There’s an old adage in academe, a dire threat that has everyone in higher education shaking in their boots at one time or another: “publish or perish.” It’s that simple. Do or die. And while that saying was originally coined for those working toward tenure in their first university jobs, increasingly publication expectations are affecting people earlier and earlier in their careers. A decade ago it was rare that the newly minted PhD applying for a job had more than one or two publications, and those may well have been in regional publications or small circulation journals. Today it’s not uncommon for candidates for tenuretrack jobs to have book contracts for their dissertations, and even candidates for adjunct teaching positions at two‐year colleges or those applying for non‐teaching jobs (perhaps in non‐profit organizations or public relations work) are likely to have a publication or two listed on their CV. The reality is, if you want to stay in this business, you’ve got to do your research.
A couple of years ago I did an informal survey of our department’s tenure track faculty, asking them where and what kind of work they first published (For a detailed discussion of the survey results, see page 6). Almost all of our faculty began by publishing things like book reviews, notes, literary encyclopedia entries. They published in lesser‐known publications, they published work on topics that didn’t end up being their field of expertise, or they co‐authored something with a professor (although co‐authoring is the exception rather than the rule in the humanities). In other words, they got their publishing feet wet a little at a time. They paid their dues.
When I began this newsletter in 2005, I also surveyed our department’s graduate students about what where their biggest graduate school concerns, and the issue of how to publish was at the top of their worries. To some degree, I thought at the time, this was putting the cart before the horse. Here were students just forming their thesis committees,
learning the ropes of teaching, and proposing thesis projects that they would spend the next year or more working on. Ultimately, graduate students expend much more time and effort on those things than they do on getting something into print, and a book review or an entry in a literary encyclopedia means precious little if your thesis isn’t completed. But publishing looms large in academe, and students fear it as much as they understand its importance.
Case in point, last spring I sent out the “Call for Papers” for this very issue of IMR to graduate students just completing their first year of Masters degrees in our program. I had already asked Sarah Stoeckl, former USU graduate student and now PhD candidate at the University of Oregon, to write an essay about publishing while in graduate school, but my goal was to also get current USU students to use the summer to reflect on their first year and write brief notes about the wisdom they’d learned. I wanted to
use the opportunity to model for our grads the submissions process, and I expected several students to have something to say. No problem, I thought—with an online newsletter I didn’t have to worry about too much material.
The result? Overwhelming silence. So I extended the deadline. Again, nothing.
I’ll admit, I was briefly annoyed (fleetingly wondering if summer fun was more important to students than their careers) and then I was mystified (how could students pass up such a shoe‐in opportunity, I thought).
But what I really think is at play here is that students tend to see publishing as a Herculean task, to be performed by only those with special powers. But the moral of the tale of Hercules is that even a demigod has to take it one task at a time. Publishing is a process, and Sarah’s essay “Portrait of the Scholar as a Young Professional, or Thoughts on Publishing While in Graduate School” offers some manageable tips for slaying the dragon.
I’d like to challenge every reader to spend some time during the coming weeks to plan to take at least one small step toward publishing: research a gradfriendly venue (take a look at Watermark where Sarah published, for instance), go through your seminar papers and determine which one might be a candidate for submission, read a book like The Grad Student’s Guide to Getting Published (this is out‐of‐print now but used, cheap copies are available on Amazon), or start a writing group with your peers and start talking about ways
to publish your work.
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