It’s summer, and that means I can get back to work.
The greatest disconnect between the popular understanding of academia and the reality is that a lot of us don’t, really, have summers “off”. Summer is a big, tempting vista of days and weeks to devote to research. Sure, some folks take off in the summer, but in the main this is when you try to gain yardage before time gets constrained again in the academic year (or at least make up deficits from the academic year).
Teaching can be great, and for some academics it really is the focus of their work, but a big chunk of my contract is research and the vast bulk of what I’m judged on is publications. For me and others on this track, then, being on teaching time is also inherently about being back on “manager time”—or, rather, customer time, because students will have questions and demands and interests that break up the unstructured time when research really flows. jYou can still do research during teaching terms (and if you don’t, well, there’s many other careers for you), but there’s a big difference between the disciplined effort that lets you crank out 10-15 hours of research time a week if you are very good and the ability to do 25 or 30 hours in the summer even if you’re a little lazy. (I will note, though, that there’s something to the routine of teaching that keeps you from ever being too lazy—and that there’s something to answering students’ questions to keep you from being too esoteric.)
The past couple of weeks, then, I devoted myself very selfishly and fully to research, taking three projects that had been sitting around almost done for the bulk of the semester and bludgeoning them into shape. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll do the same. It’s The Bear for research projects, with Stata and R code instead of beef and Ultra Spice Chai instead of cocaine. (Okay—that’s a pretty tame bear.)
Why do research? Partly, mostly, it’s the love of the game. This is science, even if it’s not the space telescope or blood cell kind, and I like to think that this wave of projects will actually teach us a lot about how the U.S. public understands foreign policy. (I’ll be sharing some of this work with you!) Partly, it’s about careers—mine and my co-authors. For graduate student co-authors, one feels a keen sense of obligation to help launch their careers; for peer co-authors, it’s the fulfillment of a commitment and the enjoyment of working with someone else who is invested in the same topic you are. And, well, sometimes it’s about the argument—scholars have a deep and lasting professional commitment to getting in the last word. When the bombs start falling, you can be sure that somewhere some nuclear strategy scholar’s last thought will be “I told you s—”
Let’s be clear: you really can’t dismiss the career aspects. One of the other widely misunderstood bits of academia is that we write for free. Even some people in academia don’t fully understand this. Well, true, I don’t get paid when a journal article lands, but that’s really peasant thinking about the whole thing. As a scholar, your publications literally represent your intellectual capital, and accumulating capital makes you more competitive and thus, in the long run, better paid. How much? One 1975 article (so let’s not put too much weight on it) estimated that a publication could be worth up to $76,000 in today’s dollars for a junior professor. That is, by a back-of-an-envelope calculation, about $2,500 per year—which is a surprisingly realistic figure if you make some further assumptions (that there’s diminishing marginal returns to publications, for instance, so that your 20th paper is worth somewhat less than your second, and that articles later in your career are less likely to have a major impact, so that it becomes rational for senior profs to actually take summers off).
If you have a junior professor in your life, and all they seem to think about is publications, this is why it matters for them. Also, if they don’t publish enough, they will be fired.
Being an assistant professor and a graduate student in this market is a ruthless selection mechanism for people who can succeed under this form of pressure. Let me hasten to add that this doesn’t mean it’s good, not even on its own terms of knowledge production—some more leisure would be better! But it does mean that anyone who is not already a workaholic is either socialized into becoming one or is selected out of the profession. (And some people who are just unlucky are, too.) Those pressures carve deep grooves in your soul. They are hard to break.
All of this is to say: Sorry I was gone! I will be back. There will be more. And also—I needed a quick vacation from the newsletter so I could get some work done.
Congratulations! Wishing you much future success.