A Call to Activism

In 2005, biologist Phil Clapham warned of the perils of not publishing one’s work. Failure to publish by scientists who work for years on a subject, he wrote, “is a scientific crime.” Speaking in 2018 from the arts and humanities field, I hold a different viewpoint. I find excessive publishing equally damaging to the discipline as not publishing at all. The well-known academic motto “publish or perish,” combined with an expanding press and the rise of digital publishing, is creating vast, fast-expanding and unmanageable bibliographies. According to JSTOR in 2010 alone there were 799 articles published on “Picasso,” 10,250 on “Art Market” and 12,143 on “Medieval.” Undoubtedly there will be some overlap in these results, and not all will be relevant to one’s research – I admit the term “Medieval” is particularly vague – but these numbers highlight the large amount of published work in a single year. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep abreast of new publications, even if one’s research subject is relatively niche. As a result, many of us are unable to read either widely or thoroughly and we circumscribe our specialism to smaller and smaller areas. We may suffer from reading fatigue or from feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. In addition, the requirement to publish is so ruthless that, combined with professional uncertainty, it is driving colleagues away from academia. The phenomenon of quitting – which has even created its own academic genre, “Quit Lit” – has been recently investigated by sociologist Francesca Coin. Her paper was downloaded more than 3,000 times in the few weeks since its publication on the repository website Academia.edu, a rate that shows its topicality for the academic community. Coin speaks of a career academic who “works an unrealistic, 24/7 schedule chronicled by constant overload and frequent burnout. It acts as an individual enterprise whose desire for self-realization translates into being constantly frustrated by feelings of dissatisfaction and an unmanageable workload.” A possible answer to this professional fatigue is quitting, following the rebellious creed of French philosopher Albert Camus (1913–1960). In the words of Coin: