No Time to Think and Getting Published: A Letter from an Editor

I’ve recently become the editor of a major journal, Science, Technology and Human Values.  I’m learning the ropes, and becoming very sensitive to the temporal values I hold, how they are changing, and how they relate to values in science and technology.

In June, I’ll be attending a conference called “No Time to Think,” organized by David Levy of the University of Washington School of Information.  It’s part of a decade-long cooperation with David and several other people.  Originally we called this group “Information and the Quality of Life.”  Over the years, as we’ve met for meetings, retreats, workshops, and the like, I’ve become very aware of how little time we really have in academia.  It’s ironic.  It seems, from the outside especially, that we have all the time in the world.  However, that’s a will-o-the-wisp.  What we have are infinite ways to say yes, and neither a culture of, nor training in, how to say no.  Furthermore, almost all our tasks (except for hours spent lecturing in the classroom) are distributed over time and often (increasingly often), over space.  Among other things, during the past couple of weeks, for example, I read articles to vet them for the journal; made decisions back from referees about reviewed papers; counseled several of my students about their careers and writing; wrote several letters of recommendation for students and one for a former colleague; collected and put in order receipts from research and lecture trips; read (quickly) a couple of articles from other journals; learned to use a new piece of technology; trouble-shot my computer which suddenly stopped talking to the campus server; had the flu; filled out the marketing form for a new book of mine that is coming out in a few months; finished writing 3 proposals; explained to a group of authors who had prepared an article for the volume that we could not publish it because CNN wanted too much money for permissions; presented two papers at a conference in Los Angeles attended by many colleagues from around the US and Canada.....well, I could go on.  And every day, some more email comes, often with little favors or requests asking for a little more of the same thing.

This is the context for describing one class of events that I have experienced since becoming editor of this journal.  Four times since September I have been faced with an author writing to me and informing me that if the article they have submitted is not accepted to the journal, they will not get tenure (and that their families, one including a newborn will suffer and they will have to move), or they will not get a job they’ve applied to and will be unemployed after graduate school.  This, for me, is a nightmare.  I’ve been there.  I can’t run a quality journal on this basis.  Some of the papers were good, some not so good.  But it has begun a conversation for me in the privacy of my insomniac nights:  why are these things irrelevant? Haven’t I been fighting against an academe that is impersonal, that doesn’t consider people as whole beings?  I don’t believe in grades, even (my best job to date was teaching at Goddard College in Vermont, where students were evaluated verbally, telling what they accomplished, instead of in grades.  Interestingly, employers loved the transcripts as it gave them a lot more insight into what a person could do than “Sociology 137   A-.”  Those who hated it were graduate admissions programs – because they didn’t have time to read narrative transcripts, for the reasons adumbrated above.) 

How can we understand, love, and support our colleagues on the one hand, and on the other, judge them as unworthy of tenure, of having an article published, of managing to raise enough money (were “enough” is not really specified)? 

Sometimes I think we are CEOs with no budget; royalty with no titles; families with a torn moral carapace. 

No time to think.  Yet time to suffer with our good friends.  How can we change this state of affairs? 

          At the heart of scholarly decision-making,

                   Leigh

Susan Leigh Star