We gather around a table in the Welcome Trust library. There is an antique map on the table, and we try to navigate for a space without moving it, being aware that the guard is watching. It is a very welcoming space since unlike other libraries the rules allow us to converse. It is our first writing retreat meeting in London, and we have to clarify our plans for the coming five days. The three of us are very excited. Since starting on the project, we have met only virtually through video conferences and suddenly, we are here together three-dimensional human beings sitting in a real library somewhere between Australia and Israel. The first text we are going to write as decided in our previous virtual meeting is about the function and place given to academic curriculum vitae in neoliberal academia.

It coincides with the current news that Tamar had been promoted to associate professor. It was a long and exhausting journey, with strict rules, intricate but at the same time, involved amorphous and murky quantitative calculations. When she tells us about it, it sounds like a macabre comedy.

Susan has been an associate professor for five years already, gaining approval in 2014. We ask her about the journey she underwent. She says that when she applied for promotion, she believed her CV portfolio met the criteria. “I had a lot of publications, I had brought in some grants, and I had done lots of service for the university and in my profession,” Susan tells us. “It was true that some of my teaching scores were less than outstanding, but I felt I could explain. I often taught difficult content that many students found hard to embrace in the short term and I had scholarly publications that reported on my ongoing critical efforts to achieve excellence in teaching and learning.” Overall, Susan thought she had accomplished what was needed to be eligible for promotion, although “she suspected the Dean was not wholeheartedly supportive.” The application was unsuccessful. “The promotion committee encouraged me to apply again. The second attempt at promotion was again unsuccessful. And I felt quite disheartened.”

Omri asks Susan whether she’d thought of leaving the university. “I considered it.” Susan responds, “but after a while, I realised that my job gives me the freedom to read, converse with likeminded colleagues, teach and supervise students, and to do research that I believed could contribute to social work. I realized that I could enjoy what my job without the promotion. In the end it all worked well. There were changes in management. The new manager asked me why I didn’t apply for promotion. I told him that I had already applied and had been unsuccessful. He said to apply again, and he would support me. And that’s how it happened, on the third try.”

As in any institution, the outstanding CV is necessary for hiring and promotion. But it’s not the only factor. The web of considerations is complex and not very transparent. We have all experienced it; almost every academic in the world has experienced it. It involves organizational politics which means that there are people to whom the system is favourably inclined for various reasons, some of them personal. Omri recalls that at the university where he wrote his doctorate, it helped a lot if you’d been born into an academic household. “Diversity is a pretty word,” he states “but it remains mostly a declaration of intentions. In a consistent fashion, the sons and daughters of professors at this institution advanced quickly; it was very clear. They had acquired the academic habitus and appropriate social connections at an early age. They had a structural advantage over people from the outside.” “And you’d better belong to a distinctive discipline,” Tamar states. “The system may talk a lot about being interdisciplinary, but at the moment of truth, having a broad research scope could become an obstacle.”

We are quiet for a while staring at our computer screens. The guard approaches us to see if we are not damaging the antique map. “I have an idea,” Tamar says. “I will tell the story of my promotion. It could give us some insights as to how our CV becomes a source of permanent stress and therefore an effective managerial control and regulation tool.”

Tamar’s Story: Are We Huge Calculators?

The paradigm of academic promotion has not changed for more than one hundred years. This fact I learnt from “Paywall: The Business of Scholarship”—a documentary addressing ways of resistance to the current corporate industry of academic publications—which I was watching as part of my preparations for writing the story on my curriculum vitae. This claim did not surprise me. Having spent several decades in academia, I was familiar with the almost unchanging non-transparent and objectifying promotion procedures which prevent candidates from having a voice. These procedures include collecting documents from the candidate, such as his/her CV, academic biography, teaching assessments and publications. They also involve gathering reference letters, preferably from unknown strangers in the same discipline and field, who are instructed to provide unbiased opinions and judgements of the candidate’s academic proficiency, performance and achievements. They also require discussions of the collected material by several committees whose meeting schedule is intentionally concealed and whose members are not personally familiar with the candidate’s accomplishments. This apparent anonymity is regarded as the proper way to achieve objective and fair judgement in order to reach a rational decision on the candidate’s qualities, competence and aptness for the academic guild. In practice however, the process always involves a hidden institutional and personal political agenda which is rarely discussed, while the lack of transparency and the non-involvement of the candidate in the process prevent him/her from defending her/himself against negative assessments and undesirable final decisions.

