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It was about five and a half years ago now that my dissertation on Śāntideva was approved and I could receive my PhD. Most doctoral graduates try very hard to turn their dissertations into a published or at least publishable book. I can say with some confidence that that will not happen.
There are two key reasons for this, and I’ll address the second next week. The first, which I will discuss here, is practical and political. I have removed myself from the meatgrinder that is the faculty job market, and that fact creates new possibilities for me. My dissertation has been available free online here to you the readers ever since Love of All Wisdom began. I sent a link to the blog to a friend and colleague of mine; as soon as he received it, he sent me a Google instant message full of shock: “You posted your entire dissertation! Aren’t you interested in publishing it as a book?” His surprise was understandable. What publisher would want to sell a book whose contents are available for free? By making my diss free and easily available, it would seem, I had just made it that much harder to get on the traditional path: get your diss published, get tenure. I have heard some argue more recently that having a freely available dissertation doesn’t really affect one’s odds of getting published. Perhaps that’s true, and I hope that it is, but that was not a gamble that my friend would have been ready to take at the time. If I had tried to remain on the traditional path, I wouldn’t have been ready for it either.
What my friend didn’t know at the time was that I had just decided to get off that path. I had had a hard enough time finding a tenure-track job already, and with the crash of 2008 I saw the writing on the wall. I had wanted to start this blog for years before that time, but had felt too timid to do so.
Then in early 2009, I was very close to a tenure-track job at the University of Alberta – one of just three candidates offered a flyout. It was the kind of dream job I’d aspired to since beginning my PhD. It was a job specifically dealing with South Asian philosophy, and one poised between departments of philosophy and religious studies so I wouldn’t feel confined to one disciplinary approach. Even better, it was a 2/2 position at a research university, so I would have time to write, and be supported in that ambition. It paid very well, it was in a city, and it even meant I could return to Canada.
One Sunday evening, I got the dreaded email telling me another candidate had accepted the position. I felt glum and disappointed and went to bed.
The next morning, to my own surprise, I felt bright and joyful. But that didn’t make sense… or did it? Then I realized: a weight has been lifted. Now that this job is out of the picture, I know that I will no longer be making a serious effort to a faculty job. Now I can go off and find some other line of work where I can live where I choose, and which does not expect to devour my whole life. Now I don’t have to keep trying to convince myself that Edmonton is a place I want to live. (I’d already spent rather too much time listening to Stan Rogers’s The Idiot, and its quintessentially Canadian tale of hard-luck East Coasters who move to Alberta for work but miss their home.)
And especially: now I don’t have to write for the arbitrary specifications of academic gatekeepers, living in fear that saying the wrong thing will torpedo my job or tenure if the wrong person reads it. Only now do I have the “academic freedom” that is so laughably dangled before doctoral candidates, as if that were something that were actually likely to happen to most of them; only now can I say the things I’m actually thinking.
So I think the story has a happy ending, for as far as I can tell, my friend and I both played the game in the right ways; we both ended up with we wanted most. He is now a tenure-track – maybe even tenured? – professor, and I am not. But he’s based in an outer suburb in Texas, and I’m in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, places as full of intellectual activity as one could wish for. I would not dream of trading my life for his, and I hope the same is true in reverse.
And to return to the dissertation: I’ve long been a believer in open access, above all for scholarly publishing. Those who require payment for digital content usually justify the practice on the grounds that it’s the only way to ensure content creators – artists and writers – are compensated. For a number of reasons I think this argument is often unconvincing. But even if we assume it is correct in the general case, it has no justification in the academic world, where the creators are not paid. Currently, for the bulk of scholarly work, individuals or institutions must pay high prices, often extremely high prices (over U$100 for most 200-page Brill books) – for work that is produced for free! That is a racket and an outrage. It seems to me that the sooner we can end this closed ecosystem and make our freely created knowledge available to the whole world for free, the better.
And so I proudly make my dissertation available to everyone, on principle. That’s the ideal choice for the benefit of the world, whether or not it is the wisest choice for a tenure-seeking academic. Happily, I’m not that anymore.
Amod,
I think you did the right thing in making your dissertation available (and I am happy to read that you enjoy your life). I wonder whether the problem regards Academic life in itself or Academic careerists, though. I tend to make freely available (either through my blog or through Academia) whatever I write and I tend to receive the sort of reactions you mention and, even more frequently, something like “Are not you afraid someone is going to steal your work?” (By the way: no, I am not, although I am aware that it could happen.)
