Welcome to our first Friday thread! In place of an essay, I’ll offer a few questions in hopes that we might continue conversations begun earlier in the week. I’ll drop in and out of the discussion throughout the next few days, and I hope you’ll feel free to contribute as you have time.
The first question comes from Amy Letter, who wrote about winning a cash award for her poetry and being shamed by a coworker after she’d shared the good news with him. He said she shouldn’t be creating art for the money. And she wasn’t – she was just happy to have been acknowledged in a tangible way. At the end of her comment, she wrote: “[T]hat salesman back then was right: don't do art for money. But don't scold an artist for being happy about a money prize either. Appreciation can take many forms.”
If you are a creative person, what are some forms of appreciation for your work that you find most meaningful? Most sustaining?
A related question has emerged in higher education. As Sylvia Goodman wrote recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education, some say that the practice of peer review, which has been pro bono since it began, ought to be compensated. Peer review is like church work: scholars donate their time because they believe they have a responsibility to participate in the creation of knowledge. Some journals are published by professional organizations that hold an annual conference, and there is a lot of other work required to keep those organizations going. Typically the president of a scholarly organization volunteers their time, along with anyone who serves on an executive committee. I have served in many of these roles as a peer reviewer, contest judge, graduate student representative, and so on, and most of the time I was happy to do it for nothing.
But some editors believe the quality of peer review is diluted by expecting it to be done for free: many of the most qualified scholars get too many requests and have begun to protect themselves by saying no. Paying reviewers could ensure a higher level of expertise. Others feel that the honor of being invited to vet submissions to a journal ought to be compensation enough. And others know that smaller journals simply cannot survive if they must add compensation for reviewers to their expense column. It’s possible that gratis peer review began more as an agreement between already-privileged people who didn’t need the income, and that the question has grown more pointed as academe has diversified and as questions about systemic inequities have grown more urgent.
What are some of the benefits and tradeoffs of compensating peer reviewers? What might be similar examples of vital work in academe that has historically been done for free? Should that old arrangement continue, or is it time for a new experiment?
I'm not sure where the idea that one should do art for "art's sake" or "love" rather than money came from, but I suspect it came from a power structure that wanted something for nothing. Regardless, it devalues art. Not that all art could or should be "commercial." That should be up to the creator and the market. The person that "shamed" the poet should be ashamed, and the poet should be celebrated. Last night at the Knoxville, IA, public library, we celebrated the acquisition of four pieces of art for our walls. I'm on the board and we set up what I hope is a new model others will use. The normal process is that people/institutions will put out a request for proposals from artists. Dozens or hundreds of people will put in countless hours of work, with only once piece selected, and one artist compensated. Everyone else loses. With consultation from Des Moines muralist Ben Schuh, we did something different. We sent out a request for QUALIFICATIONS which is simply a look at the artist's portfolios. We received just under thirty submissions. From that group, we selected maybe a dozen to provide us with a sketch, and we paid them maybe $150 (forgive me, I don't remember the exact numbers). We then picked four and paid them what they felt their work was worth. We had a fantastic reception. We also negotiated merchandising rights with the artists and will be selling book bags, t-shirts, etc. We will do this every couple of years, growing our collection and maybe auctioning some pieces to raise money for more. We have created an art incubator and are on the verge of making the library an art museum where people will come from all over. I think this is a great model and will be writing about it soon. It was a monetary investment by the library board in artists, and in the community. And ultimately this investment will make money for the library, allowing us to buy more art, and the cycle will continue. If you don't pay artists for their work. You exploit them. And no, "exposure" isn't enough.
Smart commentary, Bob. I agree that typically the pressure to do things for free (or for less) comes from those in power who stand to benefit. I forget where I read this, but someone wrote a fine essay about how the quality of public education in primary and secondary schools was artificially inflated by sexism. For at least a few generations, American children were taught overwhelmingly by women who were capable of becoming doctors, lawyers, and scientists, but who faced substantial obstacles to those careers. Some of them were made by their husbands or by the spirit of the age to feel that there could be only one "big" career in a household. They weren't paid fairly, but they offered a premium education to many children. Those who think teachers are growing too greedy now fail to recognize that women with similar aptitude to those teachers from a generation or two ago are now choosing medicine, law, and science over education. In that case, raising the quality of teacher would seem directly related to the level of pay.
