Yes, it is there, too: Academic false consciousness and academic journals

As if academic false consciousness wasn’t bad enough at our institutions and among graduate students, it appears that it is also present at academic journals. Last week, Olderwoman at Scatterplot posted about receiving a packet of five reviews of the same article, stating:

Although five was over the top and freaked me out, it has become pretty common now for me as a reviewer to get a packet with four reviews. No wonder we regular reviewers are feeling under the gun. The old calculation of two or even three reviews per article has gone by the wayside. The pressure for fast turnaround and the high turn-down or non-response rate among potential reviewers has led editors to send out articles to extra reviewers in the hopes of ending up with at least the minimum two or three.

But this is a death spiral. As a frequently-sought reviewer I get at least four requests a month, sometimes as many as eight, and I used to get more before I got so crabby.  When I was young and eager, I was reviewing an article a week [and thus, by the way, having a huge influence on my specialty area], and I know some people who are keeping that pace. But at some point you burn out and say “no more.” I, like all other frequently-sought reviewers I know, turn down outright the requests from journals I don’t know for articles that sound boring, and then save up the other requests and once a month pick which articles I want to review. So the interesting-sounding articles from good journals get too many reviewers, while the boring-sounding articles from no-name journals get none. If journal editors respond to the non-response by reviewers to boring-sounding articles by sending out even more reviewer requests per article, our mailboxes will be flooded even more and the non-response rate and delayed-response rate by reviewers will go up even more. Senior scholars are asked to review six to eight (or more?) articles per month. You have to say no to most of the requests.

And then we have the totally out of hand R&R problem. I think it is completely immoral to send an R&R to ANY new reviewers. I know a young scholar with a perfectly good paper who is now on the 4th (!!!!) iteration of an R&R from ASR. Not because she has not satisfied the original reviewers, but because the editors keep sending each revision to a new set of reviewers in addition to the original reviewers and, of course, the new reviewers have a different perspective and a new set of suggestions for the paper, some of which cover ground that was gone over in one or more of the previous revisions. Not to mention the problem that R&R memos are now longer than the original articles!!  We are no longer a discipline of article publishing, we are turning into a discipline of R&R memo-writing.

She proposes several ground rules that she thinks would help the problem and that reminded me a bit of Gary Fine’s discussion of similar problems as editor of Social Psychology Quarterly.

Fabio followed her post with one of his own, talking specifically about ASR and the number of R&Rs that are given:

This issue has arisen with respect to the American Sociological Review, the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association. The ASR has been giving R&R’s to many submitted articles, much more than average, and they are soliciting many reviews per article. It has also been sending articles through multiple rounds of revisions, leading to articles being held at the journal for years. Since they seem to accept to same number of articles per year (about 40), that implies that the multiple rounds of revision do not lead to publication for many authors. Here is my response to that post:

I am asking the American Sociological Review to curtail this practice. In writing this, I have no personal stake in this matter. I do not have any papers under review, nor has the ASR accepted my previous submissions. I only write as a member of the profession, senior faculty at a top 20 program, a former managing editor of an ASA journal (Sociological Methodology), former associate editor of the American Journal of Sociology, occasional board member for various journals, author, and reviewer.

The inflated R&R policy is damaging sociology in a few ways. First, by continually R&R’ing papers that have little chance of publication, the ASR is “trapping” papers that may be perfectly suitable for specialty journals or other outlets. Thus, inflated R&Rs keep good research out of the public eye for years. You are suppressing science.

Second, inflated R&Rs damage the reputation of the ASR itself. The goal of a flagship journal is to be very picky. When people hear that a paper has been invited for revision, they believe that the editors think that the paper is of great merit and wide relevance. Inflated R&Rs undermine that perception.

Third, you are damaging people’s careers. By trapping papers, you preventing papers from being resubmitted to other journals that can help their careers. Also, R&R invitations are often seen as signs of intellectual progress, especially for doctoral students and junior faculty. By lumping together strong and weak papers, you are debasing the “currency” of the R&R. When people see “R&R at American Sociological Review,” they no longer know what to think and that pollutes the junior level job market.

