Podcast #1: Paul Covey: 21st-Century Academic

TRANSCRIPT:
Eric Hermann [EH]: My guest today is Professor Paul Covey, a musicologist who teaches in the Washington D.C. area. Paul has a breadth of experience in academic publishing — he has published articles, been an assistant editor at an academic publisher, and taught graduate courses on research methods — which makes him an ideal guest for this podcast.

How are you, Paul?

Paul Covey [PC]: I’m doing well — as well as a 21st-century academic can be doing!

EH: Paul, you’re somebody with a lot of experience in the academic world—teaching, editing, writing articles. In many ways, I think you’re the embodiment of the 21st-century academic—for better or worse—in terms of juggling teaching, research, editing, and other activities. Can you give us an idea of what your academic career is like and what you do day-to day?

PC: Well, what I do day-to-day is . . . I feel like a professional driver much of time. There’s a term that gets used on message boards to refer to adjuncts: freeway flyer. This seems apt often in my case. Because right now, if you can call it a career, it’s one that involves cobbling together various jobs. So, on a given day I go to one or more schools, teach the classes, and then when I come home, I try my best to still be able to work in some way.

EH: One of the unique things you did as a graduate student (and afterwards) was to work at an academic journal. I believed you worked at the journal Ethnomusicology.

PC: I did. And I should clarify, I was not the editor, I was the assistant editor. So, in that capacity I wasn’t responsible—thank goodness—for any decision making about what to publish. But I did get to observe the process as it took place. And then my duties involved mainly copy editing and markup, that is, putting the articles into a markup language for the automatic compositor to work with. But I did get to see the articles at various stages.

But it was a funny thing. We found that the challenge sometimes was finding enough articles that were submitted to us that we really felt good about publishing in a journal of that profile.

EH: As an editor, what types of articles were you looking for? Were there certain types of articles that immediately went to the top of the heap?

PC: Absolutely. I have the impression—and I didn’t look at all of the submissions—but any submission we got that really dealt with a topic that was within the purview of the journal, had a clear thesis and made logical sense, and had plenty of citations would get sent to reviewers. And then the reviewers would make recommendations.

EH: So, the basic criteria for sending an article to reviewers was that it needed to be relevant to the journal, include a strong argument, and be sufficiently cited.

PC: Yeah, I would say those would be three main benchmarks. Now, for a journal like Ethnomusicology, the purview in terms of subject matter is relatively wide. For other journals it would be more narrow.

The way it usually works for peer review, is that they will send it to one or more reviewers—usually two or three if possible—and those will tend to be people who the editor knows professionally, and people who are experts who know a fair amount about the subject being discussed. And those reviewers are academics who do it as service to the profession; they don’t receive any compensation for it. They read the article and make recommendations about what kinds of changes and development they would like to see to make it a stronger article in their eyes. And they’ll recommend that a particular article seems to be publishable with these kinds of changes. Or, they’ll say that an article seems like it probably can’t be brought up to a position where that reviewer would consider it publishable. It’s kind of like what happens in a dissertation defense, where the committee members will recommend changes.

So, then the editor reads those reviews, and kind of synthesizes it, and it’s ultimately the editor’s decision about which of those recommendations to more strongly recommend to the author.

The editor communicates to the author and attaches those reviews, which are anonymous. And that’s an important part of the process: When the editor sends the article to the reviewers, any identifying information is removed. So, the reviewers don’t have way of knowing who wrote the article. And the reviewers don’t sign their reviews, so the author who gets them has no idea who wrote them. In other words, it’s a double-blind peer review.

EH: Do the referees typically write up detailed reviews for the authors, or are the comments usually more minimal?

PC: Well, the level of detail can vary. I’ve seen reviews that are extremely detailed, and I’ve also seen reviews that are only a paragraph long or so. Reviewers are supposed to (and they don’t always) give recommendations for improvement; or if they recommend rejecting the article, they’re supposed to justify that and give a legitimate reason why.

[EH]: Can you tell us a little bit more about how editors narrow the original batch of articles down to the top three or four that get published?

[PC]: Well it seems to be a nice thing for an editor to have a backlog of accepted, or more or less accepted, articles, since the academic year has a tendency to run in cycles and the journal is quarterly. It turns out that a large number of submissions come in at certain times of the year: during the summer, right at the beginning of the academic year, and also at the start of the spring semester (obviously that’s when people have had time to work on them). So, the editor and the assistant editor work on getting the articles ready for publication throughout the year and the thing comes out quarterly.

