Why Do Research After Tenure?

The common complaint is that if you give someone tenure, how do you make sure that the person continues to do research? Couldn't someone just show up to teach their courses and spend the rest of the time on the golf course?

Let's look at some of the factors that make this not happen very much.

(1) We do not play golf. *

(2) Tenure at a research university is a license to do research with nobody bothering you. To get that far, you have to like scholarship more than a little. You've invested a lot in developing your research to a certain point, and it takes a life of its own: you are invited to submit articles, to give talks.

(3) Your annual evaluations, raises, and eventual promotion to full professor depend on research. Your pride and place in the profession, your ego.

(4) I know people who don't publish a lot, but sometimes that's because they barely squeaked by for tenure. If you really look at the typical "dead wood" type, they were never much in the 1st place. Maybe they got tenure in a climate where the institution didn't demand very much. Maybe they have other talents aside from research and are excellent teachers, administrators, and not dead wood at all from that perspective. So tenure didn't make them stop publishing, just stop pretending to care.

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*Yes, some academics play golf. That was a joke.

Arrímate a los buenos / Them that's got

Arrímate a los buenos, y serás uno de ellos.

Get next to the "good" people, and you will be one of them. There is a cynical and an idealistic reading of this traditional Spanish proverb. Generally, there is a whole class of proverbs like 'no con quien naces, sino con quien paces" that emphasize that an individual will be judged by the company he or she keeps. It's kind of a double-edged blade: you can overcome humble origins by associating yourself with a better class of people. On the other hand, the proverb warns that someone seen is good company is not necessarily what she seems.

Scholars will often be judged by their surroundings, where they work, where they got their degree, who their dissertation advisor was. An article in a prestigious journal looks good because it got accepted into that journal and is rubbing shoulders with a better class of article. Don't waste a great article on a lesser journal. Don't write books for the Twayne series.

There is an unfairness here, that of "accumulated advantage" or the "Matthew Effect" summarized by Billie Holiday: "Them that's got shall get, / them that's not shall lose / so the bible says / and it still is news." An already publishing scholar will get more research grants to continue, whereas someone who hasn't already "got" won't "get." On the other hand, there's an upward mobility principle inherentin "arrímate a los buenos." Once you get into a few good journals, you are part of "los buenos."

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I went to Mediocre State School for undergraduate, then to Stanford for Grad School. The Stanford Spanish Department was not very good when I was there, but it didn't matter, because it had an impressive name and I was good: I had managed to get myself very good training at Mediocre State School and then worked independently, teaching myself what I had to learn. I was in Comp Lit to I didn't have to take courses in Spanish that I didn't want to. I was hurt by the lack of great courses there, but I also learned that I was responsible for my own education.

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My Department now has very good pedagogy for Graduate Students. The only problem is that the students are sometimes more passive. If we taught them worse, they would have to work more independently.

Sudoku

For a while now I've been trying to find the relevance of sudoku for academic writing. It must have some relevance, right? It requires some concentration and thus might help with working memory; it could stave off senility in the aged or middle-aged. What I've come up with so far is that it forces you to look for what's not there. In other words, in a row, a column, a square, you have to see what number is missing, not what number is already there. Secondly, you have to think diagonally. Your aim is not to make a column of ones, but a pattern of ones or twos or threes where none of these repeat.

Look at a classroom of students. You see who's there. What's harder to do is to see who isn't in class, because there is no visible evidence of those students. You might look at a chair and say, who sits there, usually?

Who Cares How Many Hours I Work?

According to the general public, a college professor works about 15 hours a week. Maybe 6 hours in the classroom and another nine preparing class and grading. Summers off, ample time between semesters...

According to the academic, the work-load is 50-60 hours a week. Research, committee work and other departmental obligations, peer review of articles...

I think both of those are wrong ways of looking at the problem.

Who cares how many hours an academic works?

40% of my effort is supposed to go to research. (Time, or effort? I'd say effort.) A good research year for someone in my field would be 2 articles and some measurable progress toward a larger project (book.) Or one article and even more progress. So a few Sundays ago, Oct. 3, I spent about an hour finishing the conclusion and introduction to a chapter. It shouldn't really matter whether I spend 1 or 6 hours on research on a given day. What matters is the task, not the time. If I am more efficient, so be it.

Teaching (teaching, preparing, grading), takes the time that it does. Service tasks take the time they do and I get them done very efficiently. What if I worked a ten hour week on a particular occasion (in the middle of the summer) and made a major breakthrough in my scholarship? Was I lazy that week? If someone asked you what you accomplished in a particular day, would you respond with a number of hours or with a list of things accomplished? Are you more impressed with someone with a long list of accomplishments or with a time-sheet showing a lot of hours put in at the office? If someone had an impressive list, you could pretty much ignore her time-sheet, right?

