75 Luftballons

Every couple of weeks it seems something sets academic Twitter buzzing. Yesterday it was a well-established professor with a light (2–1) teaching load who shared three secrets to having put out 75 publications since 2005 and invited her readers to respond with which of her strategies were the hardest for them. I quote:

1. I sleep 8 hours a night.
2. I write for 1–2 hours every weekday
3. I don’t get in my own way.

I don’t think that the author meant anything malicious by her tweet, but the self-congratulatory framing seemed tone-deaf at a time when a lot of people are struggling. Many academics I follow on Twitter pushed back, challenging her the privilege of such a small teaching load and secure employment, debating whether we ought to measure our academic worth by simple volume of publications—to say nothing of how disciplines count different publications—and still others cast side-eye at what exactly “not getting in one’s own way” means.

When I saw the tweet I mostly just felt tired.

I’m not going to rehash my CV here — I keep a public version on this site that I update every few months if anyone cares. Suffice it to say that since graduating four years ago I have published more than some people, but less than others, while also teaching a whole bunch of courses on part-time contracts at multiple schools.

I exercise daily, make sure to read outside of work (because it is something I enjoy), and try to sleep 8-hours a night. I’ve even had more success with the sleeping since the start fo the pandemic and have started actually taking one day entirely off each weekend!

(Okay, fine. Most weekends.)

I also write for about an hour almost every weekday. The exact time changes, but I try to carve out an hour or two, usually in the morning, where I turn off email and social media in order to just wrestle with words.

It wasn’t always like this. When I started tracking the time I spend writing a few years ago I was in a very different position than I am now. Fresh off my dissertation and only teaching one course a semester, I had time to write and wanted a way to keep myself accountable. As my teaching load snowballed, I found it harder to find time to write and the amount of time I gave my writing plummeted. About the same time, I discovered that I missed that time I spent writing in much the same way that I miss physical exercise when I go more than a couple of days without doing anything. My recent writing sessions have been motivated in part by the terror of several deadlines that just passed for projects I committed to delivering, but I also find peace in the daily practice separate from those commitments.

I want to do good research and to have it taken seriously, but I also can’t define my academic existence by my publication record. My post-PhD life has been defined by teaching positions, often without support for research or publication. I have continued to do both, but approaching them as a second job demands finding other measures of academic success. I can block off time for writing, but the fact that my teaching contracts demand a lot of the time I would otherwise dedicate to focused reading means that I haven’t had the brain space recently to fan the spark of an idea into fully-realized papers. At the moment this isn’t much of a problem given that I am in the final stages of completing projects, but it does mean that my research pipeline will (temporarily) run dry.

But guess what? I’m okay with this! I have jotted down notes for a couple of articles that I would like to dig into, to say nothing of ideas for three more book. None of these things are actually in a research pipeline right now so much as sitting on a shelf collecting dust. Inevitably some of these will never amount to anything, whether because I get distracted by other shiny objects (projects) or because I will take them down to find that the idea half-formed years ago just doesn’t work, but others will eventually enter into the pipe and emerge sometime down the line.

The reason I felt tired when I saw the original post is because I momentarily felt the pressure that comes with using the raw numbers of publications as a metric of academic success. I’m tired enough as it is, I don’t need any more pressure.

As I wrote above, I don’t think the author meant anything malicious by her comment — and may have believed she was trying to help contribute to some sort of self-help productivity discourse that operates in some sort of abstract space where the real world doesn’t apply. This discourse operates in a space of extreme privilege, but it also both responds to and reinforces an academic culture of publication where the goalposts are forever just out of reach. Whatever you demonstrate to be your pace becomes an expectation and however fast you publish you could have put out one more. After all, should we not always strive for maximum efficiency and ever greater production?

Of course we shouldn’t. Fast scholarship isn’t the same as good scholarship.

Now fast scholarship is not actually what the original tweeter called for, but by setting the volume of her publications as a the metric of success she has nevertheless implied that we ought to bow to the pressure to produce more and more quickly. I might be be able to reach 75 academic publications (including reviews), but I also may not ever publish 75 academic pieces in my career. Not only would either of these outcomes be fine with me, but it is also critical to resist the simple quantification of academic production.

Working in higher education has enough challenges already. Rather than focusing on someone’s prodigious output and trying to replicate their method, every discussion of academic productivity needs to start with sustainability, support, and the academic communities we want to create.