Fourth, you are wasting precious time. Reviewers are usually full time faculty who teach, mentor graduate and undergraduate students, do administrative work, conduct research, and have full family lives. Thus, when you ask for a fourth reviewer, or a invite a paper for a third round of R&R, you are taking up many, many scarce resources.

Olderwoman, Fine, and Fabio all make valid points that need to be addressed by editors as well as their reviewers. More than any of the other instances of academic false consciousness, this seems like something that can be addressed quickly and relatively easily. Let’s do it.

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Academic false consciousness among graduate students

Tenured and tenure-track faculty aren’t the only ones suffering from academic false consciousness; graduate students have it, too. David Banks notes that as colleges and universities eliminate paid positions (I received an e-mail recently noting that the support person taking over in my department will be responsible for covering three academic departments and three additional areas of the school – that isn’t even an entire paid day per week for each!) graduate students are increasingly asked to do things that support staff did in the past, “until they are credentialed enough to maintain a destructive status quo.” He concludes:

What I’m trying to highlight, and I think the list I opened with does this on its own, is the downright bizarre way the American academy has arranged its labor to the detriment of all. The well-to-do are positioned to succeed in graduate school, but only because they have the time to learn a dazzling array of skills that at one point were the jobs of middle class support staff or the service component of tenure-track faculty. This doesn’t even include the intangible and difficult to define cultural distinction necessary to make it seem as though you belong in the academy to begin with. Or, as Kendzior puts it, “ Higher education today is less about the accumulation of knowledge than the demonstration of status – a status conferred by pre-existing wealth and connections. It is not about the degree, but the pedigree.”

The role of the graduate student needs a serious overhaul, if not for the sake of the graduate students themselves (which, honestly, are doing far better than most in the world) than for the people who would have filled the hundreds of different jobs that grad students  are informally pressured into taking on. Or do it because grad school needs to be seen as and treated like a job in and of itself, not a wobbly stepping stone towards some quickly disappearing professional career. Maybe we could start by removing “student” altogether in favor of “training faculty” or “Professor’s Assistant.” From there we can start deciding whether it makes sense to describe earning a Ph.D as a process of credentialing or just another job with a very peculiar and uncertain form of promotion. Perhaps that would give prospective grad students a better understanding of what they’re getting themselves into.

I guess that if the academy collapses we can all just enroll in Georgia Tech’s cheap new computer-science-degree-by-MOOC!

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Nate Silver vs. the old guard

In case you haven’t heard, Nate Silver recently decided to leave the New York Times for the paragon of political analysis known as ESPN. Interestingly, Margaret Sullivan of the New York Times recently wrote a blog post describing Silver’s fit. She says, in part:

* I don’t think Nate Silver ever really fit into the Times culture and I think he was aware of that. He was, in a word, disruptive. Much like the Brad Pitt character in the movie “Moneyball” disrupted the old model of how to scout baseball players, Nate disrupted the traditional model of how to cover politics.

His entire probability-based way of looking at politics ran against the kind of political journalism that The Times specializes in: polling, the horse race, campaign coverage, analysis based on campaign-trail observation, and opinion writing, or “punditry,” as he put it, famously describing it as “fundamentally useless.” Of course, The Times is equally known for its in-depth and investigative reporting on politics.

His approach was to work against the narrative of politics – the “story” – and that made him always interesting to read. For me, both of these approaches have value and can live together just fine.

* A number of traditional and well-respected Times journalists disliked his work. The first time I wrote about him I suggested that print readers should have the same access to his writing that online readers were getting. I was surprised to quickly hear by e-mail from three high-profile Times political journalists, criticizing him and his work. They were also tough on me for seeming to endorse what he wrote, since I was suggesting that it get more visibility.

Many others, of course, in The Times’s newsroom did appreciate his work and the innovation (not to mention the traffic) that he brought, and liked his humility.

As John Gruber points out:

Traditional model: mostly bullshit.

Nate Silver: facts.

