In my continuing concern about what the academy will look like after the carnage of the crash is over, I want to turn to where legal scholarship is headed. I thought about titling this post, "The Coming Decline in Publication Requirements"--but that would have been misleading for a reason that I'll talk about shortly.
Here I also want to talk about Lindsay Waters' recent article on "Slow Writing; or, Getting Off the Book Standard: What Can Journal Editors Do?" (available here for those who are coming from urls with a subscription). Waters is at the center of the humanities; he's executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press. So what he says needs to be taken very seriously. He's an extremely important gate-keeper, a keen observer of trends, and an important critic of humanities scholarship. I highly recommend his article. Several upshots of his article are that too many books are being published, too early in the careers of faculty, and that there should be a renewed emphasis on the essay. I agree with a lot of this, though perhaps not quite with the amplitude of Waters' criticism.
Waters predicts that the scholarly monograph will go out of style (or fall out of its current fashion, anyway) in part because of economics. University libraries just can't afford to keep paying for monographs. A lot of times when I read a book I think, I'd rather have read a short version of it in an article. In fact a lot of the key arguments of books appear in one or two articles before they're published. For those books, which in essence reprint articles, I think many justifiably ask, "why was this book published?" Then again, sometimes books build on articles and are more than the one or two articles that have appeared already.
What Waters says resonates even more with our current economic crisis. There is a modesty about essays that befits our new, scaled-down era. We're hearing a lot more about "get rich slow"; perhaps essays--and fewer and better thought-out ones at that--are the academic parallel (something akin to "get established as a scholar slow"). In the go-go 80s (and the go-go 90s), we did things big and fast. One of my former students, an engineer, had an apt critique of the "fast" approach. I think it was from the Chrysler assembly line, something along the lines of "faster's slower, slower's quicker." We're learning the wisdom of that in the economy--and perhaps there is a parallel phenomenon in the legal academy. I'm not sure.
In post-crash America, we do things slow, if we are fortunate enough to have the resources to do them at all. Perhaps we'll also return to traditional topics: doctrine in the case of legal academics, close readings of cases. Maybe we'll refocus on ideas. Hard to know where this is all headed, but the changes may be big.
And in part I think the coming increase in teaching loads will also contribute to this. When you're teaching four sections of 80 students and serving on a couple of university committees, it won't be possible to write as much as people have been doing of late. There's something lost here, obviously. But we will gain some things as well. One gain is the pleasure of working with more students; perhaps another gain is that there will be an attempt to perfect our work. At least maybe that's one way of thinking about making a virtue out of a necessity.
So maybe one of the things we'll see "after the fall" is a decline in number of publications expected, but maybe also an increased emphasis on quality. Fewer publications make it easier for tenure and hiring committees to take seriously work. Who knows--but perhaps that'll happen.
Alfred Brophy
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