It’s very helpful to have a timeline a spreadsheet indicating what stage various articles are at. We had a spreadsheet showing everything that had been sent to users. It was marked with one color if the article was still out, another color if the reviewer had said “revise and resubmit,” and another color if the article just needed to be copy edited before publishing. So, usually there would be these three levels. And then of course the articles that got rejected out of hand—the so-called desk rejections—would not make it into the spreadsheet.

EH: So for the articles that did eventually get published, in what ways were they exceptional?

PC: Well, the thing that articles that ultimately get published tend to have in common is that it’s very clear what they’re about. Not that it can be boiled down to a single thesis statement, as text books on writing would have it. But relatively close to the beginning of the article, it becomes clear what point the article is trying to make. And it’s part of some kind of scholarly conversation about a topic. So it has a relevance.

And it doesn’t—in terms of its content—meander down superfluous pathways. It is concise and well cited. Within that, though, there’s a good deal of variance because there are a lot of different kinds of topics that call for different kinds of treatments.

EH: One complaint many academics have is that it takes so long to get an article published. Was this was a problem at Ethnomusicology, and how did you guys deal with it?

PC: One of the things that made Larry such a wonderful editor is that he is committed to streamlining the process and making it quick. So, our turnaround time was quicker than at most journals, and authors had a tendency to appreciate that. But when I’ve submitted articles to other journals—it’s difficult for me to remember exactly how long it is taken to receive feedback— but it’s been several months in each case, and possibly as much as a year in one case.

EH: Is the delay because it’s difficult to find referees to review the articles?

PC: I think that’s probably one factor. Sometimes a topic is narrow and constrained enough that there are really very few people who would qualify as an expert (and then of course you get into the philosophical discussion of how significant of a topic that really is). But I think finding reviewers can be one of the issues. The backlog of submissions is another issue. The editor has all those articles in the inbox and has to figure out what to do with them all—figuring out which reviewer to send it to, typing up the email, keeping track of each response, on so on. Keeping all of that straight takes a great deal of time. . . .

I think there’s kind of a hierarchy in terms of the order in which you submit an article. You send it first to the top most journal you think could ever plausibly publish it. But when they reject it, you kind of shrug that off because you were shooting for the moon. Then you send it down the chain to a journal who is more likely to publish it. Everybody is going down that chain—that’s how the ecosystem works, that’s how the food chain works. Pretty much everything that the third-tier journal publishes was rejected by a first-tier journal two years ago.

EH: You’ve seen tons of graduate student papers. In your experience, what are some of the problems with graduate student papers (especially in the humanities) that prevent them from being publishable?

PC: Well, we will be perfectly frank. Most of them are not publishable. And I don’t mean in any way to impugn the papers because they’re meant to be seminar papers for the most part. They weren’t written with a view to eventual publication.

The things they have in common that prevent them from being publishable are mostly general kinds of things. Sometimes they go over territory that has been gone over before. Or they don’t necessarily have insights or answer questions of the kind that a journal would be interested in publishing. Also, mechanical issues arise with regards to how clear the thesis is and what it’s trying to do. And the rhetorical structure is often not well developed. One of the things I do in class is to take apart the structure of papers, and when you do that it becomes clear how minimal the kernel of scholarship actually is in many articles, and how much of what sort of puffs up the paper into something publishable is really rhetoric: putting the key parts of the argument in just the right places in the article, maximizing the right things, minimizing the right things, and generally massaging the article into a convincing shape. And that can certainly be done. But I think it would be unfair to expect a paper that’s not even being written with a view towards publication to have those publishable traits.

That being said, I do have student papers that I think with just a little bit of additional work could possibly be publishable. The thing they have in common is that they participate in a currently on-going conversation about which something really new and interesting can be said, and they do so in a clear and eloquent fashion.

You asked whether it makes sense for graduate students to try to publish while they are students. My answer to that question is an emphatic “yes.” I think the biggest mistake I made as a graduate student was not trying to publish while I was a student. I figured, well, I’ll get my dissertation done and then I’ll publish. In retrospect, I think any chance I had to get a top academic job would have been predicated on graduating with at least one or two publications. And I think just about everybody who gets a job straight out of graduate school today has publications that he or she got while in graduate school.