These procedures, which diminish the candidate’s agency, were shaped long before higher education institutions turned into neoliberal alcoves. Yet my personal experience demonstrates that the demands of objective assessment, efficiency, standardization, productivity, accountability and excellence, which are the foundation of the neoliberal audit culture, objectify individual scholars even further. The need to measure our/my academic activities and achievements is reflected in the increasing importance of the CV and its by-product—the academic biography.

Throughout my academic career I was always instructed to keep my CV up-to-date and complete, since it has a major role in establishing my professional status and salary, and consequently my psychological and emotional state. During the process of my promotion to senior lecturer, I learnt about the need to write an “academic biography.” “What on earth does that mean?,” I asked a member of the promotion committee, when we happened to meet in a corridor on our way to our classes. “Do they want me to write an autobiography of my academic upbringing, that started with my mother’s studies of economics during the 1940s in the Tel Aviv branch of the Hebrew University before Israel was established?” It was quite rare then for women to study at a higher educational institution, and I was proud of my mother, yet the tone in which I mentioned it to my colleague was ironic. I knew very well that my mother’s achievements, my family’s history and their impact on my decision to choose an academic career were irrelevant to the document I had to draft. “Should I recall my confusion when writing my application to the university in my twenties? Having to choose a discipline struck me as a depressing restriction, since I wanted to devour so many kinds of knowledge.” My questions challenged the narrow meaning that the academic system awards biography. “Potentially, I could write a novel about an intellectually curious young woman who’s enamored with learning, yet has gradually become … an efficient professional academic, with intellectual horizons confined to specific subjects matching her academic specialties.” My colleague wasn’t amused by these ironic musings and implied criticism. Obviously impatient, he retorted: “The committee wouldn’t have time to read your prose, and you’d better focus on what’s important. The biography should list your achievements in terms of teaching, publication, grants, and service to the community. No more than five pages. I’ll send you my biography as a model of how to write it.” Five pages? I wanted to protest; how can I condense my academic efforts into five pages? But before I could ask this last irritable question, my colleague turned away and disappeared down the corridor.

The CV and the academic biography I submitted were of course impeccable. Academic socialization teaches you to obey institutional instructions regarding how to construct a proper profile of a serious successful scholar. For example I had to highlight my individual research and writing achievements while diminishing my joint efforts with colleagues and students to construct new knowledge. I exchanged the “we” pronoun with the “I,” feeling quite uncomfortable in the process. So, although I was very critical of this neoliberal scheme, I was also very keen to remain in academia since I really liked teaching, researching and writing. Becoming a senior lecturer was one of the requirements for holding a position. If you want to stay in academia you need this advancement, I told myself while writing my biography. And this dictates that you express your criticism towards the academic establishment only behind closed doors, and next time don’t dare to articulate your disapproval in the ears of promotion committee members. Although I wanted to resist what was regarded as “unimportant,” “unnecessary” and/or “irrelevant” information about my life as a teacher, a researcher, a writer and an activist in the academic setting, I was in fact complying with the system. Yet for a critical academic like me, such complicity had its psychological and emotional costs.

“Just a little push and you’ll be there, the dean had told me […]”. His voice was matter of fact, businesslike. On my way out of his office I felt enormously tired, and I crumpled onto a couch in the waiting room. One of his assistants asked me whether I’d like a glass of water. No, I’ll just close my eyes for a moment I said, and when I did, I could see huge armies of journals marching onto a laptop screen and merging with drafts full of red-lined mark-ups all erasing and rewriting themselves. I found myself counting: one, two, three, four, but only high-impact journals, high-impact one, two, three, four, five, six. We won’t be able to promote you; we simply won’t, if they’re not high impact. I opened my eyes. The assistant stood above me with a glass of water. “Won’t you take a sip? You look pale” (Hager, 2017, p. 251).

This type of dizziness and daytime nightmares following conversations on promotion procedures with academic managers, which I described in my fictional story “Under Broadmoor,” is an unspoken shared experience of most academics. It is often regarded as just one of those unpleasant moments in our climb to the academic summit and therefore addressing its emotional, psychological and occasionally physical costs is considered on the threshold of self-indulgence. However, silencing it, in my opinion, does a disservice to the academic community.

