When I was growing up, my mother reminded me repeatedly of what she called "The Order of Things": graduate from high school, go to a good college, graduate from that college, find a good profession, establish yourself in that profession, become financially stable, then meet someone nice, fall in love, get married and have babies (ideally, lots).
Until recently in academia, scholars followed a similar Order of Things: graduate coursework, comprehensive exams, dissertation proposal, dissertation defense, finding a tenure-track job, publishing the dissertation either through journal articles or a monograph, going up for tenure, getting it (phew!) and then moving on to the fun stuff: exploring ideas and answering questions for their own sake, perhaps even publishing a trade book to expand to an audience beyond immediate colleagues in "the field."
Sparked by changes in the publishing world—most notably new emphasis on the bottom line at university presses—that traditional career path is changing. Editors now push scholars toward topics and methods with wider public appeal, and they gravitate toward academics who know how to write for general audiences. Anyone who ventures into the AAR/SBL book exhibit and talks to an editor or two knows about "the disappearing monograph" and the new gods of marketability and profitability at university presses. If the dissertation is by definition specialized scholarly work, and specialized scholarly work is now largely unpublishable, what is an aspiring academic to do?
One answer is to shake up the Old Order. A younger generation of scholars and writers—Lauren F. Winner (Real Sex, Brazos, Apr.), Hella Winston (Unchosen, Beacon, Nov.), Patton Dodd (My Faith So Far, Jossey-Bass, 2004), and Peter Manseau (Vows, Free Press, Oct.), to name just a few—are choosing to go about the graduate school to job to tenure-track procession a little differently, and not just in sequencing. The traditional Order of Things in academia is, if not passing away, getting more complicated.
Discerning Differences
Traditionalist scholars typically scoff at trade books, seeing them as lesser works than university press tomes and the kiss of death for young scholars hoping to make a career of academia.
As a junior faculty member myself, I have already twice dipped into trade publishing (including my first book, with a pink cover and irreverent tone that masks, at least for some readers, its roots in my dissertation). But I am also invested in traditional scholarship. I'm as likely to curl up on a rainy Saturday with Heidegger's Being and Time as with Bridget Jones's Diary. Since I have a personal stake in avoiding the dangers of taking the trade plunge while the tenure clock is ticking, I went searching among trade-bitten graduate students, junior faculty, full professors and those who make their homes outside of academia to see if there are times when publishing leads to perishing.
One foundational question is, "What differentiates a trade book from a tenure book?" Carey Newman, editor at Baylor University Press, explains that trade books are 175—200 pages with lots of "air" per page, while academic texts are 275—300 peer-reviewed, endnote-heavy pages that do not shy away from such academese as "hermeneutics" and "discourse." There are scholars (albeit rare ones) who can write the traditional academic book that is also accessible to a trade audience, and Kristin Swenson's Living Through Pain: Psalms and the Search for Wholeness(Baylor, Nov.) is Newman's ideal example.
But can such quick-and-easy distinctions really answer the question? Often it is difficult to differentiate the trade from the "tenure-worthy" in terms of writing style, citations, quality of research and even potential contributions to a scholarly field. Aside from the peer review process, I wonder whether the apparent distinction between the two boils down to nothing more than the fact that one carries the university press stamp, while the other does not. And how effective—and necessary—is the peer review process? Isn't it possible for scholars to obtain "peer reviews" after publication in both academic journals and publications such as Publishers Weekly and the New York Times (whose reviews are often written by credentialed academics)?
Once scholars say yes to trade, whether as graduate students or full professors, the question, "At what cost to my career?" inevitably comes up. Phyllis Tickle, former academic, veteran trade author and former religion editor of PW, calls the "ongoing stigma" for academics who write to a popular audience "mystifying," and argues that "especially in a democracy it is the responsibility of the academy to make space on the faculty and in tenured positions for both the public intellectual and the research intellectual."
Most scholars believe that writing for a wider audience comes at a cost—of lost respect and even lost opportunities. "Popular writing will never be at the heart of academic work, nor should it be...it will open certain doors and close others," says Winner, a graduate student in the unique position of having published three successful trade books, all before finishing her Ph.D. at Columbia.