I look forward to hearing more about your library project. It's great when a community can support its artists in that way!
I have a memory of a study in which people were asked to do a task for free, for increasing amounts of money, and for an absurdly high amount of money. (Was this a Ted talk? Probably. Anyone see this?) The gist was people do very good work for free, when they know they’re doing it out of kindness. Give them an insultingly low payment (clean that big stack of dishes, get a nickel!) they do shitty (I imagine even “resentful”) work. Pay them decently they do fine, but pay them high the work goes back to shitty and they might just take the money and leave the job undone. If there’s any merit to this, it suggests work-for-free can be better quality work because the person is just deciding / agreeing to do it, and the only reward is the pride at a job well done?
Maybe you're thinking of Dan Pink's Drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc. I would disagree slightly: Pink's premise is that payment only has the opposite effect when the task requires high-level cognition. For things like washing dishes, there is a direct relationship between payment and performance (I don't think the higher pay leads to worse performance, unless you're thinking of a different study). For things like complex problem solving, people do their best work when they are paid enough to take money off the table. In that case, they are driven more by autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
What happens in a lot of higher ed contexts is that money becomes a reason for limiting autonomy by centralizing resources. The larger purpose question is eroded when a large focus of the institution is on making money for its graduates (return on investment, jobs-based curriculum). And then -- once those other two pillars have been destabilized, faculty might start wondering, Hey, why is my professional mastery not acknowledged with additional compensation? Or--why am I working for pay that would be seen as a poor return on investment for my own graduates?
Pink also mentions hobbies, like playing an instrument, which we do for free because we are intrinsically motivated by things like mastery. But I don't know that his argument imagines anyone doing anything for free so much as that truly complex and creative work requires compensation to be untethered from the actual creative or cognitive work.
It wasn't that one, and it did have to do with more "menial" tasks. Something like, Scenerio #1: "Wash these dishes, we'd really appreciate it; #2: "Wash these dishes, you'll receive one dollar; #3 "Wash these dishes, you'll receive $15; and #4: "Wash these dishes, you'll receive $1,000. And then people in scenarios 1 and 3 do a good job washing the dishes, while people in scenario 2 and 4 rinse and run -- the idea was both drastic underpayment and drastic overpayment made people check out on the task altogether. But people were as willing to work well for free as for a good wage. I think we see ourselves as good people, and so we will do a job we see as helping out because that reinforces our social standing; so does being paid fairly. But being underpaid is spit in the eye, and overpayment means you're in charge, exempt from the rules, and free to be selfish.
So is writing work "tainted" (shitty) when its for pay? Maybe!! I think of the disillusioned youtubers who complain that viewers only reward you for doing what they want and if you do something you care about they abandon you. They care about financial success, and they're sad to discover that kind of success means doing what the public wants, over and over. (I'm paraphrasing Willa Cather's Coming, Aphrodite! here) Another kind of success is the freedom to create what you want for your own reasons, and not care if you have a "public" or not. Maybe no one will ever acknowledge you as "a great," but you don't care, because you're having adventures and making discoveries.
Yes -- great examples. I think also of Kurt Cobain sneering at himself for being stupid and contagious. This is the perennial angst about "selling out."
I suppose I reject the binary somewhat. I'm somewhere in the middle. But that is because I grew up feeling like a weird kid. Wore homemade clothes, didn't have a TV, didn't understand who E.T. was. Writing helped me explain my world to others who didn't share it, and so I've never been able to *not* care about audience, to some extent. I also believe that good craft requires sensitivity to audience, or at least awareness of what might make art more accessible, more universally enjoyable. Otherwise, what's the difference between art and a private journal?