Academic life is increasingly cluttered. Academics take on huge commitments that aren't either teaching or research. Some of these activities are extremely valuable, so I'm not knocking those, especially if they contribute directly to these primary missions.

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Of course, some people think scholarship in the Humanities is not worthwhile in the first place, but my contract says I am to do it and I intend to keep on with it.

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Maintaining the scholarly base is itself a full-time job.

Work Done: Oct 1-7

I liked how it worked to keep track of tasks accomplished during the final part of Sept. Remember my theory that you could get a lot done by doing just one thing a day, if you actually have enough days of doing that?

Remember: "Writing is hard, but the hardest part of writing is the easiest part, which is sitting down to do it." Since most of my work is writing some way or the other, if I sit down to do something often enough then tasks will get done.

If you write every day, then you will write every year too. See how that works?

Fri. Oct. 1. Worked on "Verse Paragraph," Chapter 8 of my book. Wrote a solid first paragraph of the conclusion, and half of a second.

Oct. 2. Continued to work on this; conclusion and introduction done except for final paragraphs of each. Jiménez section done except for some missing references. I'm "smelling" the end of this chapter in a few weeks.

Oct. 3. Finished intro and conclusion to aforementioned chapter. That's the bread of the sandwich.

Oct. 4. Nothing much. Teaching and blogging, but I can't say I got one significant thing done.

Oct. 5. Wrote a confidential document of 250 words; did substantial work on "Verse Paragraph": finished footnotes, bibliography. I can really smell the end now.

Oct. 6. Finished "Verse Paragraph"! On a teaching day at that.

Oct. 7. Nothing! I did get some comments on my chapter finished the day before, though. That was wonderful. Thanks, Carlos! I gave a short talk in my dept. on Stupid Motivation and attended a dept. meeting.

So in seven days, I had 4 days with 1 thing accomplished, 1 day when I listed 2 tasks, and 2 days with nothing much done. In the bigger picture, I finished a chapter and wrote a short confidential personnel document.

See also this post.

From Idea to Book

Here's the text of my brown-bag presentation:

I’d like to talk a little about my book, Apocryphal Lorca. I don’t want to talk about the intellectual content of the book itself, except insofar as it is relevant to the topic of my main topic: developing and completing a long-term research project. You might have read the blog post from the University of Chicago blog, which I sent to you earlier this week. There will be a quiz at the end of my presentation today.

In academia we are all smart people, so my theory is that the key is not outsmarting ourselves too much. What I mean by this is that the keys to “research productivity”—to use the NRC buzz-word—are not overly complicated. Good planning, time and task management, and attention to the basics of prose style are more significant than aspects of scholarship that seemingly require more intellectual firepower. This is the concept behind my blog on scholarly writing, “Stupid Motivational Tricks.” Smart people are really exceptionally good at rationalizing their procrastination, their inability to get writing done.

Developing the Project:

At the begining of 2006 I wrote out some ideas for some articles I could write during the coming year. I had twelve ideas. I knew I wouldn’t really write 12 articles, but I thought if I got a good start in January, writing one article a month, I might produce something of substance by the end of the year. My friend and co-blogger Thomas Basbøll, a poet and PhD working in the field of Organizational Studies, and an academic writing consultant from Denmark, says you should submit 6 times a year, including resubmits of articles. That’s what you might have to do to get 2-3 acceptances.

January went well: I wrote an article on Samuel Beckett and José Ángel Valente that was swiftly rejected by Hispanic Review and eventually published in Comparative Literature. In February I wrote an article that was rejected by Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, and which I’ve never published. For March, I had the phrase “Apocryphal Lorca” written down. As I began to write this third article I realized that it wasn’t an article at all, but a book. In May I wrote a proposal for an NEH Fellowship, and I completed work on the book during the 2007-08 academic year.

Completing the Project:

I knew an editor at the University of Chicago Press because I had been a reviewer for several translations of Spanish poetry and had done good (or at least quick) work for him. I contacted him because I thought this might be a kind of break-out book that would not be interesting only to Hispanists. Having an advanced contract helped to motivate me.

To write the book, I used a very simple method called the “Seinfeld Chain,” invented by the comedian Jerry Seinfeld. What you do is to buy a calendar and a red sharpie. On every day you work on your project, write a number on that day of the calendar, 1,2,3,4... Try to keep the chain going as many days as possible. If you skip a day, you start again with 1,2,3... For example, I wrote every day between August 1, 2007 and Christmas Eve. That was one chain of over a hundred days. Then I only worked about 12 days in a row after that. That was my second chain. You have to imagine Seinfeld’s voice in your head saying “Don’t break the chain!.” The advantages of this method is that you can easily get into a consistent rhythm of writing. Even chains of seven or eight days might be more than what you would be writing normally—maybe two or three times a week? I never wrote for more than three hours a day. I found that if I wrote for one or two hours, I would still be quite fresh the next day.