From a sociological perspective the strangest thing may be that it has taken so long for somebody to cut through the bullshit that pervades our conversations about politics, especially when a simple aggregation of the polls is incredibly effective. Lest we forget the political spectacle, though, Matthew Yglesias at Slate writes that Silver has been extremely successful because of his numbers combined with his ability as a journalist:

He’s a fantastic and engaging writer, who not only came up with an election forecasting method that far outpaces the TV pundits but more impressively he found a large audience for it. After all, even though the TV pundits’ methods are totally wrong and arbitrary they don’t do what they do for no reason. The idea is that it makes good television. And you don’t crowd out terrible analysis just by doing better analysis, you have to find the better analysis and find a way to make it compelling to people. That’s what Nate Silver accomplished.

It will be interesting to see what Silver brings to ESPN. Josh Levin, also at Slate, already has some suggestions.

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The defensive turn

One of the things I try to do in my sociology courses is disrupt students’ normal way of looking at the world to show them that things are often not as simple as they seem. From this perspective, one of the most interesting things about the Zimmerman trial to me was his claim that he was defending himself after he actively pursued Trayvon Martin. As President Obama noted in his recent speech on the case, the idea of Stand Your Ground laws are complicated by the difficulty of telling who is on the offensive and who is on the defensive. Obama stated:

For those who resist that idea that we should think about something like these ‘‘stand your ground’’ laws, I just ask people to consider if Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk? And do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman, who had followed him in a car, because he felt threatened? And if the answer to that question is at least ambiguous, it seems to me that we might want to examine those kinds of laws.

While my fighting experience is limited to being punched twice in the face (on separate occasions), it seems that in most fights both parties are on both offense and defense. In this case, the fight between Martin and Zimmerman could have easily started because Martin felt threatened by the man who followed him first in his truck and then on foot. In the event that somebody is pursuing you, defending yourself seems like a reasonable course of action. As soon as the fight started, though, Martin’s defense would be perceived by Zimmerman as offense and Zimmerman may have felt that he was defending himself. The cliche that the best defense is a good offense is based on the complicated interplay in situations like this.

The idea that fights like this are either/or affairs where one person is attacking and the other may be “standing his ground” could use a good dose of disruption. Situations like these are the perfect time to commit sociology for the greater good.

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Don’t forget the mission

When discussing issues related to funding, one of my school’s president’s favorite sayings is that we are “not for profit, but we’re not for loss.” I recently saw this phrase in a book somewhere, so I imagine that my school’s president is not alone in his affinity for this statement that is intended to justify whatever he is arguing for at the time (such as outsourcing various things, expanding degree programs for non-traditional students, and bringing in huge freshmen classes).  I am relatively certain that he makes these decisions based on what he believes is in the best financial interest of the school. When chasing money, though, one must be careful not to forget the mission, as a recent failed experiment in online courses at San Jose State University demonstrates.

Will Oremus at Slate reports that more than half of the students enrolled in SJSU’s first batch of five online courses through Udacity failed their final exams. Tenured Radical has a good take on this, writing:

I am not against online learning, and I am persuaded that under the right conditions it can be effective. It is, however, becoming ever clearer that corporate methods for extracting profit from education are exploitative and ineffective for students.  I don’t think any of these providers are honest about the down side of not having a real, live teacher — not to mention the absence of classmates who might help you learn.

Furthermore, what course open to thousands of random people could really teach all of them well? Part of what actual schools (where students are taught in non-profit numbers) can provide is some sense of what might be expected from a course. At my last job, it was reasonable to expect that students would devote themselves full-time to school, and when they didn’t that was a choice. At my first job, and my present job, it is reasonable to assume that students are pressured by work and family. That means, depending on which group I am teaching, I assemble different courses, different ways of using class time and pacing the semester, different ways of paying attention to my students, and different ways of choosing course materials. One is not easier than the other; they are different. Increasingly, I teach students differently within the same class.

David Silbey at Edge of the American West notes that “Not finishing or failing the course is – from a monetary standpoint – a feature, not a bug. Students who fail to finish or finish but fail have to pay again for the same (or an equivalent course). Profit!”