My wife runs a website that began as a labor of love early in our family life and that has now grown to be a successful business. She makes all kinds of decisions now based on audience, but I don't think she feels cheapened by that. She enjoys providing a service to other families who are struggling with the perennial problem of how to feed their children well, especially during those early years.
I take your point, however, in the difference between my literary work and my journalism. My novel is set in two places that New York publishers could care less about -- rural Iowa and rural Idaho -- and that was not a strategic commercial decision. It was, however, the only way I could tell that story truthfully. So I'll be happy with a small press if I ever find one to publish it. I'm paid for what I write in The Chronicle, and I often tell other people's stories there, so it feels more like a service I'm providing than art. Though I certainly bring many of my craft sensibilities to bear on my writing there, too. And of course this Substack is something more like that service. It wouldn't exist if my only purpose were to vent. Knowing that I'm speaking to issues that other people care about, worrying a little about being too negative at times, all of that comes with caring about audience.
I like this thought - "doing it out of kindness" as a motivation well beyond financial gain. It implies the relational need of doing good work (or good art, for that matter), where you complete high-quality tasks because you want their recipient to enjoy it. I understand that this is small-scale for discussion of public writing, but there's an important principle in there somewhere.
Does that complement your idea of "the pride at a job well done," where you can have pride in the other person's enjoyment?
Kevin, I wonder in the larger conversation whether the pride/kindness motivations need to be decoupled from a livelihood? I know that spirituality is the heart of your own series and that sacrifice is a core theme in Christianity. But there are those who earn a living by doing ministry full time. Is writing necessarily different?
I'm thinking about this because one of my mentors in graduate school chose a career as an insurance executive even though his first love was poetry. In a way, the two worlds cross-pollinated -- he brought poems to his secretary and revised them until she could understand them. But it allowed him to take more of the gentleman's approach to art as a "pure" pursuit. However, the history of literature and art is also littered with examples of people who could not do art on the side and who also could not find work as professors or teachers that might allow them to create art within the confines of their primary job. Everyone makes their own choices, of course, but I suppose what I'm probing this week -- hopefully gently -- is the notion that we have come to think of art, writing, and other creative endeavors as tarnished in some way by payment. And I'm not sure whether that is necessary or even sustainable in a digital world that monetizes nearly everything. Perhaps I've drifted afield of your original point?
Interesting points. Funny--I’m currently reading a biography on Gauguin. He was a very successful stock broker in Paris but he quit and opted for poverty in order to do his art full time. He found the stock market spiritually strangling.
Hey, Joshua: I finally read and reviewed Educated!
I don't think you've drifted afield — you've rightly pointed out the trap where artists can be talked into accepting only emotional rather than financial rewards. (Hopefully) that's not what I was implying as a full-application principle for this work. I mostly meant to say that kind intentions and relational concern can improve the work's quality.
But back to your first paragraph of questions — I don't think I could recommend decoupling the kindness motivation from a livelihood. I believe any livelihood to be a gift from God, one to be used relationally and lovingly however possible. That's not to say someone should forego payment for their work while they're being kind, though some (misguided) people have argued that for church teachers, staff, and administrators who work full-time in ministry. Funny enough, it closely mirrors the payment-tarnishes-art idea. Regardless of those bad arguments for spiritual-pauperism-as-greater-holiness, kind relational work doesn't need to be mutually exclusive with getting paid. Hence, kindness can remain in a balanced tension with a livelihood.
This makes complete sense!!! Makes me think of the freelance website Upwork--people on there often ask for huge jobs done at absurdly low prices, like editing a whole book for $50. Yep. You heard me right. If you choose to help someone for free, that’s one thing. But being paid indentured servant wages? No!
The most sustaining appreciation I've ever received of my writing is when people mention it to me and want to discuss it — not only online but especially in person. I once wrote an essay and my older brother screenshotted a passage to send me via text, which (clearly) I still think about. It's the interpersonal interest, where I can feel that someone else cares about my writing and wants to think it through the way I do.
Indeed -- we write to connect, and nothing feels better than knowing that something we wrote resonated with a reader!
