DOORS, but have you considered adding a flame thrower?" and a third said: "it's not a horse." - Josh Grubbs
posted by straight at 1:26 PM on July 27, 2022 [30 favorites]


Peer review at its best is not quality control -- it's quality improvement. (To all the peer reviewers I've ever had who made my work better: I ADORE YOU ALL. YOU ARE THE BEST.)

It was arguably never good enough as the near-sole quality control measure for research publication, and as ways to diddle data, erase ethics, screw statistics, and color conclusions multiply beyond belief... it's cryingly obvious that additional quality-control processes are needed. They'll have to vary by discipline, of course -- my research definitely needs ethical oversight, for example, and a plagiarism check wouldn't hurt (though I don't, I swear!), but I've never had to do a Western blot in my life, so the image scrutinizers can pass my work by.
posted by humbug at 1:34 PM on July 27, 2022 [7 favorites]


Did academe yell when intro courses started being taught by TAs and adjuncts? Did they hell. It meant more time for their REEEEEEEEEEEEEE-surch, so they cheered it on.

I had a friend for a long time who, like you, had a full-time, all-teaching, non-tenure-track job at a major research university. In her department, the tenured faculty could "buy out" their teaching requirements to focus entirely on research. The buyout amount they reverted to the department was more than my friend was paid per class, so it was a moneymaker for the department.

That wouldn't work in humanities, because humanities scholars don't do the kind of research that is funded by outside grants, but it was eye-opening for me to learn that this kind of thing happened.

In the fall of 2019, I sat in on a graduate seminar in literature at my local big university, where I was a grad student in literature 20+ years ago. I'd had a course with this same professor but we didn't really remember each other. I said the first night, something like, "I've been very excited to come here because I'm dying to know what took the place of post-modernism," and the prof said, "We have no idea. That's one reason the profession is falling apart."
posted by Well I never at 1:41 PM on July 27, 2022 [5 favorites]


How else would it work? I've had colleagues running enough research that there official workload was nine days a week. How can they still carry a teaching load that's the same as someone without those projects?
posted by biffa at 1:47 PM on July 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


My experience as a humanities academic is that all the structural issues may be real (I am an associate editor for a journal, which means I commission book reviews, and due to the state of my subfield I am frequently unable to find any reviewers—much less reviewers who meet the modest diversity goals I've set for myself).

However the quality of humanities scholarship remains excellent and is probably improving as a result of the fact that awful competitive pressure in the field exerts a lot of influence. So I don't know if it's really a good thing.
posted by derrinyet at 1:59 PM on July 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


The university became a profit-center.
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:02 PM on July 27, 2022 [6 favorites]


But that's not true. In my Dad's day (late 1940s) a humanities degree was the normal step toward a business or legal job or advanced degree.

I wasn't around in the 40's, but I have definitely gotten the "humanities are worthless" message over and over again since oh, high school a few decades ago. One guy even said to my face it was useless. This is a fun thing to hear when you literally don't have talents in any other fields that are more useful. I guess times have changed, because all I've heard my whole life is that arts are expendable, my degrees are useless, etc. And this has pretty much been the case in practice for me as well.

Society values what it values, and this isn't it. What can you do.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:25 PM on July 27, 2022 [5 favorites]


Well, this post has reminded me that I have an article to referee...

The emphasis on research has only limited explanatory power, I fear, because most academics are not at campuses that require any significant research output. A UC campus might outsource its intro to lit courses to a TA, but random Directional State, Cute Little SUNY Comprehensive, or branch campus will have few-to-no TAs and often surprisingly few adjuncts. (The bulk of my tenure and promotion to full professor rested on my teaching performance, even though I also write a fair amount for someone at my kind of comprehensive college; we have adjuncts to fill out the writing program, but everyone teaches composition and introductory courses.) I currently have a course reduction...because I'm doing Time-Consuming Administrative Job, not because of the book I'm writing. And the "write your way out" approach to life no longer works, given the implosion of tenure-track jobs at any level.

Most of my peer review experiences have actually been helpful, so I'm not complaining there, but it can take a while--I submitted an article to a journal in March and have heard nothing since the editors' acknowledgment. For someone in my position, such delays are irritating at most, but the prof who pointed out that this situation is incredibly damaging to junior faculty is on the money. (Famous UK University Press lost the manuscript for my first book--this was in the old days of, gasp, hardcopy submissions--and didn't fess up for a very long time, which would have been a really terrifying situation if I had needed it for tenure.) One way to fix the backlog situation, to be honest, is to bring back desk rejections...