During these “CV meetings,” the academic managers (i.e. head of departments, dean, rectors and others) examine the document which structures our professional options, our salary and consequently our psychological and emotional state, pointing to our faults and inadequacies while self-assuredly proposing possible revisions which will correct our mistakes and ineptitudes. This process of repair is supposed to result in construction of a proper and institutionally satisfying CV and thus our academic personality and our future.

Unlike my fictional character, I have rarely allowed myself to expose my vulnerability after such encounters. Like her, however, I had to consider my CV’s imperfections in order to be eligible for a promotion professorship. I had to account for a lack of publications in high-impact journals, too many papers in unranked journals, and one, to my academic shame, in a paid-open access platform, This last failure elicited a repeated question by colleagues and managers: “What were you thinking?” which lingered in my ears for months. “Take it out, it will ruin your chances.” the dean advised in one of our meetings. “And why on earth did you publish book chapters? They lack any ranking. Nobody counts chapters. Don’t bother publishing them in the future, at least not now when you are in the process of promotion (when exactly was I not in such a process, I was thinking). Fifteen published articles after your last promotion is a good number. I see you are very interdisciplinary—it is an unusual mix of history, education, cultural studies, gender studies, and sociology.” His face showed his confusion when he looked at the list of my publications. “I am worried about this abundance. We will definitely have to explain how all this fits together.” His use of the “we” pronoun seemed to indicate his concern for my academic fate which provided me with some consolation. “Your challenge is to explain your association with several disciplines and fields of research. We will see.”

Returning to my room after the meeting, I felt exhausted. I sat staring at an empty computer screen, feeling waves of anger, helplessness and despair. The prospect of writing a text that would justify why, for 20 years, I was interested in a variety of subjects and wrote about them, seemed to me a troubling nuisance. Why do I need this promotion anyway? Unlike most of my colleagues I didn’t plan my academic life in order to achieve it. I was quite surprised that, despite my disciplinary chaos (I teach mostly in the Education Department, yet most of my publications belong to gender and cultural studies), I was potentially considered qualified for possible promotion. To relieve feelings of incompetence and inadequacy, I uploaded my CV on the computer screen and, following the dean’s method, started counting. I counted published papers; I counted submitted papers; I counted planned papers; I counted research projects; I counted grant applications and I counted teaching assessment grades. One, two, three, four, one two three four. While counting I was aware that, by counting, I was complying with the institutional notion that the quality of my/our incessant knowledge-work is less important than the quantity of my/our “manufactured” products. I visualized my colleagues sitting in rooms in various campuses all over the world, looking numbly at their CVs on computer screens and calculating numbers, indexes and counting endlessly, one, two three. Did academia turn us into huge calculators? The image of the first room size computer at Tel Aviv University, which I saw as a child with my father, crept into my mind.

Wanting to erase this nightmarish image, I walked to the yard; I looked at the blue sky and the grass around me. This normal sight had a soothing effect. Why did my research addressing infanticide in Victorian England, the nuclear debate, feminist methodologies, activism and teaching have to be quantified, losing its importance in the process?

When my/our impression is that the significance of our research is overlooked and our intellectual contribution is somehow discounted and our CV becomes just a list of items, it is not surprising that we look for shortcuts to raise numbers of publications, grants, teaching grades, community service. And these shortcuts sometimes lead us to deviate from our research ethics.

The fictional researcher in “Under Broadmoor” almost crossed ethical boundaries when trying to obey her dean’s instructions to publish more and faster. She had travelled all the way to England to interview Helen, whose great-great grandmother had been hospitalized in Broadmoor, a psychiatric prison during the second half of the nineteenth century. The hospitalization occurred after she had killed her child. In what seemed like a horrible stroke of fate, Helen’s grandmother, who had lately died, had handed all her children over to care. Although the researcher is driven by curiosity to meet Helen and to hear her sad story, her real aim is to produce a few new articles about the continuous misery of her family. Yet her research “object” is discovered to have an agency. During their conversation Helen declares her intention to write and publish the family story with her daughter. “‘How wonderful,’ I said politely, feeling a tinge of anger and disappointment as I suddenly realized that I was losing my chance to tell a family story” (Hager, 2017, p. 253). Yet this frustration is gradually transformed into a disturbing realization of the intellectual shallowness and the unethical and exploitative dimensions of this planned research. “What had I been thinking? Writing a quick and easy paper about her? I would need another ten years of exhaustive research. What did I know about her and her contemporaries? Nothing at all save what Helen had told me now and what little I had read in the months leading up to our meeting. A meeting for purposes of research, this was how I had justified the trip to London, filling out the funding forms. This was what I had called it to myself too, every time I had thought of it. Over the past year, without realizing it, I had turned Helen into my research project. But this research project was an actual living breathing woman” (Hager, 2017, p. 254).

