First Gen Forward has released a new resource guide: Scholarly Writing Insights: A Guide for First-gen and Emerging Scholars, Faculty, Editorial Boards, and Publishers. The authors write of the importance of teaching first-gen students and new faculty the "hidden curriculum" of values and expectations of academic publishing. Without such a guide, they argue, first-gen scholars may "struggle".
I'm 100% for making the "hidden curriculum" more explicit across academic work. And I'm puzzled by this guide.
I'm not clear why these authors were chosen to create a resource guide for high-stakes academic publishing. Neither is an academic (one works for First Gen Forward, another in Student Affairs, and I'm sure that they do great work in those roles). I find a very small number of 2nd or 3rd author citations in Student Affairs journals for each.
The guide reflects much of what First Gen Forward (the organization that also coordinates the First Gen Celebration Day annual event) conveys across its work: that the system essentially works, that good-willed faculty and staff have not yet noticed that some newcomers need additional support, and that first-gen students/scholars do not yet know about the widely available support that they can access with advodates' nudges to be more assertive.
Much of First Gen Forward's work is focused specifically on direct student support on campus and there aren't a lot of competing voices in that work. But on the question of academic publishing, there are so many critiques, guides, and proposed alternatives that these authors never mention.
And, I believe, they're giving poor advice to First Gen scholars.
What Do They Recommend?
For Writers: "Emerging scholars" need to connect with readily available help. First-generation emerging scholars should initiate the process of co-authoring research articles and should contact journals to request that they become peer reviewers for others' work, as if faculty just hadn't thought about asking them to co-author and inexperienced reviewers are part of how others will get published. They should pursue professional networks, as if access to networks is open to whomever asks.
Help is readily available for the asking from "faculty" and "networks", the resource guide tells new scholars. Just ask.
For Faculty: Faculty are advised to "demystify" the publishing process, which seems to mean teaching about the structure of an article, the process of peer review, and how to incorporate feedback in revisions. They should co-author pieces with students and "emerging scholars", even if their own career review processes may demand solo authorship at key decision points.
There's no mention of why faculty may not be doing these things now as a matter of routine. The guide assumes that they just haven't thought of it.
For Editors and Publishers: Editors are advised to
"approach the review process as a developmental experience for writers. By focusing on feedback that offers opportunities to grow, expand, and hone a writer’s research, editors and publishers can encourage writers through feedback".
There's no mention of how institutional pressures to publish (for grant money and institutional rankings) mean that journals have many more submissions than they might have in the past and that editing and reviewing is still mostly unpaid work.
There's no mention of the hierarchy of journals in which high rejection numbers (with minimal feedback) establish "prestige" for publishers, editors, and authors, or the profits for publishers when libraries now have budgets for only the "best" journals.
As for inclusivity and diversity, the Guide recommends that editors create topical special issues on marginalized groups (though this begs the question of who gets published in these issues and the importance of diverse perspectives on most other topics) and training reviewers to recognize their own biases (though this doesn't question why any faculty member isn't already accountable for such biases elsewhere in their academic lives).
What Was Left Out:
The authors leave out a great deal about the culture of academic publishing that complicates these recommended shifts to a system of generosity and mutual goodwill.
- The questions of remedying "bias" in peer review begs the question of why, long after it's routine for authors and reviewers to identify their positionality as relevant to the credibility of their scholarly judgment, neither authors nor peer reviewers are expected to reveal their own class backgrounds and rarely do. Yet they still pass judgment on whether research on class inequalities is of interest to the broader field.
- One part of "demystifying" the publication process is to be upfront about many voices now speaking of the ways that the system is broken, from the shortage of volunteer peer reviewers, to intensifying pressure on faculty on all campuses to boost publication rates and thus intensifying pressure on reviewers and editors to gatekeep.
- There is nothing here about how intense competition for declining numbers of tenure-track faculty jobs has increased pressures in many fields to publish while in graduate school and to publish more extensively before tenure review. All of these intensify the competition between scholars from poor and working-class backgrounds and the majority of faculty who are from privileged backgrounds. All of these things disadvantage graduate students and early career faculty whose work and family pressures compete with writing time. There's no mention of a faculty role in revising standards for tenure or even for hiring, though those standards are within the control of faculty governance. Individual mentoring through a broken system will never be enough for scholars on the margins.
- There's nothing about the many disincentives to collaborative work, co-authoring, and mentoring though a "resource guide" that suggests that faculty would just do all these things if asked sets up first-gen scholars to interpret rejection as personal.
- There's no mention of the multiple online resources intended to guide newer writers in creating an academic manuscript. There's no mention of UC Press's excellent First Gen Program to mentor scholars through the book production process or academic libraries' and publishers' many resources for graduate students and new scholars. It's not clear why an advocacy group wouldn't be sure that their audience knew about all the resources available.
For all the good intentions in First-Gen Forward's recognition that getting started in academic publishing can be like being tossed into the churning ocean, first-gen scholars deserve better than the advice of authors who have done some recreational rowing on calm lakes.
And first-gen scholars deserve better than the implication that broken systems that now serve the already advantaged will change with bullet points of recommendations like this resource guide.