The reason for keeping on doing it, notwithstanding these “risks” is, in my case, quite clear: It happened to me many many times that, upon meeting someone, she or he asked me whether I was the same Elisa Freschi of the blog and that we started discussing about one or the other issue mentioned in it. This has happened only ONCE with my many articles or with my book. There is, thus, no comparison between the amount of feedback, of real relationships I may be able to build, of information I may be able to spread and of questions I may be able to raise through my “traditionally” published work and through my on-line one.
However, I keep on working in the Academia and will continue like that unless and until I cannot find any more funding (which is not a remote possibility, I have to admit). Thus, I do not think that the real alternative is between Academic claustrophobia and outer freedom, but rather between different sorts of people. But I now remember that we discussed this issue already (https://loveofallwisdom.com/blog/2011/03/21/because-a-manifesto/ and http://elisafreschi.blogspot.co.at/2013/01/is-academia-best-place-to-study-indian.html) and I am also ready to admit that the situation might be different in the US and that tenured jobs might be attractive for people with certain characteristic traits.
Yes, I agree things are different; for one thing, it sounds like the kind of para-academic job I now have is not available in Europe.
Thank you, Amod, for doing what’s right. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of free (as in speech) and open (as in access) availability of information. Of course there will always be secrets, lies and profits to be made, but at the level of academic discussion, this is precisely what we need.
I sense that over the next few decades we’re going to see a radical change in the current system. Already with the combined efforts of Archive.org and Google (Play) one has access to literally millions of books.
I think that one major way in which this revolution, so to speak, could take place is by professors themselves choosing to publish in open-access journals rather than those run by the devil that are these filthy rich corporations (Elsevier, Brill, Springer etc.).
And of course, one can only publicly sigh and privately smile when it comes to the sheer number of books Google Print/Books/Play has helped liberate (or ‘pirate’, if you’re an Elsevier executive). The cumulative pressure of free ebook sites (such as Ebookoid) which typically host upwards of 400k books is going to destabilise their business sooner or later.
Apologies for a second comment, but could you tell me what the scene is like for an academic in terms of library access? With your current position in the infotech department, do you retain free-of-cost access to all the journals and books your university has subscription to? And how often do you have to resort to buying something yourself as opposed to just using the uni library?
Yes, I do get full library access, which is a huge perk of this sort of position. It even includes inter-library loan, which means it’s less common that I have to buy my own books. I do that mainly for the kind of books I’m likely to come back to again and again.
This is one of the things I love about the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, since it’s been available free online since its inception, but is also peer reviewed. What I love about your blog, in contrast, is its semi-academic status, if that’s the more or less right thing to call it—that you take ideas seriously, but very much try them out, not worry about putting things exactly right. It is strange to think that philosophers writing as academic philosophers are so rarely able to step back from being precise and publishable and think about ideas.
One of my most interesting academic experiences happened at the Boston APA where you and I met. Most of the scheduled panels had been canceled, and philosophers tended to drift in to see whatever panel was left standing. I ended up going to an epistemology panel, which was attended by a bunch of philosophers who wouldn’t usually have been there. What fascinated me was that during the Q & A, before people asked their questions, they would announce some variant of: “I’m not an epistemologist, but . . .” before speaking. And I thought it was so fascinating that we’d constructed our discipline in such a way that philosophy PhD’s needed to point out that they weren’t really qualified to speak outside their specialization, and needed to flag that they should not be evaluated by the quality of their comment when they did so. Epistemology is a fun game, but there are a lot of rules to learn before you get to play it with the grownups.
It seems to me that this state of affairs leaves comparative philosophy a dangerous field, since we generally don’t do a great job specializing in anything—or at least I haven’t. Which leaves me feeling a bit mute most of the time. I’ve also been thinking about what gets valued and what may get missed in academic publishing. Whether for instance an interesting connection might not be appreciated if it isn’t stated quite right, while a paper that says (almost) nothing with perfect precision establishes one’s credentials as a serious philosopher.
This is a round about way of saying that I like your blog, and the intellectual space you’ve created with it. (And I liked your dissertation as well! Thanks for making it available!)