I had drinks with a new friend earlier this week, and he surprised me by bringing a copy of my book for me to sign. In that case, it was the interest in my work -- the conversation that ensued -- that sustained me the most. But he did also go online and purchase it, which took some trouble and also made me feel appreciated.
The “service model” worked when most faculty were tenure-stream. It doesn’t work when they’re not. And finding ways to compensate contingent faculty for service that their tenured peers are doing because they are fairly compensated by their institutions is going to be essential going forward. I now regularly turn down requests to peer review articles that I would have accepted when I was a tenured faculty member. I’m no longer a “peer” now that my tenured position was eliminated, and consequently I’m not going to perform uncompensated labor as if I were a member of the guild of tenured faculty.
An excellent point. The increase in contingent positions -- what John Warner calls "the precariate" -- further destabilizes systems that grew out of faculty security.
As a formerly tenured professor, myself, I wonder if some of this is also affected by other forms of workload creep? The more time one is asked to devote to student recruitment, administrative work, mandatory webinar trainings, etc., the less time one has to devote to things like peer review. One becomes, as Thoreau said, frittered away by detail.
"Peer review is like church work: scholars donate their time because they believe they have a responsibility to participate..." hits it exactly on the nose. You have to believe in the cause to do the gratis work.
With the abundant evidence that peer review, even in (especially in?) the sciences, is biased in multiple ways, there are just a few options for a response beyond time and financial considerations. Either you lose your faith in it, or you try to step up and do your part to add or restore integrity to what is a human and thus fallible institution that aspires to more. Or you just shut your mind to the flaws and assume that in the end it somehow all works out, flaws and all, and is infallible in a way that you don't have to fully understand. This variety of responses I see in scientists with regard to science and peer review, just as I see them with equally perceptive and intelligent people of faith about their religion.
My central disillusionment with academic science has been the inability of its adherents to apply the same standards of intellect and rigor of their training to the institutions that house them: their own field, and academia in general. For example, it has taken the half-unraveling (and effective disappearance via contingent faculty hiring) of tenure, and the collapsing of the economic structure of journals, the glacially slow progress of diversity in science, and the power of social media to unite dissidents, all together over the past quarter-century, for criticism of these institutions and their underpinnings--e.g., peer review--to get any real traction. The culture is intensely conservative, in the traditional sense of resistance to change and also in terms of fealty to absolute power, as well as being abundantly self-serving (as in, "I don't question the people who gave me a job and tenure and those who write letters of recommendation for me, shhh").
I think you could argue that Judeo-Christian culture actually has a stronger tradition of questioning its ultimate master (Job did it, Jesus did it) than academic science does. The outsider Nobelist Chandrasekhar did, in an interview with a former student near the end of his life. Upon reading that interview as a Ph.D. student I had my epiphany, confirmation that my intuition was correct, that I was trapped in a system with feet of clay.
This is quite a statement, John. I can't speak with much authority to the inner workings of peer review in science except to state the obvious: a lack of diversity among peer reviewers leads to inevitable bias in what is endorsed for publication. Helen Longino has a good book on the subject: Science as Social Knowledge. It's not new (Princeton UP, 1990), but I think the thesis has aged rather well, namely, that the context in which science is conducted influences the results even if the process that *constitutes* science -- the scientific method -- remains pure. Which is to say that how a researcher conducts an experiment may not depend on cultural background, gender, or any other cultural marker, but the kinds of questions that researcher sets out to investigate assuredly derive from a socio-cultural context. A crass example that a friend once offered was based on a bizarre hypothetical: if extraterrestrial beings were to determine what the most common human ailment was, based purely on TV advertising, they would conclude that it must be erectile dysfunction. But the point holds: there was funding for ED drugs because of who the researchers were, what their interests were, and how both scientific funding and the marketplace reflected those priorities.
I wonder if there might be a spectrum of conservatism among scientists. Many of the Biologists and some of the Chemists that I know tend to be more open to institutional innovation. The Physicists and Engineers, on the other hand...don't bother raising a question about the academic calendar, the Wednesday off before Thanksgiving, or a campus-wide day for volunteering.
