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distinguished American scholars whose work is being prominently published, but very, very
few are women.
More scholars are writing more words for less money than ever before.
Academic publishers have a particular obligation to measure the distance between the
university and the public, and to think about whose work spans it. One reason journalists
write well is that journalists write for money: They write for readers. Historically, under the
system of scholarly publishingacademic journals and university pressesscholars write for
nothing. They have been able to afford to do this because they are paid salaries by the
universities that employ them. (Academics rarely meet deadlines because their failure to meet
them seldom has any consequence; in this way, too, they are not treated like writers.) And,
while academic journals and university presses like to have readers who will pay for what
they publish, they have been able to do without them; their publications have been subsidized
by the universities that house them. University publishing has suited both scholars who need
to publish and presses whose mission is to publish them. It has not rewarded clarity or beauty
or timeliness, and it has not made a priority of satisfying readers or earning profits because it
was not designed to do any of these things: It was designed to advance scholarship.
This set of arrangements has produced a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge
surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose. Whether the mountain is higher than the moat is
wide has been much debated but may not matter any longer: This era is nearly over. Much of
what scholars write is and should be written for other scholars: An audience of specialists is
often exactly the right audience needed for the fullest and most sophisticated exchange of
ideas. But in the digital age, those exchanges can be made through forms of publication that
no longer require publishers.
University presses have been asked to look at their ledgers; trustees are asking for
"innovation agendas," and "big ideas," and "branding visions," and the usual malarkey that
you hear just before the ax falls. Meanwhile, for those scholars hoping to write for
nonscholars by entering the world of print journalism, the blood is already all over the carpet.
Bookstores and newsstands have shut their doors. Newspapers, magazines, and entire
publishing houses have stopped their presses. And the public, wearing big, Internet boots, has
stomped through the gates of the university. "Writing for the public" is, by now, a fairly
meaningless thing to say. Everyone who tweets "writes for the public." Lectures are posted
online. So are papers. Most of what academics produce can be found, by anyone who wants
to find it, by searching Google. These shifts have made exchanging ideas easier, faster,
cheaper, and less dependent on publishersand even less accountable to readers.
Every day, more scholars are writing more words for less money than ever before: They are
self-publishing and tweeting and blogging and MOOC-ing. Much of this is all to the good,
especially insofar as it disseminates knowledge. But publicity and public-spiritedness are not
one and the same, and when publicity, for its own sake, is taken for a measure of worth
some tenure evaluations are conducted by counting "hits"attention replaces citation as the
academic author's compensation. One trouble here is: Peer review may reward opacity, but a
search engine rewards nothing so much as outrageousness.
The new economy of letters hasn't made academic writing better, but it has made it harder for
certain kinds of intellectuals to be heard. All the noise has silenced the modest, the untenured,
and the politically moderate.
It has also had the unintended consequence of diminishing the prominence of women
intellectuals during the very decades when a generation of female scholars reached the top of
their fields. The work of female intellectuals is underrepresented in everything from online
courses to the nation's most prominent reviewing venues. One explanation is bias, but another
is reticence. (As Erika Fry reported last year in the Columbia Journalism Review, nearly 80
percent of the op-eds published in the nation's leading newspapers are written by men, but
that number appears to roughly reflect the gender breakdown of submissions; it's not so much
that opinion essays written by women aren't published; it's that women don't write them.)
Then, too, in an online culture that values opinion and personality over research and
reporting, academics keen to reach readers generally have the best shot at success if they are
willing to offer cavalier and often unsubstantiated opinions, promote their own work, and
even expose their lives to public view. Few female intellectuals, and not many men, are
willing to do these things. Not everyone wants to be paid in attention.
University presses may not be in any position to fix these problemsalthough universities
arebut they ought to be able to mitigate the worst of them. With trade presses less willing
to publish scholarship than ever before, university presses have got to revise their mission.
They need to defend their charge to publish the best scholarship, brilliantly. But they can also
publish less, better. They can demand a great deal more from their authors (not least, that they
meet deadlines), and give much more to their readers (including books written for a
nonacademic audience). Reticence can be conquered.
Above all, university presses can take as their charge countering some of the Internet-era
forces that diminish the work of some of the academy's most exciting and important thinkers
by finding, cultivating, and decisively promoting the contributions of those scholars who
happen to hold a passionate sense of accountability to both the university and the public.
Someone's got to bridge the moat.
Jill Lepore is a professor of American history at Harvard University