Thanks, Stephen. My first instinct was to rant about the narrowness of analytic philosophy, but that’s not fair; it’s really a much wider problem. I wanted to enter my religion program as a comparativist, but it rapidly became clear to me that I would never get hired if I did that. In retrospect, perhaps since I didn’t get hired anyway, I should have just followed my muse. But it was helpful to get the really deep concentration on Śāntideva that my diss provided, and the Nussbaum element really helped me engage it with my deeper interests. Anyway, yes, it certainly seems that to be a proper comparativist it seems you either have to have tenure already (and be satisfied with your current position) or leave the game entirely. Or never mind even comparativist – no junior academic could write the equivalent of Plato’s Republic or the Phenomenology of Spirit. “You’re a metaphysician! What do you know about political philosophy?”
As your comment notes, the stakes do go beyond the job issue, in that whatever your job status, people are inclined not to take you seriously outside your specialization. But at least when your career is no longer depending on what they think of you, you don’t have to care what they think.
In my opinion, attacking publishing companies for being “filthy rich corporations” (especially Brill, which is, to my knowledge, still a smallish and independent though publicly traded company) is barking up the wrong tree. Academic publishing is not getting excessive government subsidies or destroying the environment like the more corrupt oil companies. Having worked at Brill for 4 years, I see things from the other side. I have never met a single person who went into academic publishing for the money or who has gotten filthy rich from it. But publishing companies are businesses and they provide a service–and paying for services rendered by businesses is how economies function.
I respect the desire for open access of scholarly work, and sure, some of the publishing model is about controlling and profiting from information. However, from the other side, publishing companies provide a vetting process. Anybody can put their dissertation out there for free–it may be fabulous, it may not be. That’s a person’s right if they want to do that. But if one is looking to establish themselves in an academic profession, because of the volume of work out there for on the internet, how is anyone supposed to find it? And how are the people who do find it supposed to know that it’s solid scholarship? An individual author doesn’t have the same resources (or the reputation) of a well-established publishing company to promote a book.
If a scholar gets published by a well-established and well-respected publishing company like Brill, that automatically increases their academic street cred, if that’s what the author is looking for. It also guarantees they’ll make at least some money from their book sale (admittedly, however little). The book is automatically assumed to be of a certain quality. If the book is in a series, hundreds of libraries will receive the book for their stacks as a matter of course (thousands if their book is more mainstream). The book will appear in catalogs and will be featured in ads in relevant publications. It will be featured in social media outlets that have a larger number of followers than the author does. If authors self-publish, good luck to them at getting stores to carry the book–bookstores will often only do business with a company or a distributor, not individual authors. They know that the author’s work has been vetted and has a greater likelihood that people will buy it–plus, publishing companies and distributors will often take back remainders. The risk to bookstores is too great when buying from an individual.
When the consumer pays for a Brill book, they are paying for all the input costs that it took to create that book. I’m not saying that the books published aren’t expensive–they surely are. However, the profit margin for the company is often pretty thin by, say, oil company standards. The consumer is paying for acquisition, editing, production, formatting, typesetting, marketing, author’s royalties, etc. With digital content being published by a company, like an online journal or even an ebook, the buyer may not be paying for the physical production costs, but they’re still paying for all the rest of the input costs. Is the business perfect? No. Is there waste? Sure. I know that companies like Brill are not perfect. But I think calling for completely open access for all work is just calling for a giant slush pile. There’s a lot of crap out there on the internet. I would not want to sort through it all in a quest for actual quality work.
As to the argument that academics create their work for nothing… that’s the majority of artists. Most writers do not get an advance or a commission–they create their work with the idea that hopefully they will be able to sell it and earn money and, if not actual fame, some degree of notability. That’s not a racket–that’s how business works. Once they sell their work to a publishing company or distributors, they get royalties on every book that is sold–that’s their compensation.
With the advent of blogging and social media and all other internet media, the availability of information is certainly exploding. More and more people who put their work out there for free are gaining a following and maybe even making money. I’m sure this ever-changing culture is changing the face of the publishing industry. (I’ve been out of academic publishing for about 6 years, so I can’t speak as to the specifics of how.) However, I think it’s unrealistic to expect that viral fame will happen for lots of people. Also, it’s a problem that we are living in a society that increasingly expects to get high quality information and products for nothing. There’s got to be some kind of filter and vetting process, and it seems unreasonable to me to always expect that vetting to be a labor of love.
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