I own a company where we publish literature reviews for free for the public-- our mission is to take all the medical research on a specific topic and make it publicly accessible by summarizing it and translating it for lay people. Each article takes 6-12 months to write (it's a painstaking process to sum up all the research on a given medical topic), and then we send it out to experts in the field (researchers, physicians, etc.) for peer review. We differ from most journal articles in that: 1) we pay an honorarium for the expert's time, 2) we name and publicly thank the expert in an acknowledgment section at the end of the article. This was born out of my frustration of doing free peer review back when I worked in academia. It was SO much labor to do peer review, and I needed to do it for my resume, but it always felt like the journals were making money off of my back and free labor (and everyone else's back!) It feels good to be part of the change.
I'm not sure where the idea that one should do art for "art's sake" or "love" rather than money came from, but I suspect it came from a power structure that wanted something for nothing. Regardless, it devalues art. Not that all art could or should be "commercial." That should be up to the creator and the market. The person that "shamed" the poet should be ashamed, and the poet should be celebrated. Last night at the Knoxville, IA, public library, we celebrated the acquisition of four pieces of art for our walls. I'm on the board and we set up what I hope is a new model others will use. The normal process is that people/institutions will put out a request for proposals from artists. Dozens or hundreds of people will put in countless hours of work, with only once piece selected, and one artist compensated. Everyone else loses. With consultation from Des Moines muralist Ben Schuh, we did something different. We sent out a request for QUALIFICATIONS which is simply a look at the artist's portfolios. We received just under thirty submissions. From that group, we selected maybe a dozen to provide us with a sketch, and we paid them maybe $150 (forgive me, I don't remember the exact numbers). We then picked four and paid them what they felt their work was worth. We had a fantastic reception. We also negotiated merchandising rights with the artists and will be selling book bags, t-shirts, etc. We will do this every couple of years, growing our collection and maybe auctioning some pieces to raise money for more. We have created an art incubator and are on the verge of making the library an art museum where people will come from all over. I think this is a great model and will be writing about it soon. It was a monetary investment by the library board in artists, and in the community. And ultimately this investment will make money for the library, allowing us to buy more art, and the cycle will continue. If you don't pay artists for their work. You exploit them. And no, "exposure" isn't enough.
Smart commentary, Bob. I agree that typically the pressure to do things for free (or for less) comes from those in power who stand to benefit. I forget where I read this, but someone wrote a fine essay about how the quality of public education in primary and secondary schools was artificially inflated by sexism. For at least a few generations, American children were taught overwhelmingly by women who were capable of becoming doctors, lawyers, and scientists, but who faced substantial obstacles to those careers. Some of them were made by their husbands or by the spirit of the age to feel that there could be only one "big" career in a household. They weren't paid fairly, but they offered a premium education to many children. Those who think teachers are growing too greedy now fail to recognize that women with similar aptitude to those teachers from a generation or two ago are now choosing medicine, law, and science over education. In that case, raising the quality of teacher would seem directly related to the level of pay.
I look forward to hearing more about your library project. It's great when a community can support its artists in that way!
I think there can be a solid mix of art and commerce. It doesn’t have to be binary.
Absolutely.
I have a memory of a study in which people were asked to do a task for free, for increasing amounts of money, and for an absurdly high amount of money. (Was this a Ted talk? Probably. Anyone see this?) The gist was people do very good work for free, when they know they’re doing it out of kindness. Give them an insultingly low payment (clean that big stack of dishes, get a nickel!) they do shitty (I imagine even “resentful”) work. Pay them decently they do fine, but pay them high the work goes back to shitty and they might just take the money and leave the job undone. If there’s any merit to this, it suggests work-for-free can be better quality work because the person is just deciding / agreeing to do it, and the only reward is the pride at a job well done?
