/ 1 June 2009

Dialogue with the Ivory tower

The first scholarly journal, it is believed, was the Journal des Scavans (in modern French, savants: "those who know" or, persons of learning.

The first scholarly journal, it is commonly believed, was the Journal des Scavans (in modern French, savants: “those who know” or, more prosaically, persons of learning).

It appeared in January 1665 and was followed a few months later by the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

As networks of “learned gentlemen” — encompassing both major and minor figures in Europe’s so-called Age of Enlightenment — became formalised on either side of the English Channel, similar publications accommodated a proliferation of scientific theories, political tracts and historiographical miscellania.

Critics such as Zygmunt Bauman have shown, however, that these self-styled hommes des idées et des letters were not disinterested promoters of reason and the quest for knowledge.

For Bauman, as “the Enlightenment reached its full maturity” in the 18th century, an age began in which “a managed society, a society consciously designed, planned and supervised by the centralised power [of the state]” was an implementable reality.

Who would design the model? Les philosophes, of course the intellectuals. Who would transfer it to the people? Les professeurs — the educators.

Thus it was that, from the outset, the scholarly journal was associated with a kind of intellectual elitism strongly linked to class distinctions and, implicitly, the knowledge-power axis around which the modern nation state turns.

During the 20th century (even as magazines such as Popular Mechanics sought to disseminate information about technological developments among “interested amateurs”), scholarly journals increasingly became university-based phenomena: the domain of the professional academic.

In our own time, the imperatives of super-specialisation seem to dictate that only those with expertise in a certain discipline — those who understand the jargon-laden discourses of their subjects — can be contributors to, or readers of, academic journals.

In Europe, the United States and many Asian countries, where there are thousands and thousands of academics working for universities or research institutes, such readers still constitute a substantial number.

The market for academic publications in South Africa is, of course, decidedly smaller. But, while online publication and electronic databases provide the means for South African journals to access a global readership —- and for this to be assiduously measured and reflected in the indexes produced by the Institute for Scientific Information —- a number of factors complicate their production.

Department of education policies aimed at increasing the research output of academics at South Africa’s universities are, on the
surface, a stimulus to this production. Simply put, every article published in an accredited journal earns a subsidy of about R80 000 for the institute to which the article’s author is affiliated.

Universities thus place a premium on their academic staff members’ journal publication records (some incentivise research output by returning a small portion of the subsidy to staff members’ pockets, either directly or indirectly through research grants, conference travel allowances and so on; others use the stick rather than the carrot, making it clear that publication is a prerequisite to promotion).

This has various consequences. One is that, because there are no financial incentives to improve “teaching output”, academics are tempted to neglect this aspect of their jobs. Another flaw in the system, it has frequently been pointed out, is that the department of education and the National Research Foundation do not sufficiently distinguish between the natural sciences, the social sciences and “non-­scientific” disciplines (the arts and humanities) in their evaluations.

Publication in journal articles is, according to those who decry the subsidy system, more suitable for scientific studies than for, say, literary criticism. Internationally, most arts academics prioritise book publications — monographs or chapters in collections of essays — over journal articles, but in South Africa there’s more money in the latter.

As a result, researchers are encouraged to churn out as many articles as they can, as quickly as possible; inevitably, this has a detrimental effect on the quality of work submitted to journal editors. The peer-review process implemented by accredited journals is supposed to provide a strict measure of quality control, but the vicissitudes of producing a journal (specifically, financial and time restrictions) are such that many editors are pressured into taking short cuts.

This, presumably, is the reason behind initiatives such as the panel recently convened by the Academy of Science of South Africa with the aim of “improving the quality and accountability of editorial work in South Africa”.

A further challenge faced by editors, however, is that no matter how impressive the content of a journal may be, the fewer readers it has, the less it is viewed as a valuable and necessary outlet for academic writing. For journals in the arts and humanities in particular, the challenge is to meet the twin (but, occasionally, opposing) criteria of “relevance”, “use”, “applicability”, “interest” -— and serious scholarship.

Consider, for instance, the journal that I edit: Shakespeare in Southern Africa. The title in itself may be enough to turn potential “casual” readers off, either because they were traumatised by studying Shakespeare at school or, more fractiously, because they consider Shakespeare’s continued presence on our syllabi and our stages a colonial throwback.

Literary academics, on the other hand, may have a slightly more nuanced awareness of the contentious history of Shakespeare studies in this country but would nevertheless be reluctant to engage with what is perceived (as one of my colleagues has described it) as the “relentlessly apolitical” stance of many Renaissance literature scholars.

How, then, does one persuade potential readers that this is not the case? One approach is to widen the range of contributors and editorial advisers who are involved in producing and assessing the journal’s content and thus, hopefully, to broaden the journal’s readership.

This may entail soliciting articles or finding peer reviewers who are not necessarily part of the comparatively small pool of university-based Shakespeare scholars in South Africa; there is a need for interaction between those in the “ivory towers” and public intellectuals, artists, journalists or other commentators who are not part of the university environment.

Still, if research articles by full-time academics are to be rigorously assessed by their peers, an element of “elitism” must be maintained.

This does not mean, however, that the content of these articles is removed from the social realities that, ultimately, provide a context for the work of all academics.

Guy Butler (founding editor of Shakespeare in Southern Africa) wrote in 1988 that while “South Africa has more important things to attend to” than the study of Shakespeare’s work, “that does not mean long-term interests must be neglected. There are occasions when urgent matters may properly benefit from our attending to matters of permanent importance.” Butler’s phrasing of the relationship between centuries-old texts and current affairs has been criticised as conservative, but it did at least acknowledge the relationship. Two decades later, the journal continues to explore this dynamic.

Key to such exploration is, of course, material that does not fall into the “research article” category —- often what is most interesting to the casual reader —- such as book and theatre reviews, interviews with theatre practitioners and shorter literary essays. These pieces serve as a reminder that Shakespeare is a going concern and not simply an arcane object of study.

Perhaps, then, there is some middle ground to be found between the requirements of scholarly rigour and general interest. If so, academic journals can continue to contribute to a process of “enlightenment” that is not tainted by the less propitious elements of the legacy of the hommes des idées et des letters.

Chris Thurman is a lecturer in English literature at Wits University