The Function of a Crisis in the Time of School

Trying to do academic work outside of academia is difficult for a variety of reasons, but a significant one is the lack of feedback and critique from others. As a full-time teacher I don’t have time or freedom to attend conferences, nor do I have access to university reading groups and seminars, let alone informal discussions with people in my field. My access to journals is limited as I have no institutional affiliation or log-in either. It is, by design I imagine, very isolating to be working on such projects alone. You are supposed to be part of the Academy to be working in it. Not an outsider.

One of the lovely things about the article of mine that was published in Anarchist Studies last year, and the editing process for my book the year before (as well as the editorial discussions I’ve had for my forthcoming projects) was having a few other pairs of eyes go over my work and make suggestions. Good work is usually collaborative, even in the seemingly individualistic domain of writing. It is hard to collaborate though when working by yourself in the few moments of free-time you can carve out from a demanding full-time career, far away from where other knowledgable academics are working.

I applied for a job recently and they wanted a writing sample as part of the application. Unfortunately all my published work was longer than the word limit they requested, so I included a shorter paper that was currently being reviewed by a journal. I felt good about my application. I have what is needed for the job and have some really great references. But a week after the application was sent off the paper got rejected pretty brutally. Essentially the journal said the piece was way more polemical than it was philosophical and would have to be completely redone from the ground up to have any chance of redemption. In other words: fuck my drag, right?

I can see from the reviewer’s comments that they are, to some extent, right about the work, and a lot could be done to improve the paper. In my defence though, I think they didn’t get exactly what I was intending to do (for example, they criticised my choice of focusing on a specific piece of polemical work by Noam Chomsky and didn’t seem to understand that the entire point of the paper was an analysis of that specific paper on its anniversary following a more recent lecture of the same name - at a philosophy conference, no less - and the argument I was making was intended to be empirical and “real world” not merely analytical or linguistic, and that I believe that still counts as philosophy. Or at least it should.) But if they didn’t get it then that’s on me. I need to clarify what I was trying to do more explicitly, and be clear about exactly what sort of argument I am trying to make. There were also other more specific comments on parts of the paper that were far more helpful.

But I waited over six months to get their feedback. Six months where the paper couldn’t be submitted anywhere else and where I had no other venue to workshop its ideas. The paper itself was written in a pocket of free-time last summer, about something fairly immediate at the time. I am not too inclined to rebuild the argument from the ground up because, frankly, the moment has gone. It was a paper in response to a particular thing at a particular time and while I still stand by what I wrote I don’t have the time to spend working further on it as we get further and further away from the moment that inspired it and more and more involved with another - completely different - project. My time to work on such projects is currently limited, so that paper has to be considered a busted flush. 

I’ll publish it here if anyone is interested.

Perhaps the particular journal was the wrong journal to submit it to. Again though, without that institutional access or a network of peers to give advice, I am operating fairly blind regarding which venue might be right for my work. But now it’s over half a year later, I’m working on other things, and the job I had some decent hope of being interviewed for hasn’t got in touch. Perhaps because the writing sample I sent them is, according to peer review, a steaming pile of garbage?

I guess it’s a learning experience, and now that I am focussing more time and energy on my academic work I will hopefully start to build the contacts and professional knowledge base that I lack after all these years of being away. An independent part-timer operating within the cracks of a teaching career. I will eventually be able to bounce some ideas off people before they reach the editorial staff at a journal, and remember how to play the game of following the stylistic fashions of the moment that make my work feel like philosophy to the gatekeepers of analytic rigour.

But it isn’t half embarrassing to think that the sample of your writing you sent off to hopefully impress a future employer is a work rejected by a journal for not being philosophical enough.

It will be their loss, but I won’t hold my breath for an interview.