Stephen Prothero, chair of Boston University's Department of Religion and author of American Jesus (FSG, 2003) and the upcoming Religious Literacy (Harper San Francisco, 2007), contends, "[T]here is a real paranoia among academics about what will count in the future as a tenure book. Academe has always understood itself as pure. It doesn't want to be hybridized or mucked up with popular culture, since so much of its identity is tied up in being proudly unpopular." The real question, says Prothero, is "to what extent do academics want to be the sect of inaccessibility?" Of the impact of his own turn to trade, Prothero explains that, while some of his former scholarly conversation partners have "dropped off," trade publishing has expanded his dialogue partners to include full-time writers, editors and the general public.
Timothy K. Beal wrote both Roadside Religion: In Search of the Sacred, the Strange, and the Substance of Faith (Beacon, May) and Religion and Its Monsters (Routledge, 2001) after receiving tenure at Case Western Reserve University. "I see no problem for pre-tenure faculty and graduate students writing for trade. Doing so will help them write clearer academic pieces," says Beal. Then again, he adds ominously, "there's always the worry that you're committing academic suicide by going for trade."
Moral Obligations, Tough Choices
Many scholars, Winston, Winner, and Swenson among them, feel a moral responsibility to make their research accessible to the largest possible audience. "For me, the lure is the possibility of reaching more people," says Winston. "After all, if you believe research should ultimately be in the service of something beyond advancing theory in the discipline, which I do, it is almost an obligation to circulate your findings as widely as possible."
Winner, too, understands her "less academic writing" as "an act of translation—taking academic insights and sharp, analytical questions and translating them into an idiom that is broadly accessible, even appealing, to people outside the academy." Similarly, Kristin Swenson believes "scholarship should never be an end in itself, but always point us further and in new directions." It is, she adds, "an unfortunate arrogance to presume that people with lots of letters behind their names are the only ones who ought to have access to new information and ways of thinking."
Still, some do make the choice an either/or. Peter Manseau, coauthor of Killing the Buddha (Free Press, 2004) and author of Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, once believed he would become one of a rare breed who both taught in the academy and wrote for a wide audience. But not long into his graduate program, Manseau decided to leave his academic ambitions behind.
Explains Manseau, "In graduate school, I was stunned to meet students who had been in the program eight or 10 years or more, writing, rewriting, revising and re-revising their dissertations based on the concerns of advisers and committees. Though such a process might make for good scholarship, it didn't seem it would hold, for me, anything close to the satisfaction of writing and being read by an actual audience."
Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of several trade books including Doubt: A History (Harper San Francisco, 2003), also left full-time academia for writing. "Once you realize that general audience readers will happily read solid scholarship if it is in the service of exciting, relevant ideas, well, it seems crazy to abandon them," says Hecht.
Patton Dodd, author of My Faith So Far (Jossey-Bass, 2004) a memoir he wrote while still pursuing his Ph.D., took another road. He says he was encouraged by his professors to write for a broad audience, so no either/or choice was necessary. When academics ask him "whether he plans to be a writer or a professor," he always answers: both. "The academic stigma against popular writing," Dodd explains, "has been an annoyance more than an encumbrance."
Many older academics respond with Zen-like silence to these questions and dilemmas. This leaves graduate students and junior faculty to guess and stress over how to use their time and choose projects.
The Unanswered Questions
Like it or not, the ivory tower is under renovation. A younger generation of scholars in religious studies and theology have new desires and views about the distribution of knowledge, audience hierarchies, styles of writing, use of pop culture evidence, venues for scholarship and simply how to go about being a scholar today. Some are choosing to forgo the tenure track altogether, finding alternative careers as popular authors.
A host of questions remain. Is academia flexible enough to accommodate publishing's new realities, the desires of young scholars and broad public demand for information about religions? Will university presses abandon the monograph altogether? If so, what will happen to those of us—popular writers included—who depend on that foundational research for our own projects?
The key question is whether the scholarly community is ready to consider new criteria for what counts as tenure-worthy. Can the concept of professional writing be expanded to include the accessible voice of the trade book, to admit that "accessible" and "scholarly" can coexist? Might trade publishers be willing to adopt some version of peer review for authors facing tenure committees? Finally, can academia live with the bridges that younger scholars are building, their translations of old truths into new idioms? Can it invite everyday pilgrims into its cloisters?
Something's gotta give—ideally, on both sides of what appears to be a growing chasm between tenure requirements and publishing goals, the old and the young, the scholarly and the popular. Sometimes the Order of Things must change.
