BY ANI KOKOBOBO
Guest Blogger Ani Kokobobo is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Slavic Department, at the University of Kansas as well as Editor, Tolstoy Studies Journal.
Jan Ekels the Younger [Public domain, Public domain or CC0]
Whether in person, or on social media, many colleagues, administrators, and friends have regularly encouraged my op-eds and explainer pieces. Yet when assembling my tenure file, I knew that these writings bore less weight in my professional dossier than even my book reviews or conference appearances. So what is the discrepancy, between the profuse encouragement and the fact that these writings do not seem to “count” for anything? And can we please do something to change this reality?
My op-eds amount to no more than 12,000 words – not quite the size of two academic peer-review articles. But their intellectual impact in my career and thinking far outweighs this modest word count. I hesitate to employ lofty terms like “public intellectual” because that merely stokes my Impostor’s Syndrome, but these writings have opened up my intellectual horizons and gotten me out of my disciplinary corner in deeply rewarding, transformative ways.
I penned my first op-ed about how Dostoevsky Predicted Trump’s America, a few months before the election of Donald Trump. The click-bait title worked well, as over 78,000 people visited the article page. As a nineteenth-century Russian literature scholar, I do highly specialized work normally read by a couple dozen other specialists at best, so this level of readership was unparalleled. Not to mention that, for the first time, I was able to share my expertise in a meaningful way with close family and friends who would not eagerly read my academic book and articles.
But exposure to a broader readership is only one part of why writing for the public can be so important. For me, my first op-ed also forged a path to a new confidence and a new sense of relevance in my own academic expertise: a feeling that my training and my thinking did not merely belong in libraries or lecture halls, but also in the public square. And if I could feel this way, as a scholar of nineteenth-century Russian literature, surely most academics are capable of this experience under the right circumstances.
Moreover, looking at my current research, I can also note that just as my expertise helps me understand contemporary political realities, so the reverse is also true. The exigencies of the present have their way of reflecting back on our intellectual interests, unsettling the calm, and unveiling new possibilities and new areas of inquiry. In other words, maintaining a footing and intellectually engaging with questions of the present makes us better scholars. Thinking about Tolstoy through the lens of #metoo, I unveiled new nuances about his writings.
With everything happening in the world, and national concern with boundaries between fact and fiction, our academic expertise and the unique perspective it can lend, is sorely needed, now more than ever. The modest contributions made by my op-eds were clear examples of a normally unrepresented voice joining a larger national conversation. In fact, groups like The Op-Ed Project have dedicated themselves to helping academics, and particularly women and minorities within that group, to contribute to public debates. Websites like The Conversation only publish the writings of academics, and the Washington Post recently launched a new series last year, Made By History, aimed at getting professors to pen explainer, historically-oriented pieces.
In encouraging academics to share their expertise with the public, these publishing platforms also seem to have borrowed the parameters of the academic writing model. They do not pay writers and justify this approach by describing their op-ed and explainer pieces as shorter in length, but on par with peer-review publications in terms of rigor. And certainly, academics do not get paid to publish peer-review articles.
Yet universities, who indirectly give credit for peer-review writings through promotions, do not seem to be on the same page about this question. Public writing, despite their perceived prestige on cyberspace or social media, tend to fall into the ether within the university setting. Most people will account for this labor on their CVs, but in my department’s annual evaluation, my colleagues were unsure as to how to evaluate my op-eds, and whether they were equivalent to book reviews, minor publications, or service publications.
In thinking about how to evaluate these writings, I’m not suggesting that op-eds or shorter explainer pieces should replace of peer-reviewed articles, or be valued at the same level. But to afford these efforts zero professional credit while the validity of disciplines like the humanities is perpetually being called into question, and academics are accused of being out of touch, seems like a missed opportunity for universities.
How about finding a way within our institutional, academic assessment frameworks to motivate scholars to speak to a broader audience? Obviously this motivation would vary greatly from discipline to discipline, but so does the role ascribed peer-reviewed articles and monographs. Angry letters to the editor or other informal writings might be neglected, but when academics use the skills and subject matter of their discipline to engage contemporary questions in reputable publications, should this part of our professional lives only be measured in likes and retweets?