Both points underscore the importance of focusing on a school’s mission. What does the mission statement actually say about educating students. Whose responsibility is it to ensure that students are actively engaged in a course? This is something that I have struggled with over the years; as I implement requirements that students dislike but that force them to engage with a course or give very detailed writing assignments because many students cannot handle the lack of structure in more open-ended assignments it is inevitable that some students will complain I am treating them like “high schoolers” or that they should be able to skip class if they want to.

As Tenured Radical notes, being there in person I can adjust things, sometimes even for students in the same course. If I were responsible for thousands of students through an online course, though, not only would these sorts of adjustments be very difficult to manage, but requiring students to complete discussion questions or take quizzes about the reading themselves would be nearly impossible.

SJSU’s mission statement declares that its goal is “To enrich the lives of its students, to transmit knowledge to its students along with the necessary skills for applying it in the service of our society, and to expand the base of knowledge through research and scholarship.”  This, like most mission statements, seems fairly vague. If, as a job candidate, you are able to meet with a school’s president, I think that an important question to ask is how the president personally views the school’s mission statement and works to fulfill it. Is he or she focused on keeping the school afloat financially or on enriching the lives of students? The answer will likely tell you much more about the school’s direction than the mission statement itself.

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Academic false consciousness

When I was writing about writing the other day I considered linking to this post by Arlene Stein that mentions C. Wright Mills’s idea of “intellectual craftsmanship.” Stein writes:

Mills spoke about the benefits that accrue to those who approach writing as a craft rather than simply as a means to an end. The main reason, he said, “I am not ‘alienated” is because I write.” Writing can make us feel more connected to others, and allow us to make a contribution to the society in which we live, he believed. Mills saw writing as a skill that one can develop, as well as an art form, and a form of self-expression. A mixture of technique and inspiration, good writing requires an acquaintance with the methodologies of research needed for the task. There is, he believed, an unexpected quality about writing too—a “playfulness of mind, as well a truly fierce drive to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks.”

While I was thinking about this in terms of the writing process, though, Stein juxtaposes Mills’s idea with a perceived lack of intellectual craftsmanship on college and university campuses today as the result of increased competition that places the ends above the means:

Today, we laborers in the groves of academia are pitted against one another in a quest for increased productivity. Academic departments and units compete against one another for increasingly scarce goods, such as the right to hire faculty; individual scholars in the same department compete against one another for small pay increases, euphemistically termed “merit pay.” In my own university, Rutgers, the public flagship university of New Jersey, “austerity” is the new normal, justifying stagnant salaries and higher tuitions. As state funding provides a smaller and smaller percentage of annual operating budgets, university administrators try to introduce entrepreneurial initiatives into academic departments to generate revenue–with varying degrees of success.

Competition in academia, like competition elsewhere, can at times spur one on to produce great things. (Just think of the fierce mid-1960s rivalry between The Beatles and the Rolling Stones!) Too often, though, competition for scarce resources leads individuals –and I’m speaking of academics here– on a quest to distinguish ourselves from our peers merely to stand apart from the crowd. Today, market values and “fast capitalism” increasingly permeate academia, leading to ever higher expectations of output (read: publication), and higher productivity for productivity’s sake—accumulating more and more lines for one’s cv instead of contributing work that really makes a difference to oneself, and to others.

Perhaps more important than a lack of great or meaningful works, I would argue that this competition among faculty both within and between institutions is contributing to our eventual demise by creating false consciousness among academics. Because administrators want to increase the rankings of our institutions, they want each generation of faculty to be better than those who came before. They want us to publish more and in “better” journals while teaching more students with fewer resources. They want us to become internationally-known experts in our fields while denying sabbatical requests that would allow us to finish a book. And we do it.

Academic false consciousness is not only striving to become a “famous” sociologist, but believing that if you become one it is on the basis of merit rather than good fortune. Academic false consciousness is writing harsh reviews of papers submitted to a journal that you have never personally published in. Academic false consciousness is noting in a tenure review letter that the scholar in question would not receive tenure at your hallowed institution. Academic false consciousness is downplaying the achievements of your colleagues so that your own case for merit pay will be stronger. Academic false consciousness is being afraid to question an administrator’s decisions because you fear the administration’s ability to make dissenting voices pay in subtle ways over many years.