The disappearance of tenured and tenure-track positions is absolutely a driver of this problem. There are just fewer people to do all the work? (And those people are likely dealing with increasing service burdens as well, as their campuses try to cut corners.) It's also the case, though, that if you have a corporation like Elsevier raking in big profits off of the free labor of a lot of journal editors, authors, and referees, then at a certain point people begin to ask some hard questions about the arrangement. The original justification for not compensating referees, editors, etc. was that you were repaid for it elsewhere--it would count for promotion or merit pay increases. If such labor is not doing even that, though...
posted by thomas j wise at 2:25 PM on July 27, 2022 [9 favorites]


is to bring back desk rejections...

This isn't a thing in the humanities? It definitely still is in economics and I have the scars to prove it.

(so is being paid to referee; it's nice to know where the submission fee is going. But, yeah, we have submission fees, whereas I've gathered my STEM colleagues generally don't but do have to pay once the article's accepted. Anyway, the disparate experiences of publishing in different fields suggests that the existence of Elsevier is neither necessary nor sufficient as an explanation for this, although I doubt they're helping much. And of course the burden of reviewing books is much higher than a shorter article).
posted by dismas at 2:44 PM on July 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s I worked at both Intel and Apple as a software engineer with a BA in Religious Studies from UC Santa Barbara. One of my fellow engineers had a BS in marine biology. Other engineers had equally irrelevant college degrees there. Having a college degree meant something then because it reflected your abilities. A liberal arts degree was just as valuable as an engineering degree then. Plus UC when I was there was cheap. Dead cheap. Now liberal arts degrees are probably a waste of a lot of money. No respect. No jobs. High tuition. I’m just glad I was around back then. Now I couldn’t afford a college education. And majoring in what I am interested is a waste of money. And I don’t have a clue if a liberal arts education will ever be of value again. As to software engineers? I think most employed by Silicon Valley now live in other countries. This is a nation of anti-intellectuals. And people who dream of earning a billion dollars. Ha!
posted by njohnson23 at 2:46 PM on July 27, 2022 [9 favorites]


One form that credentialism took up through the '60s or so was that any college degree would get you a better job and a management track option. Being "well rounded" was definitely a justification for it. Also general humanities requirements were way more common and way more extensive as well.

I'd love to hear from people who've studied the history formally, but I was growing up in the '70s and I feel that was the tail end of the era. You got more career focused majors ("communications" for example) and as more people got degrees you needed something postgraduate to impress (I believe law degrees doubled as catch alls for this sort of thing, prior to the dominance of the MBA.)

There were arguments in the '50s about the increased public funding of the sciences, and some luminary justified it by saying the sciences were valuable for their own sake, just like poetry and art were. They didn't need applications. Times have changed . . . .
posted by mark k at 2:53 PM on July 27, 2022 [4 favorites]


The fault mostly lies outside the academy but I’ve never felt dumber than when I was taught by those in the literature department and read their assigned readings. The mockery from the outside is cringeworthy but a lot of this scholarship is impenetrable. I eventually got a MA in a humanities degree (history) and actually could understand that stuff (not to mention a PhD in the social sciences). Literary scholarship didn’t do themselves any favors, any more did a lot of the social sciences who went all formal theory heavy decades ago.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 3:14 PM on July 27, 2022 [2 favorites]


This isn't a thing in the humanities? It definitely still is in economics and I have the scars to prove it.

It was when I started out a couple of decades ago, but in US humanities journals, appears to have disappeared as a common practice.
posted by thomas j wise at 3:23 PM on July 27, 2022


academe did this to itself by valuing REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-surch above absolutely everything else about working in higher ed.

i mean, what do you want when universities that traditionally made a good portion of their nut from state appropriations have to look elsewhere for money? it's gotta come from somewhere, so naturally departments and colleges are going to prioritize someone who can bring in external funding over someone who cannot. would you prefer hiking student tuition even more? for all the grotesquerie of bloated university administrations, they also have a role in hustling private donor money and marketing the institution to fresh meat. every public university is constantly trying to patch the hole de-investment in higher education has blown in the budget.

i get you have some Opinions about researchers, but maybe they are not the villains you seem to think they are.
posted by logicpunk at 3:26 PM on July 27, 2022 [7 favorites]


My impression is that higher education in the United States is clearly broken in quite a few respects. What I wonder is how this differs from e.g. Europe or other parts of the world. Are things equally broken there? If not, what are the primary differences? Education is almost certainly more subsidized outside the US but is that the sole difference, and if so then how do those mechanics play out?
posted by Slothrup at 3:50 PM on July 27, 2022 [3 favorites]


The university became a profit-center.

