morricone/theremin
50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street
on inequality and academic publishing (and how google scholar is like the sat)
How does our publishing define us? And why is publishing the way professors are defined? Chad Wellmon* and Andrew Piper have a really interesting paper that combines historical work on the changing definition of a professor alongside some nice quantitative work on who winds up publishing where:
In the case of contemporary university assessment, the relative value and authority of individual scholars and institutions are directly linked to “research outputs.” Publications are discrete objects that can be counted and compared. They have become the academy’s ultimate markers of value, especially in the humanities and humanistic social sciences where other markers of quantifiable value such as grants and private funding are less prominent.
Wellmon’s a professor of German and has written a book about the invention of the modern university, so it’s no surprise the article takes a deep dive into the German roots of what we modern academics do. Then we get to the article’s quantitative second half, which comes out of Andrew Piper’s really interesting work on the digital humanities (like text mining the novel!)
So what do they find? It turns out where you work matters for where you get published, but even more important is where you went to school. My one criticism of this finding would be that humanities professors at non-elite schools just don’t need articles for tenure or status: the humanities they’re looking at are still mostly monograph games. My hunch is you’d find a bit more parity if you looked at monographs, especially as correlated with where people work (though where they went to school might look about the same as Wellmon and Piper find in reference to articles).
Yet the irony of a focus on publications is that it was supposed to make things more equal! As Wellmon and Piper tell the tale, to be a professor in days gone by was to depend on patronage networks and relatively arbitrary methods of evaluation. So then we say, wait, okay, we’ll look at publishing. That will even things out! Yet it turns out the rich still just get richer, and we haven’t replaced patronage networks so much as changed the patronage sources and forms. It’s a weirdly similar story to the SAT, which was intended to make a smart kid from a public school in Kansas commensurable with a prep school kid from Rye, New York. Yet the SAT didn’t quite work like that, for reasons sociologists of education have been studying for some time. And it turns out Google Scholar doesn’t work like that either. Yet one of the biggest problems here is that both Google Scholar and the SAT seem to work. After all, professors X and Y can both submit to the same journal with an equal shot, just like students X and Y can take the same SAT on the same day. And to go back to “incalculability” wouldn’t work either:
For many in the humanities, it is precisely the process of Weberian rationalization, embodied above all in counting mechanisms like the REF or Google Scholar, that have contributed to the ills of the current system. Only an emphasis on the “incalculable” or ineffable nature of humanistic practices and objects of study can preserve the health of intellectual inquiry into the future. And yet the history of scholarly publication that we have tried to outline here tells us a different story: the recourse to measurability in exercises like the REF is not something administratively new but part of a much longer attempt to undo ensconced systems of patronage and loosen forms of institutional favoritism and cultural capital. The recourse to accounting for publication was implemented in the spirit of transparency and intellectual openness. The urge among some humanists to resist this tradition absolutely and as a matter of principle would only retard attempts to redress longstanding patterns. The invocation of incalculability has to date served as a highly effective means of maintaining hierarchy and the concentration of power, prestige, and patronage––cultural capital of all sorts.
So what do we do? They’ve got a modest suggestion:
What we need in our view is not less quantification but more; not less mediation but mediation of a different kind. It is not enough to demand intellectual diversity and assume its benefits. We need new ways of measuring, nurturing, valuing, and, ultimately, conceiving of it. We need alternative systems of searching, discovering, and cultivating intellectual difference. We need platforms of dissemination that don’t simply replicate existing systems of concentration and patronage, just as we need new metrics of output and impact that rely less on centrality and quantity and more on content and difference.
Read the whole thing (it’s free for now).
*I looked at an early version of this paper for Chad (he’s a fellow at the IASC where I did a post-doc).
the root of things
50+ chapters of grad skool advice goodness: Grad Skool Rulz ($4.44 – cheap!!!!)/Theory for the Working Sociologist (discount code: ROJAS – 30% off!!)/From Black Power/Party in the Street
how to meet with a professor at a conference
It’s getting close to ASA, and you might be a grad student who wants to meet with a professor. That’s great! You should do it! Or you should at least try. Here are some tips for meeting professors at conferences. (By the way, it’s even better to try these at smaller conferences like SSHA or SSSR. ASA is crazy and huge and people’s schedules are often packed with all sorts of work and grad-school friends and collaborators and editors and all sorts of other stuff).
Before the Meeting
- Do it now. It’s not too late (a lot of folks are making their schedules now) but wait much later than now and a lot of folks will be pretty booked.
- Make sure the e-mail is friendly but also keep it formal. As a rule, call people by their title (Professor X) until they sign their e-mail with a first name or you’re told to call them by the first name. Explain, in the e-mail, why you want to meet and how the author’s work has been helpful for your own.
- Have a good reason for the meeting. Generic networking is fine for receptions and stuff like that, but if you’re e-mailing someone to meet, you should be able to explain pretty quickly how their work relates to yours and why meeting in person would be helpful.
- In terms of who you meet, always emphasize relevance over status. The best meetings I’ve had at any of these conferences are usually not with the stars of my subfields but with assistant or associate professors or even other grad students whose work I find really exciting and relevant to my own. Plus, these people tend to have more time.
- Do not be presumptuous. Make clear in your e-mail that you understand the professor might be too busy or otherwise occupied. You don’t have to be obsequious, but make sure you don’t come off as entitled. Nobody owes you their time or attention.