Thomas’s method of writing is the “16 week challenge.” It takes advantage of the structure academic calendar (2 16-week semesters) and locates the writing process 5 days a week within one’s normal work schedule. That’s an excellent method too, but I find I need to do some writing over the weekends, holidays, and summers as well to balance out the dominance of teaching and service during the course of any given semester.

The Aftermath:

What made the Lorca project such an excellent one for me personally? Anytime you can develop an almost wholly original perspective on a canonical author, the results are likely to be golden. Many people claim to be interested in non-canonical authors, but try marketing a project on Antonio Gamoneda to a major US University Press. (Gamoneda is a canonical writer too, but not too many people know it yet.) Writing another book interpreting Lorca’s work did not seem worthwhile to me. For the purposes of this project, I didn’t really care about what Lorca’s work meant to me, or what it meant in and of itself in some New Critical Vacuum, but I cared a great deal about what it meant to other people. In addition, the topic allowed me to use a lot of what I knew but had not yet been able to put into my scholarship, and to take advantage of some of my expertise in translation theory and US poetry. Since the story of Lorca’s influence on US poetry is one of misunderstandings, the topic also allowed me to let loose my sense of humor. I wasn’t trying to make jokes, but some of the material just is funny.

I was actually able to connect two areas of the canon: Lorca and the poets associated with the Beat Generation and the New York School. I’ve written other books, but the University of Chicago Press would not be interested in them.
Not every topic is going to be as glamorous or marketable as this one, but I think there’s a lesson to be learned in choosing a good topic: literary criticism does not have to be dull. Not always. I’m interested in a lot of dull things too, like metrics, but I think you have to make some concessions to what other people are interested in.

I’ve sometimes felt like the experience of writing this book was like getting struck by lightning. I was incredibly lucky that a very good idea for a book happened to find me and that I was able to take advantage of it. I’m not denying the element of pure good luck, but let’s go back to 2006. My absurd plan of thinking of twelve ideas for articles at the begining of the year did not result in 12 articles, but in one article and one book. I was rejected a few times but I stuck with my plan. I had more than one idea that I wanted to develop, and the best of these ideas won out over the others In other words, I had done the preliminary work to put myself in a position to be able to get struck by lightning. I also had the work habits to get it done. The book seemed to write itself almost effortlessly because I had a mechanism in place, the stupidly simple “Seinfeld Chain.” Writing is hard work, but the hardest part is the easiest and stupidest: sitting down to do it regularly. I think very few people really like to write. Otherwise we would all have triple the number of publications. I do like to write, but even I have a hard time sitting down to do it without tricking myself into it.

The advantages I had—mostly being seriously interested in a lot of interesting things and being a half-way-decent writer of prose—were the product of years of work, showing that fortune favors the prepared mind and that it sometimes takes twenty years to become an overnight success.

The Department

I've been talking this whole time on this blog about an individual's personal research activities. The contradiction here is that we belong to departments, to teams, yet our research challenges and accomplishments pertain to us individually. It's always my work.

In the typical Research I institution, the faculty do not duplicate one another's interests. For example, we have, in Peninsular Literature in my department, one medievalist, two early modernists (one specializing in Jesuits, the inquisition, and narrative prose, the other on theater), one 19th century specialist (working on theater and illustrated periodicals), two 20th / 21st century scholars, myself (working on poetry and poetics, translation theory), and Jorge, who works on contemporary narrative, film, and culture. My colleagues are very smart people, and they are good to have around if I have questions to ask about their fields, but we don't really collaborate on research. My interests are closer to those of our specialist in Latin American poetry, with whom I've co-taught a course, but generally those who share my particular interests live thousands of miles away.

The NRC ratings of PhD programs came out recently and my department is ranked fairly high in some categories. We are definitely a top 20 Spanish department. But what does that mean if we are only the sum of individual achievements?

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There might be other models. For example, you could organize a department as a team devoted to a particular area. To study Latin American poetry, you could have a department that just did that, with everyone stepping on one another's toes and jealous of one another's accomplishments. Hierarchies would be even stronger than in normal departments. Students who decided they weren't interested in that after all would be kind of stuck. Undergraduates wouldn't have a lot of course offerings.

In geographically more compact areas (not Kansas), you could have research groups linking members of several universities. With the internet, you can collaborate with far-flung scholars. I'm always looking for other models to get myself out of that purely individualistic mode.