The Scholar’s Survival Manual: A Road Map for Students, Faculty, and Administrators by Martin H. Krieger (review)

Scholarly writers capacitate the industry of scholarly publishing—material to publish must originate somewhere, after all—and most scholarly writers are supported by academic institutions. Although writing for publication is just one aspect of such scholars’ lives, it is an important one. That message rings loudly and clearly through the pages of The Scholar’s Survival Manual: A Road Map for Students, Faculty, and Administrators, wherein author Martin Krieger, professor of planning at the University of Southern California, has thematically grouped and presented 420 commentaries that originated as postings on his blog over the past fifteen or so years.¹ His comments and insights are geared toward future and current tenure-track faculty at research universities, yet he is cognizant of the import of context and thus of both institutional and disciplinary differences. For example, scholarly writing is not the ‘product’ in all fields, particularly in the performance and practice fields. But writing for publication remains the way to impact a majority of scholarly arenas, and Krieger underscores the need for aspiring to make ‘substantial and substantive’ refereed contributions that are published in premier journals or by top presses (164).

Krieger’s book is as motivational and philosophical as it is practical. Claiming that readers already ‘know everything in this book’ (xv, xvi), Krieger offers reminders, admonitions, stories from his and others’ experiences, and bons mots. A theme that runs throughout the work is the following: ‘What matters is discipline, focus, and ambition. Just go to work’ (308, original emphasis). Or, stated otherwise, ‘Many people think of tenure as a goal. It is not. Doing the work is the goal’ (165). Krieger gives plenty of attention to the inevitable roadblocks and challenges that faculty scholars will encounter in their lives, but ‘excuses do not work. They do not bring you support. Excuses bring out the sharks, ready to eat you alive’ (342). Academe, all together, is a ‘deadly serious competitive business’ (165). Krieger, who is admittedly hectoring and occasionally harsh, casts off the idea of writer’s block early in the book: ‘Despite the myth that scholars do brain-work, most of the work we do is a matter of sitting down and doing boring but necessary stuff. The blocked artist or genius is not more useful than the blocked idiot. If you do not produce, you do not produce’ (25, original emphases). ‘In the end,’ then, ‘there is no substitute for brains, focus, and hard work devoted to the production of scholarly contributions to knowledge’ (347, original emphasis).

In its organization, presentation, and tone, with no-holds-barred, numbered commentaries arranged into thematically grouped sections, Krieger’s book invokes Paul Gray and David E. Drew’s What They Didn’t Teach You in Graduate School: 299 Helpful Hints for Success in Your Academic Career.² Krieger’s shortest commentary is but one sentence (a quotation from Ralph Nader on strategy); the longest, three pages. The eleven sections of the book focus on such topics as excelling in graduate school, getting faculty jobs, landing grants and fellowships, working toward tenure and promotion, understanding the scholarly and academic ethos, and writing for publication. But, by necessity—no parts of academic or scholarly life are truly independent of the others—the sections exhibit much imbrication, so material germane to writing appears in all sections of the book. ‘How do I write and publish for a scholarly audience?’ is, in fact, one of seven key questions Krieger outlines at the outset (xxvii) because writing for publication is a core component of making ‘an enduring contribution to the research enterprise’ (xxviii).

Krieger covers quite a few writing-related bases in his book. For example, he comments on the importance...