Given how nebulous and unclear tenure and promotion standards can tend to be, why not make new meanings of the chaos and let go of some of our more antiquated notions that only certain types of publications are legitimate? One arbitrary proposal might be to have three op-eds or explainer pieces bear the weight of a peer review article. I suggest three due to the length involved, but also because it means that someone is consistently writing for a broader audience more than once, thereby becoming more comfortable with a broader frame in their day-to-day thinking and research.
We have real insights to offer the world as academics and not only should universities encourage us toward the public square, but they should expect us not to shy away from it. As the news gets grimmer and larger groups of people are dehumanized due to prejudice frequently born out of ignorance, it seems absurd to confine ourselves to certain genres and to only speak through narrow parameters accessible to other specialists. If we are going to educate, we should educate the world, and, speaking for myself, I love to educate through writing.
I am sorry to be an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud about JURIED scholarship but i believe that blind-refereed review by (supposed) ACADEMIC EXPERTS in the field SHOULD count for more toward a tenure or promotion decision in an ACADEMIC setting. (I was Editor of two separate scholarly journals for a total of 10 years, and that no doubt affects my strict outlook on this subject.)
Yes, many op-ed pieces require research and some are not strictly opinion pieces (despite the name), but tenure and promotion committees should be able to make those distinctions. The MAIN distinction, though, in my admittedly old-guard “opinion” is that there IS a place for “communicating with” and “educating” the world as a public intellectual but that the rigorous criteria of PEER review (even in low-circulation academic journals) is preferable to the “think-piece” in THE ATLANTIC.
Nonetheless, unless your university literally “confines” you to peer-reviewed publications, put your assembled op-eds in your T&P dossier — ideally with a note of explanation about how they should be considered as “alternatives” to traditional scholarship.
Great piece. Timely and important. Indeed, here it is in a wide-area blog and providing meaningful inquiry and provocation to potentially thousands of readers! In my view as a published author, contributor to numerous academic reviewed articles over the past 13 years, and with over 125 tier-1 print major media opinions since 1995, I applaud the writer here for his view: he is spot on. There are two separate issues however. One, the oped and related writing is indeed highly valuable as it affects potentially millions of readers, opinion makers and others. It demands clarity of thought and style while forcing the use of plain language. Moreover it really is in fact, or in effect, peer reviewed by professional editors, and their sensibilities, and the competition for space, are high barriers to overcome. Try your hand at the NYT just as an experiment (and good luck). The other issue is the Academy. Here is where the real problem is. Both for professors of all stripes, and for “outsiders” who may have produced the equivalent (and more) of several graduate degrees, there is deep prejudice and ignorance concerning publication and output channels snd how to value them. Ezra Pound lobbied the University of Pennsylvania to admit writer Carl Sandburg as a Fellow. Professor Felix Schelling wrote him back: “The university is not here for the exceptional man” (Selected Letters 1907-1941, New Directions, D.D. Paige, ed. Introduction xxiii). Regards and thank you.
Felix Schelling’s stupid and anecdotal remark is no reason to eliminate scholarly scrutiny and academic accountability for published research. the jobs we hold are with universities, not with THE NEW YORK TIMES or THE ATLANTIC. (There are, of course, even lesser magazines and even blogs that some might consider equivalent to juried publications.) Besides, who’s to say whether Carl Sandburg would have been a good teacher of poetry? Was he familiar with the extant literature? Did he know how to compose an academic syllabus? Could he transmit his knowledge to beginners?
In my field, Cinema Studies, I’ve often worked with HIGHLY successful professionals (Academy Award winners, published authors in non-academic books and magazines, etc.) SOME could teach and others could not.
As I noted above, I do not say that we should IGNORE non-academic writing but i do object to seeing it as the equivalent of blind-refereed, juried publication that was reviewed by ACADEMIC experts, not newspaper/magazine editors whose audience is the general public.
Incidentally, a colleague at a prior institution came up for tenure and listed his major publication as a short book called THE WINES OF UPSTATE NEW YORK. He argued that it was carefully researched, written clearly, and would have more impact than a scholarly tome in his discipline: Corporate Communications. Needless to say, he was denied tenure.