Maybe you're thinking of Dan Pink's Drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc. I would disagree slightly: Pink's premise is that payment only has the opposite effect when the task requires high-level cognition. For things like washing dishes, there is a direct relationship between payment and performance (I don't think the higher pay leads to worse performance, unless you're thinking of a different study). For things like complex problem solving, people do their best work when they are paid enough to take money off the table. In that case, they are driven more by autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
What happens in a lot of higher ed contexts is that money becomes a reason for limiting autonomy by centralizing resources. The larger purpose question is eroded when a large focus of the institution is on making money for its graduates (return on investment, jobs-based curriculum). And then -- once those other two pillars have been destabilized, faculty might start wondering, Hey, why is my professional mastery not acknowledged with additional compensation? Or--why am I working for pay that would be seen as a poor return on investment for my own graduates?
Pink also mentions hobbies, like playing an instrument, which we do for free because we are intrinsically motivated by things like mastery. But I don't know that his argument imagines anyone doing anything for free so much as that truly complex and creative work requires compensation to be untethered from the actual creative or cognitive work.
It wasn't that one, and it did have to do with more "menial" tasks. Something like, Scenerio #1: "Wash these dishes, we'd really appreciate it; #2: "Wash these dishes, you'll receive one dollar; #3 "Wash these dishes, you'll receive $15; and #4: "Wash these dishes, you'll receive $1,000. And then people in scenarios 1 and 3 do a good job washing the dishes, while people in scenario 2 and 4 rinse and run -- the idea was both drastic underpayment and drastic overpayment made people check out on the task altogether. But people were as willing to work well for free as for a good wage. I think we see ourselves as good people, and so we will do a job we see as helping out because that reinforces our social standing; so does being paid fairly. But being underpaid is spit in the eye, and overpayment means you're in charge, exempt from the rules, and free to be selfish.
So is writing work "tainted" (shitty) when its for pay? Maybe!! I think of the disillusioned youtubers who complain that viewers only reward you for doing what they want and if you do something you care about they abandon you. They care about financial success, and they're sad to discover that kind of success means doing what the public wants, over and over. (I'm paraphrasing Willa Cather's Coming, Aphrodite! here) Another kind of success is the freedom to create what you want for your own reasons, and not care if you have a "public" or not. Maybe no one will ever acknowledge you as "a great," but you don't care, because you're having adventures and making discoveries.
Yes -- great examples. I think also of Kurt Cobain sneering at himself for being stupid and contagious. This is the perennial angst about "selling out."
I suppose I reject the binary somewhat. I'm somewhere in the middle. But that is because I grew up feeling like a weird kid. Wore homemade clothes, didn't have a TV, didn't understand who E.T. was. Writing helped me explain my world to others who didn't share it, and so I've never been able to *not* care about audience, to some extent. I also believe that good craft requires sensitivity to audience, or at least awareness of what might make art more accessible, more universally enjoyable. Otherwise, what's the difference between art and a private journal?
My wife runs a website that began as a labor of love early in our family life and that has now grown to be a successful business. She makes all kinds of decisions now based on audience, but I don't think she feels cheapened by that. She enjoys providing a service to other families who are struggling with the perennial problem of how to feed their children well, especially during those early years.
I take your point, however, in the difference between my literary work and my journalism. My novel is set in two places that New York publishers could care less about -- rural Iowa and rural Idaho -- and that was not a strategic commercial decision. It was, however, the only way I could tell that story truthfully. So I'll be happy with a small press if I ever find one to publish it. I'm paid for what I write in The Chronicle, and I often tell other people's stories there, so it feels more like a service I'm providing than art. Though I certainly bring many of my craft sensibilities to bear on my writing there, too. And of course this Substack is something more like that service. It wouldn't exist if my only purpose were to vent. Knowing that I'm speaking to issues that other people care about, worrying a little about being too negative at times, all of that comes with caring about audience.
I like this thought - "doing it out of kindness" as a motivation well beyond financial gain. It implies the relational need of doing good work (or good art, for that matter), where you complete high-quality tasks because you want their recipient to enjoy it. I understand that this is small-scale for discussion of public writing, but there's an important principle in there somewhere.
Does that complement your idea of "the pride at a job well done," where you can have pride in the other person's enjoyment?
