The Long View

Jeopardy question: What does graduate school prepare you for?

I’ve just spent what is always the two most rewarding hours at the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting (now in day two): volunteering for the “Chats with an Editor” booth hosted by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). This annual service provides one-on-one counseling with advanced graduate students and neophyte professors on the intricacies of selecting previous research, preparing it in article form, researching and selecting appropriate learned or creative journals to which they will submit the articles, and other scholarly professional activities.

So here is Long’s Axiom: Graduate school prepares you for graduate school. (Long’s Corollary: High school [and its state-mandated testing regimes] prepares you for high school.)

Advanced graduate students and novice professors in their first full-time or first tenure-track positions are pretty much left to their own devices in trying to figure out how to get articles published. Senior colleagues assume that junior colleagues already know this stuff. Junior colleagues are reluctant to seem unprepared for the profession, so they don’t ask their senior colleagues.

One year when I volunteered for this Chats with an Editor service, an advisee came to me with a doctorate in a hot speciality from an Ivy-League university and with a tenure-track appointment at another Ivy League university. She wanted to know how to turn parts of her dissertation into articles and how to figure out how to select the appropriate journals to which she would submit articles. I couldn’t believe that I, with a doctorate from a second-tier state university who has been teaching at a public community college, was explaining to her how to get published. Fortunately, my first doctoral course was a proseminar with Jim Cahalan, who took us through the mechanics of publishing, step by step. As a published scholar and as a journal editor I’ve been thankful for Jim’s guidance.

The first thing that I ask these clients (and it’s the same question that I ask my community-college advisees): Where do you want to be and what do you want to be doing five or ten years from now?

Decisions that you make now, will affect the options that you have later. Publishing some kinds of articles or publishing articles in some kinds of journals that are not congruent or commensurate with your career goals can often harm, not help, your career development.

The other problem with professional scholarly research is that there is no clearly defined deadline (e.g. a 25-page paper due one week before the end of the graduate seminar) and no one holding your feet to the fire (like your professor), unless you have a good tenure mentor and periodic pre-tenure review.

Given the now enormous pressure to publish (scroll down to see my previous post on that subject) or perish, you’d think that graduate schools would do a better job. My hope is that, once tenured, new scholars will take their own struggles to heart and become the mentors that they wished they’d had.

What they need from us is both simple and fair: Demystify the process of scholarly publication.