Here it is

This is the answer, and it's happening everywhere now, not just to liberal arts

Also the proliferation of MBA's, a degree which is Of The Devil
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:05 PM on July 27, 2022 [7 favorites]


"a humanities degree was the normal step toward a business or legal job or advanced degree"

I realize the difficulty of finding good legal jobs these days could be another thread, but doesn't the truism remain that most lawyers have undergrad history degrees?
posted by cidrab at 4:36 PM on July 27, 2022 [1 favorite]


Agreed with that, Ray Walston. And to qualify my earlier comment: I have worked with MBAs most of my 30 year career in corporate America. At one point I worked in small prestigious college that existed almost entirely for the purpose of minting MBAs. Most of the MBAs I have worked with a good people. Some are extremely thoughtful and generous and actively doing Good Things in their communities. My favorite, a very kind and humble person whom I worked for for a bit, was fond of saying, I'm just another douchebag MBA from Stanford.

What I've observed is that many MBAs believe that the set of skills they have been taught are applicable to any and all problems in almost any type of organization (as long as there is money to be made, of course). I get why that is. Within a certain domain, I think it's true. One of the problems with the MBA-ization of America is, I believe, is that there is a belief that that set of skills can and should be universally applied to all domains -- which is absurd -- and that doing so can only result in value. For some, I think the value is understood to be "what keeps me employed" or "what builds my resume" so that they can move on to the next organization that's been led to believe the only way to enact change or solve challenges is to bring in someone from the outside. I think that's often necessary, the problem is that too often the organization brings in an MBA, which is not the right tool for many jobs. But the MBA is really good at speaking about any problem, in a skillful and knowledgeable way, and are personally highly relatable, and -- critically -- is fantastic at appearing confident and unafraid of any challenge -- so they endear themselves to the organization and their methods then are assumed to be The Only Way.

To a guy with a hammer that he built using the exacting specifications learned at Wharton or Sloan or Kellogg or wherever, every. single. situation. looks like a nail.

Why anyone ever thought that's a good approach to academia... well, someone saw a chance to make some money, or raise their stature, or 'create a legacy', and was willing to go after those things at the expense of the quality and availability of education.
posted by armoir from antproof case at 4:38 PM on July 27, 2022 [10 favorites]


As a recently departed academic, I agree with GCU and others: this is an issue of incentives. In a highly competitive job market, those who spend time on things that benefit the field (in this case free referee work), but aren’t rewarded are out competed by those who do what gets rewarded: (1) research dollars (common in STEM) (2) publications (quantity, not quality), (3) students (who help the other two).

Bret Devereaux made this point excellently.
posted by eigenman at 4:44 PM on July 27, 2022 [6 favorites]


In a highly competitive job market

Another labor shortage driven by Amazon warehouses bidding up the price of labor!
posted by pwnguin at 5:06 PM on July 27, 2022


I'd argue that volunteering time to support Elsevier is morally wrong.

Roland Hatzenpichler...said it’s been about a year since he started refusing to review for for-profit journals for free. In response to one journal’s recent request that he review an article, for instance, Hatzenpichler thanked the editor for the invite but said that because the publication is owned by a major for-profit company with high profit margins, “my consulting fee of $200 per hour applies. Please let me know if these terms are acceptable and I will consider whether I can accept the invitation and/or suggest alternative reviewers. Please note that I will charge a one-time fee of $50 for the latter because I would be effectively doing the work you are being paid for free otherwise.”... “I’m not saying I have the solution to the problem, I’m just saying that I cannot offer my services to a company that gives nothing back to the community.”
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 5:24 PM on July 27, 2022 [11 favorites]


i am a scholarly publishing librarian who has come to know this whole scam so intimately and can't seem to get anyone to care enough to do anything about it

so RTFA will give me hives
posted by avocet at 6:05 PM on July 27, 2022 [13 favorites]