- Don’t form global impressions based on one encounter. You don’t get an e-mail back means you don’t get an e-mail back. It doesn’t mean the professor is mean, or you come off as stupid, or anything else.
During the Meeting
- Have fun! Obviously be professional, but this isn’t a job interview.
- Come prepared to discuss things about their work you find helpful and how it links to your work.
- Ask questions about that person. Sometimes when I’m nervous, I talk too much about myself because I don’t know how to handle silences. Try not to do that. This is a conversation, not a way to talk about and sell yourself.
- Don’t get personal about the other person unless they invite it first and even then, better to listen respectfully and keep it professional. The same usually goes for getting too personal about yourself. (Of course, different situations elicit different selves, etc, but as a rule this is usually pretty solid)
- Don’t do any big asks. Maybe someday you’d like to collaborate with this professor or even have them on your committee. Hold fast there tiger.
After the Meeting
- Send an e-mail thanking the professor for their time.
- In the e-mail, you might send a link to your work but remember, nobody owes you their time or attention. Don’t presume.
Good luck and have fun. And I’ll see you soon, I hope!
are publications the great equalizer?
So, as the job market approaches yet again, some questions about grad school, publications, and, well, jobs.
It all starts (and ends?) with where you go to grad school of course, and while it’s obviously not arbitrary where you get into grad school, most of us are reflective enough to know that it’s more arbitrary than the ontological verification of quality it can often become. Grad admission committees have a hard job (like any kind of committee doing any kind of ranking): they’re looking for evidence of potential for excellence as much as they’re looking for evidence that excellence already exists, and that’s after they already figure out what the hell a word like excellence means. Is grad school a boot camp, actually changing people from one kind of person into another, or is it a finishing school, taking folks who are already mostly where we’d like them to but giving them certain skills to get the rest of the way? Granted, Matthew Desmond did get into Wisconsin, but it’s a telling indication of the difficulty of gauging future success that one of sociology’s biggest starts only got into that one program.
Of course, grad school can be both boot camp and finishing school, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to get past the hegemony of the top 20 (and often top 10) departments. That list is fuzzy, of course, but if you think of, say the top 15 and the 15 or so other schools sometimes mentioned in the top 20, you have a sense what I’m talking about. What’s striking about these departments is that they don’t matter nearly as much in terms of where you’re working: look at any elite journal or publisher’s list and you’ll find people working at all sorts of colleges and universities. But then look at those CV’s of professors from across the land, and you’ll find a pretty consistent (though obviously not exclusive) list of Ph.D. programs. Of course, as you start getting into the faculties of regional universities and smaller liberal arts colleges that story changes a bit. There are plenty of people with doctorates from outside the top 20 at those schools, but as the market continues to be brutal, even that story’s changing. I went to Loyola New Orleans for undergrad, which was a great little regional university, even if it was basically a college. I think I had one professor with an Ivy League (or Ivy equivalent) doctorate. I didn’t really care, of course: they were great teachers, and I really didn’t understand how any of that stuff works. But I look at Loyola today and the CV’s of the faculty are totally different. And that’s not a story unique to Loyola New Orleans.
This isn’t an earth-shattering revelation, of course. But I bring it up because the job market is upon us again, and we’re back to that old joke about sociologists: sociologists think people gets into undergrad because of contingent social factors and they think people get jobs at sociology departments because they earn it. Of course, that’s not really true: we’re all aware (or at least most of us are aware) of how lucky we are to have our jobs. I’ve said before that imposter’s syndrome is a problem, sure, but for me, an even bigger problem is survivor’s guilt.
So how do we adjudicate worth if we’re aware of these contingencies? Peer-review publications! I think it probably is our best best, actually, but there are all sorts of ways in which this variable is not actually that independent of the others. There’s the problem of cumulative advantage, of course, which Headworth and Freese argue shows this is not really a caste system story. And that’s probably right, though with enough cumulative advantage, stratification can look a lot like caste.
There’s obviously the question of time and money for research and writing in the more prestigious (and private) programs, but even beyond that is the access to networks, a closer access to what’s fashionable, what’s necessary to cite, what’s important to avoid. In some ways, the fact that elite grad networks are spread more diffusely across the American academy than they used to be might make this less of a problem than it was, but it’s still a problem. But beyond this, there’s still the broader network and status problem of wanting the mana of a higher status Ph.D. within your faculty, and of particular network ties emphasizing those schools.
It’s an empirical question which would make a pretty good experiment how much an ASR/AJS plus top 50 school would do alongside an identical CV with a less prestigious journal and a top 10 school. But my hunch is the top 10 school would win out in a lot of places, which would show that publications are not, in fact, the great equalizer.
So what to do? Well the most obvious is for the top 20 schools to make a deliberate effort to hire form programs outside of the top 20, though, again, following Headworth and Freese, the kind of high-level publishing that might provide a useful signal does tend to correlate with a high-status Ph.D. But not always, and that makes it important to be on the lookout. Yet, as with anything related to capital accumulation, these high status schools have more to spend and can take these kinds of status risks. The much bigger challenge is for schools outside of the top 20 to be willing and eager to hire from peer institutions rather than stacking their decks with higher status Ph.D.’s. Yet there are far too many incentives pointing the other way.