Something that was eye-opening to me when I was assistant editor of Ethnomusicology was that the kind of writing that comes in initially when the paper is submitted, and then what ultimately appears in the public version, don’t always have all that close of a correspondence. I really gained some confidence as a writer from that experience.

EH: What are your thoughts on the wisdom of turning the dissertation into a book? What was your approach?

PC: Well, I figured at the time I finished my dissertation that the thing most likely to get me a job would be a bunch of publications (or at least a couple). So I figured the way to do that would be to make articles out of the dissertation rather than try to convert it into a book, which would basically be the other option. I’m not certain, looking back on it now after a few years, that this was the right strategy.

In the humanities there are “article fields” and there are “book fields.” Musicology certainly can be an article field, and in my field I’ve seen people get jobs with a handful of articles and not a book. There are also fields where you seem to need to have a book in order to get a job. And I think that a book does count maybe for two or three articles.

In retrospect, my dissertation might have made a better book then a series of articles. Certainly publication is good regardless of what kind of publication it is. But I might have been able to convert my dissertation into a book and get it through the publishing process faster.

EH: What was your approach to turning your dissertation into journal articles?

PC: Well, my approach was to think, what are the main points being made in the dissertation, and how can I reformulate the material to follow that thread in the space of a 40-page article rather than a 700-page book. In my case it was kind of a two-step process. First, I identified the parts of the dissertation that form the basis of the article, and very literally copied and pasted the stuff together to make sort of a mock-up of the article that would result. Second, I more or less chiseled it out or rewrote it into something that would make sense as an article.

EH: You’re a really fine professor who loves teaching. If you don’t get the call to become a tenure-track professor, is long-term adjuncting something you’re prepared to do?

PC: Well, there’s sort of a multi-part answer. It depends not only on what I desire but what turns out to be economically feasible. Right now I’m very lucky because my wife happens to have a very good job, and that’s introductory to saying that right now I kind of have the luxury of adjuncting. It fits the schedule of continuing research projects. I can live as an academic in a way that resembles a traditional academic life: teaching in the daytime, and coming home and researching and writing in the afternoons and evenings, and writing in the summers and breaks and so forth. So that resembles the traditional 20th century academic life, the only difference being that the pay is far less and there are no benefits. But right now I have the luxury of doing that. But that is not something I would have the luxury of doing under different economic circumstances.

I have devoted a good deal of thought to what else I might do and the sad truth of the matter is that there really is hardly anything else someone can do who has the type of education and credentials of a person who has a PHD in the humanities. They’re not really marketable skills.

EH: You don’t think your research and writing and your ability to think and speak would be transferable to other industries?

PC: I think that it undoubtedly is from a technical perspective. I think it’s primarily a problem of communicating that to other industries—having them see that people with our skill sets would be valuable employees. The optimist in me thinks that it’s possible that that might change.

Think about how we might transfer our skills: We’re good at keeping things organized, we’re good at seeing both the big picture and details, and we’re good at communicating our ideas to people in a variety of different ways. Not to mention carrying out research, and teaching and managing a course and keeping schedules and deadlines straight. Those things are applicable to all kinds of jobs.

I have this image that many of us entering business at a ground-level would probably be able to advance productively. I figure if I ultimately end up going into a retail environment, let’s say, which is probably the “unskilled entry-level” position that I would get if it became necessary for me to try to get my salary into the five-figure range (as opposed to the four figure range in which it currently sits) I figure that if I started out sweeping the floor at a fast-food restaurant, I might be able to move into management at some point and gain that elusive five-figure salary!

In other words, we are versatile and we shouldn’t sell ourselves short. I don’t want to give the impression of pessimism to your listeners, even if it’s a struggle sometimes to remain optimistic.

EH: Well, I hope for the benefit of everybody you don’t end up working in a fast food restaurant, and you continue on as a musicologist, professor, and composer!

Paul, it’s been great having you on the show and getting your insights,. Thank you very much.

PC: Thanks for having me, Eric. It’s been a pleasure.

“Publish Not Perish: Rules of the Road for Academic Writers” is a podcast that provides graduate students and other early stage academic writers — whether in the humanities, social sciences, or STEM fields — with actionable information they can use to elevate their academic writing and increase their odds of getting published. Along the way, we also discuss related topics such as the academic job market and transitioning from the Ph.D. to non-academic fields.