Kevin, I wonder in the larger conversation whether the pride/kindness motivations need to be decoupled from a livelihood? I know that spirituality is the heart of your own series and that sacrifice is a core theme in Christianity. But there are those who earn a living by doing ministry full time. Is writing necessarily different?
I'm thinking about this because one of my mentors in graduate school chose a career as an insurance executive even though his first love was poetry. In a way, the two worlds cross-pollinated -- he brought poems to his secretary and revised them until she could understand them. But it allowed him to take more of the gentleman's approach to art as a "pure" pursuit. However, the history of literature and art is also littered with examples of people who could not do art on the side and who also could not find work as professors or teachers that might allow them to create art within the confines of their primary job. Everyone makes their own choices, of course, but I suppose what I'm probing this week -- hopefully gently -- is the notion that we have come to think of art, writing, and other creative endeavors as tarnished in some way by payment. And I'm not sure whether that is necessary or even sustainable in a digital world that monetizes nearly everything. Perhaps I've drifted afield of your original point?
Interesting points. Funny--I’m currently reading a biography on Gauguin. He was a very successful stock broker in Paris but he quit and opted for poverty in order to do his art full time. He found the stock market spiritually strangling.
Hey, Joshua: I finally read and reviewed Educated!
Glad it resonated!
I don't think you've drifted afield — you've rightly pointed out the trap where artists can be talked into accepting only emotional rather than financial rewards. (Hopefully) that's not what I was implying as a full-application principle for this work. I mostly meant to say that kind intentions and relational concern can improve the work's quality.
But back to your first paragraph of questions — I don't think I could recommend decoupling the kindness motivation from a livelihood. I believe any livelihood to be a gift from God, one to be used relationally and lovingly however possible. That's not to say someone should forego payment for their work while they're being kind, though some (misguided) people have argued that for church teachers, staff, and administrators who work full-time in ministry. Funny enough, it closely mirrors the payment-tarnishes-art idea. Regardless of those bad arguments for spiritual-pauperism-as-greater-holiness, kind relational work doesn't need to be mutually exclusive with getting paid. Hence, kindness can remain in a balanced tension with a livelihood.
Love this phrase: "spiritual-pauperism-as-greater-holiness." A canard, indeed!
🔥🔥🔥
This makes complete sense!!! Makes me think of the freelance website Upwork--people on there often ask for huge jobs done at absurdly low prices, like editing a whole book for $50. Yep. You heard me right. If you choose to help someone for free, that’s one thing. But being paid indentured servant wages? No!
The most sustaining appreciation I've ever received of my writing is when people mention it to me and want to discuss it — not only online but especially in person. I once wrote an essay and my older brother screenshotted a passage to send me via text, which (clearly) I still think about. It's the interpersonal interest, where I can feel that someone else cares about my writing and wants to think it through the way I do.
Indeed -- we write to connect, and nothing feels better than knowing that something we wrote resonated with a reader!
I had drinks with a new friend earlier this week, and he surprised me by bringing a copy of my book for me to sign. In that case, it was the interest in my work -- the conversation that ensued -- that sustained me the most. But he did also go online and purchase it, which took some trouble and also made me feel appreciated.
Yeah!!! 🔥🔥🔥
The “service model” worked when most faculty were tenure-stream. It doesn’t work when they’re not. And finding ways to compensate contingent faculty for service that their tenured peers are doing because they are fairly compensated by their institutions is going to be essential going forward. I now regularly turn down requests to peer review articles that I would have accepted when I was a tenured faculty member. I’m no longer a “peer” now that my tenured position was eliminated, and consequently I’m not going to perform uncompensated labor as if I were a member of the guild of tenured faculty.
Corey, I should have said first of all that I'm sorry to hear that you lost a tenured position. That's really awful.
I appreciate that. Honestly I’m better off, though it’s taken me a while, both to get here and to see this.
An excellent point. The increase in contingent positions -- what John Warner calls "the precariate" -- further destabilizes systems that grew out of faculty security.