Administrators have continually raised the bar for tenure-track faculty members and rather than refusing to play their games, we buy into the idea that the administration’s view of the world is real and meaningful. The response from tenured faculty at Portland State University when newer faculty tried to change this system is evidence of this. Jennifer Ruth writes that the negative response to the changes she and her colleagues fought for did not come from administrators:

No, the people who now disliked us were some of the people who’d once been our closest friends: those people whose sweetheart deals no longer existed; the tenure-track faculty whose under-enrolled classes were now fully enrolled so they had 35 papers to grade instead of 20; the man whose program relied on adjuncts and so was always, if only temporarily, imperiled by my resistance to signing adjunct contracts; full-time, non-tenure-track faculty who understandably felt that my commitment to growing tenure lines implicitly jeopardized their job security (it didn’t but it’s easy to imagine how they’d feel it might); non-tenure-track faculty serving on Faculty Senate (at our institution, non-tenure-track faculty are involved in governance) during the year we introduced the “line of shame”; tenure-track faculty who had joined the profession to—god forbid—write books and teach, not to take on the Sisyphean task of rebuilding the profession, but who felt a little guilty about this. Many of these people hated our guts.

Ruth responds to Ivan Evans’s assertion that adjuncts are like India’s “untouchables” by claiming that at Portland State adjuncts were “far from being our untouchables, they were our friends with whom we had coffees, lunches, dinners; with whose kids our kids shared playdates” but she does not say that these adjuncts were given tenure-track positions when when faculty were able to argue for new lines (Update: in an e-mail she told me that some of them were).

Academic false consciousness is complaining about the problems with the adjuctification of higher education even as tenure-track faculty huddle on the top floor of the ivory tower, conspiring against each other and ignoring the fact that our weight is helping to bring it down.

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The top idea in your mind

As I have tried to get some writing done this summer, I have often thought back to an essay I read nearly three years ago (via Daring Fireball) dealing with what the author, Paul Graham, called “the top idea in your mind.” He described it like this:

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I’m increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly. [1]

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

In college I typically wrote papers at the last minute but I did not start them at the last minute. Instead, I would often spend a period of days in which a particular assignment was the top idea in my mind. Ideas about the paper or its organization might come to me during breakfast, in other classes, or, I suppose, in the shower. As these ideas came to me I would write them down somewhere and when the time came to actually sit down and write the paper I already had an idea of what I wanted to say.

There is a crucial difference in my own experiences writing papers as a college student and sitting down to write a paper having never thought about it. In discussions with students about writing I try to emphasize that this work takes very little effort but can make the writing process much easier. Essentially, thinking about a paper “counts” as working on the paper, even if no writing is being done. Far too many students seem to sit down and start writing without having grappled with the issues they plan to address or how they plan to organize their thoughts. The result is work that may have all of the parts that the assignment asks for, but lacks cohesion or depth.

Faculty members are not immune to these problems. One of the difficulties I have faced in writing during the academic year is related to the fact that teaching is almost always the top idea in my mind during these time periods. I still have a hard time transitioning from teaching to research. I have actually had a fairly productive summer in terms of writing, but this productivity has slowed considerably since I started teaching a summer course a few weeks ago. Once again, teaching is the top idea in my mind.  Unfortunately, Graham’s solution isn’t much help to me (or others who work at institutions that prioritize teaching):

You can’t directly control where your thoughts drift. If you’re controlling them, they’re not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.

Interestingly, this idea explains why I have a hard time writing as well as why those at research institutions may have a hard time teaching. In each case, the top idea in our minds is the thing that is most important for our continued employment.