The increase in publication expectations is really an important factor here. I know professors who got tenure in Humanities at R1 institutions -- I mean really good ones -- with 2 or 3 publications. like in the period 1980-2000. Nowadays that would be more like what you need to get a TT job at a lot of places. It's true that not everyone needs to publish a lot. Something like 2-3 articles is often sufficient for tenure at more teaching oriented institutions that are still competitive. But a lot of people still try to land a research job, and people just expect more and more.
Another thing is that reviewing has become better in a sense -- there are often two reviewers, the reviews are often long and helpful, there is less desk rejection. There's the expectation that the job of a reviewer is to help -- but it really isn't! I mean, I try to help and often send 4-5 page reviews, but 10-20 % of the time, the submission is just misguided (clearly coming from someone who feels they have to publish things though the work is not nearly ready) and it's clear the author just needs to wait, learn more, etc. In those cases a quick rejection is in order. (I would reserve "desk rejection" with no comment for the absolute worst cases, but suggest that a quick indication of the main problems could be used more often than it is now).
The situation in continental Europe is different because people publish a lot less in peer reviewed journals and a lot more in edited collections. They just don't have the same reviewing standards. That's changing to some degree (fortunately!).
I would be very happy to see publication levels halved, with tenure, hiring etc. taking into account quality of research more than quantity, and giving more weight (at most universities) to teaching, service, etc.
I am not sure where the demand for more publications is coming from. Probably a combination of administration, simple competition, but also departments wanting to have more prestige. I feel like departments could make a point of focusing on quality and other factors more than quantity, even if that is not the only or most important factor.
posted by melamakarona at 12:20 AM on July 28, 2022 [4 favorites]


I just want to defend peer review and say I think it's good, and that even when something I submit gets rejected (as happened yesterday), I find the feedback very helpful. In my very privileged part of science (machine learning + neuroscience) things are... pretty okay, actually. There are lots of problems, but the field is also flush with opportunity and cold hard cash, and so the *community* as such I think is reasonably healthy. Peer-review isn't the problem, it's the community around it, and whether it's properly supported.

On a somewhat different note, I wonder if the major reason people are publishing so much more is simply because the infrastructure has gotten much more efficient. Finding articles, communicating with coauthors, generating figures, and typesetting papers has, I think, simply gotten a lot better. Although this is overall a good thing, it has caused the publishing market to be flooded with content in a way that it can't quite handle. From a purely production standpoint, similar things have happened in music and video games, where the tools have gotten so good that the market is flooded with good content, and the problem shifts from getting it out there to getting it noticed.

One way to get noticed in academia is to drive up cite counts. One of the easiest ways to do that is to... just generate lots of papers. Hmm... that doesn't seem sustainable, does it? Thankfully there aren't any exploitative publishers out there that would seek to encourage this.
posted by Alex404 at 1:43 AM on July 28, 2022 [2 favorites]


Alex404
I think that in Humanities cite counts etc. are a lot less important, there are still a lot of fields where there are the in people, the good journals, etc., and other stuff just doesn't get read. I obviously don't want to make a blanket statement but I really wish there was less stuff to read. It's not that there's nothing there, but it seems like the payoff is smaller and smaller as time goes by. But there are people who are not at the most prestigious jobs, who don't have really high expectations, and who have published a couple of great things that it's clear they have thought about, taught about, for years. I wish more people could do that, but it's very hard to get a (new) job that way.
posted by melamakarona at 6:29 AM on July 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


I said the first night, something like, "I've been very excited to come here because I'm dying to know what took the place of post-modernism," and the prof said, "We have no idea. That's one reason the profession is falling apart."

The good news is, that question now has a clear answer (Nathan Fielder.)
posted by escabeche at 7:15 AM on July 28, 2022 [2 favorites]


But there are people who are not at the most prestigious jobs, who don't have really high expectations, and who have published a couple of great things that it's clear they have thought about, taught about, for years. I wish more people could do that, but it's very hard to get a (new) job that way.

You know it's funny, because that's sort of what I aspire to. I don't really have the ambition to push for some big career, I just really enjoy doing research. Although I've had a number of setbacks, recently it feels like a reasonably stable career in science feels attainable, even without the carrot-on-a-stick of a professorship. But I'm pretty sure these days a career arc like mine is only really feasible in the most privileged corners of academia. It feels very unfair that many people in other fields who are much harder working than I am are being exploited and/or driven out.
posted by Alex404 at 8:24 AM on July 28, 2022 [1 favorite]


I think it's helpful to look outside universities to find the source of the pressure on universities to behave more like businesses and stray from their "well-rounded" educational mission. State universities receive a fraction of what they used to from their states, and federal funding of universities has moved from funding the institution to funding the research universities do. When people shake their heads at the rising cost of tuition, they seem to ignore what's happening in their state legislatures and at the Department of Education. They are also ignoring the growing disparity between science and medicine research funding and humanities research funding. The NSF's 2021 research budget was 6.8 billion, the NIH's research budget was 41.7 billion, and the NEH's research budget was 14.5 million. When those are the inputs we shouldn't be surprised at the outputs.
posted by Stanczyk at 9:45 AM on July 28, 2022 [5 favorites]


Haven’t rtfa but is the answer “capitalism”?
posted by Grandysaur at 8:32 AM on July 29, 2022


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