As a formerly tenured professor, myself, I wonder if some of this is also affected by other forms of workload creep? The more time one is asked to devote to student recruitment, administrative work, mandatory webinar trainings, etc., the less time one has to devote to things like peer review. One becomes, as Thoreau said, frittered away by detail.
Yeah. Structural Incentives. It’s always about incentives.
"Peer review is like church work: scholars donate their time because they believe they have a responsibility to participate..." hits it exactly on the nose. You have to believe in the cause to do the gratis work.
With the abundant evidence that peer review, even in (especially in?) the sciences, is biased in multiple ways, there are just a few options for a response beyond time and financial considerations. Either you lose your faith in it, or you try to step up and do your part to add or restore integrity to what is a human and thus fallible institution that aspires to more. Or you just shut your mind to the flaws and assume that in the end it somehow all works out, flaws and all, and is infallible in a way that you don't have to fully understand. This variety of responses I see in scientists with regard to science and peer review, just as I see them with equally perceptive and intelligent people of faith about their religion.
My central disillusionment with academic science has been the inability of its adherents to apply the same standards of intellect and rigor of their training to the institutions that house them: their own field, and academia in general. For example, it has taken the half-unraveling (and effective disappearance via contingent faculty hiring) of tenure, and the collapsing of the economic structure of journals, the glacially slow progress of diversity in science, and the power of social media to unite dissidents, all together over the past quarter-century, for criticism of these institutions and their underpinnings--e.g., peer review--to get any real traction. The culture is intensely conservative, in the traditional sense of resistance to change and also in terms of fealty to absolute power, as well as being abundantly self-serving (as in, "I don't question the people who gave me a job and tenure and those who write letters of recommendation for me, shhh").
I think you could argue that Judeo-Christian culture actually has a stronger tradition of questioning its ultimate master (Job did it, Jesus did it) than academic science does. The outsider Nobelist Chandrasekhar did, in an interview with a former student near the end of his life. Upon reading that interview as a Ph.D. student I had my epiphany, confirmation that my intuition was correct, that I was trapped in a system with feet of clay.
This is quite a statement, John. I can't speak with much authority to the inner workings of peer review in science except to state the obvious: a lack of diversity among peer reviewers leads to inevitable bias in what is endorsed for publication. Helen Longino has a good book on the subject: Science as Social Knowledge. It's not new (Princeton UP, 1990), but I think the thesis has aged rather well, namely, that the context in which science is conducted influences the results even if the process that *constitutes* science -- the scientific method -- remains pure. Which is to say that how a researcher conducts an experiment may not depend on cultural background, gender, or any other cultural marker, but the kinds of questions that researcher sets out to investigate assuredly derive from a socio-cultural context. A crass example that a friend once offered was based on a bizarre hypothetical: if extraterrestrial beings were to determine what the most common human ailment was, based purely on TV advertising, they would conclude that it must be erectile dysfunction. But the point holds: there was funding for ED drugs because of who the researchers were, what their interests were, and how both scientific funding and the marketplace reflected those priorities.
I wonder if there might be a spectrum of conservatism among scientists. Many of the Biologists and some of the Chemists that I know tend to be more open to institutional innovation. The Physicists and Engineers, on the other hand...don't bother raising a question about the academic calendar, the Wednesday off before Thanksgiving, or a campus-wide day for volunteering.
I own a company where we publish literature reviews for free for the public-- our mission is to take all the medical research on a specific topic and make it publicly accessible by summarizing it and translating it for lay people. Each article takes 6-12 months to write (it's a painstaking process to sum up all the research on a given medical topic), and then we send it out to experts in the field (researchers, physicians, etc.) for peer review. We differ from most journal articles in that: 1) we pay an honorarium for the expert's time, 2) we name and publicly thank the expert in an acknowledgment section at the end of the article. This was born out of my frustration of doing free peer review back when I worked in academia. It was SO much labor to do peer review, and I needed to do it for my resume, but it always felt like the journals were making money off of my back and free labor (and everyone else's back!) It feels good to be part of the change.
Rebecca, this sounds like a great model for both of the themes in today’s thread title. Great work!