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South Park on standing your ground

In 2005, Florida passed the “Stand Your Ground” law that George Zimmerman and his defense team used to justify the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, which ended yesterday with an acquittal. The available evidence suggests that these laws may lead to more deaths and that the results are racially biased, since white-on-black homicides are considered to be “justified” over 350% more often than white-on-white homicides in states with Stand Your Ground laws, as seen in this table from PBS:

In 1997, the third episode of South Park was unfortunately prescient  in how the Zimmerman trial ended up. A clip of the relevant portion of the episode can be seen here. In the clip, Stan Marsh’s uncle Jimbo takes the boys hunting, explaining the technicality that allows him to shoot anything he wants:

“You see, boys, the Democrats have passed a lot of laws trying to stop us from hunting… they say we can’t shoot certain animals anymore, unless they’re posing an immediate threat. Therefore, before we shoot something, we have to say, ‘It’s coming right for us!'”

This is, essentially, George Zimmerman’s entire defense. Despite the fact that he was told not to pursue Martin and despite the fact that he did so and then shot and killed the unarmed teenager, because there were no witnesses who could contradict Zimmerman’s argument that he felt that his life was in danger it was impossible for the jury to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman’s version of events did not occur. It appears that the evidence in this case was applied in compliance with the law, but the graph above (and the case of Marissa Alexander, who was not allowed to claim that she was “standing her ground” because she went back into a house where her attacker was in order to get her car keys and ended up being sentenced to 20 years in prison for firing warning shots that did no harm to anybody) shows that these laws are not applied equally across racial lines and need to be changed.

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Teaching Sociology and impact factors

The ISI journal impact factors for 2012 were recently released, as I found out the other day via Orgtheory, since I don’t pay any attention to things like journal impact factors. I continued not paying attention to them until I saw a post on Facebook pointing out that Teaching Sociology is one of a record 66 journals banned from the list. (In case you’re counting, this post is the third out of the past four that have been inspired by Facebook. I am clearly spending my summer productively.) How does a journal get banned from the list? The previous link states that this occurs “because of excessive self-citation or because of ‘citation stacking’ (in which journals cite each other to excessive amounts).” Last year 51 journals were banned and only 34 journals were banned two years ago, so this seems to be an increasing concern.

Some of the posts about this, including Teppo’s at Orgtheory, state that these journals were banned for trying to manipulate their impact factors, but I’m not sure how much intent can be implied by the banning. Unlike US News rankings, which colleges can attempt to manipulate, editors themselves are not responsible for the citations of the papers in their journals. The very brief document that explains the reason for the bans (called “title suppression” by Thomson Reuters, who is in charge of the impact factors) states on the first page that “Thomson Reuters does not assume motive on behalf of any party,” so it appears that too much self-citation is bad regardless of the reasons.

Teaching Sociology provides an interesting counterpoint to the practice of banning journals from the list. If I write a sociological paper about an issue related to small group processes and publish it in Social Psychology Quarterly, I am likely to cite sources from a wide variety of journals because a wide variety of journals include papers about small group processes. If I write a sociological paper about an issue related to teaching and publish it in Teaching Sociology, however, I am likely to cite sources primarily from Teaching Sociology, since it is one of the only places to publish papers about this topic and, as a result, serves as a sort of unofficial archive of teaching-related publications in the discipline. I am not familiar with any of the other banned journals, but it would be interesting to see how many of them are, like Teaching Sociology, specialty journals that are the primary outlet for publications in their area.

Although I highly doubt that anybody at Teaching Sociology has a malicious intent to game the impact factor system, the high number of self-citations does point to a potential problem with insularity among sociologists who publish about teaching. Even if we cannot find discipline-specific exercises, I am sure that sociologists could find useful information about more abstract practices in the teaching-related journals of other disciplines. Maybe it is time for an interdisciplinary outlet for teaching-related publications. Or maybe there is an interdisciplinary outlet for teaching-related publications and I’m just not aware of it because I’m a sociologist who reads, cites, and publishes in Teaching Sociology.

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Two takes on a “real” Barbie

The first, available here, depicts how Barbie’s proportions would translate to a full-sized woman:

The second, available here, depicts how a real woman’s proportions would translate to a Barbie-sized doll:

It will be interesting to see whether the increasing availability of 3D printers will change the sorts of toys that children interact with.

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