Write First, Ask Questions Later: Publishing and the Race to Tenure Track

The term “assistant professor” implies that one becomes a true professor only after demonstrating the ability to put the earned wisdom of a graduate education into action, through scholarly publications met with the rigorous review of one’s peers or, more accurately, the tenured faculty whom a recently minted PhD aspires to join. Graduate students, recent PhDs, and young faculty often struggle to imagine this historical conception of tenure, not because of a naïveté about the realities of “publish or perish” but because many of us have been publishing or perishing since we were master’s students. And the dizzying rate at which those of us left standing have converted recently acquired knowledge into every type of published work, ranging from academic branding on Twitter and Facebook to peer-reviewed articles and published manuscripts, will continue to have profound implications for the future of film and media studies in the university system.

As early as 1998, Leonard Cassuto sounded the alarm over the growing professionalization of students forced to publish frequently during graduate school in order to compete not only for tenure-track jobs but also for admissions into top graduate programs. He suggested, “The contraction of the academic job market over the past several years has led young would-be faculty members to present themselves at hiring time not as apprentice scholars, but rather as fully formed professors.”¹ Consequences included a longer time spent in graduate school by students seeking additional time to publish articles and perfect their dissertation, as well as a movement toward rapid specialization among young scholars. The continued contraction of the academic job market in the humanities, coupled with other forces like “adjunctification,” declining graduate school funding, and rising student debt, has eroded the cold comfort of a lengthy stay in a PhD program for most students. And securing a tenure-track job as an “all but dissertation” (ABD) has become increasingly rare, incentivizing students to complete their doctorate even without employment prospects in sight. In these circumstances, many graduate students finish their degree as quickly as possible while publishing as frequently as possible along the way. And with fewer faculty members covering the growing span of film and media studies curricula in most departments, young scholars must prove themselves to be generalists as much as specialists.

Before proceeding, allow me to offer the requisite disclaimers on the tricky subject of academic publishing (and employment). I am thrilled and very fortunate to work as a first-year, tenure-track assistant professor of film and television. I will not try to offer strategies on how to do the same because, as I will get to later, frequent publishing before achieving tenure track is a current reality, not a guarantee or necessarily a condition of employment. Finally, I do not want to add yet another lament or rationalization for the current state of academia. This is a fraught climate that nonetheless shapes rising scholars and continues to generate remarkable new work and precocious new thinkers. Rather, I want to emphasize the unique challenges and opportunities for young media scholars who must simultaneously establish themselves within and without the contemporary media landscape.

Currently, an academic can become a public intellectual well before he or she becomes a private one. Opportunities for online scholarship, from popular criticism to more rigorous blogs and websites, are available even to undergraduates who may have just discovered formal analysis in their first college film class. Upon entering a master’s program, less formal but academically curated online publications, like Flow, Antenna, and In Media Res, provide opportunities for established scholars to test out ideas and explore topics outside of their current specialization or book project. For the graduate students who help run and contribute to such journals, these serve a different purpose, as ports of entry into their own academic writing. Another early career opportunity is reviewing books, as many of us did at the University of Texas at Austin while editors of the Velvet Light Trap, perhaps a more traditional half step toward a full scholarly article. In other words, graduate...