Helen is a fruit of my imagination, but the fictional researcher is me in many respects. In the current academic climate, my intellectual curiosity often turns into calculations of publishing feasibility. Questions like how long a research project will take and how many articles it will enable me to produce are part of my academic life. CV expectations to publish more and faster too frequently damage my/our wellbeing, but may also, and this is for me more worrying, hurt the lives of others—the human subjects of our research, in this case my fictional Helen. I also distrust our research results. When we must publish a lot and do it fast, we don’t have enough time to develop ideas, explore and think. In such circumstances, can we really account for our produced knowledge?

Three years ago, when I was considered eligible for promotion to associate professorship, I was asked to update and revise my CV and my academic biography. At that point my academic socialization and my previous experience silenced my cynicism. I didn’t even question the content anymore. I knew that I had to write a short convincing story about my research, writing, teaching and community service. It had to be clear and credible and it had to show how valuable I was for the college, for my discipline and for the academic community at large. Yet as the dean had prophesied a year earlier, my multidisciplinary academic enterprise, cherished in theory by the neoliberal ethos as a sign of my broad horizons, was in practice less to my advantage. I was asked to pack and then repack my academic biography, yet despite my efforts to show the logic of my academic adventure, the members of the promotion committee, most of whom had come from the exact and life sciences, stayed unconvinced and demanded a pre-evaluation process. Two prominent Israeli scholars were asked to comment about my achievements and to confirm that my file (at this phase I was gradually losing my human agency, turning into a record, a dossier, which passed from hand to hand) made me eligible to undergo the promotion procedures.

Passing this first test successfully I was asked to revise my CV and my academic biography yet again, adding new items if any, emphasizing my academic contributions and the praise I had received from editors, reviewers and peers. My passion for knowledge which often led me to get involved in eclectic projects and to jump from one subject to the next had to make room for a unified and organized narrative which described a rational scholar with a clear intellectual vision who had planned her academic career in cultural and gender studies ahead. It was so unlike me that every time I read this story I either laughed or could not avoid being impressed by this woman’s goal-oriented life. The most complex mission however was ranking the journals in which I have published my work.

Neoliberal academia is designed to rely on statistical and content-indifferent measures, enabling managements to assess scholars and their publications without having to be familiar with their field of expertise. These measures include the scholar’s number of publications, the ranking of the journals (i.e. IF) in which they were published and the number of times these publications were cited (h-index and I index). These three seemingly objective measures are supposed to reflect the academic quality of a researcher (Vansover, 2019). Data shows that journals in the social sciences and the humanities are less cited by the academic community than journals in the exact and life sciences. American Pulitzer Prize reporter Michael A. Hiltzik claims that while, in the exact sciences 75% of articles are cited, in the social sciences, the figure is 25% and, in the humanities, only 2% (Hiltzik, 2015). Since most of my publications have been in humanities journals, my chances to excel in neoliberal terms were close to zero.

This understanding made me wonder whether cited articles should inevitably gain a higher value status. Thomas Samuel Kuhn’s (2012) argument regarding the difficulty in accepting research which opposes current theories and paradigms implies that original articles which address innovative ways of thinking, undermining accepted disciplinary notions, will unavoidably be mentioned less often, while established theories have better chances to be cited by the scientific community. Review articles which serve as background for current research have relatively higher quoting scores. But does that mean they are of higher quality than articles that provide innovative vantage points and are less cited? I suspect that the current ranking system encourages academics to defend their careers by staying in the mainstream. Bruce Albert, the editor of Science, confirms this suspicion:

Any evaluation system in which the mere number of a researcher’s publications increases his or her score creates a strong disincentive to pursue risky and potentially groundbreaking work, because it takes years to create a new approach in a new experimental context, during which no publications should be expected. Such metrics further block innovation because they encourage scientists to work in areas of science that are already highly populated, as it is only in these fields that large numbers of scientists can be expected to reference one’s work, no matter how outstanding. (Albert, 2013, p. 787)

Looking first at the Journal Citation Report (JCR), which annually publishes journals’ Impact Factor (IF), and is considered the most widely used measure of journal quality, I discovered that this index contains 12,000 journals, 8500 in the exact sciences, 3000 in the social sciences and only 500 in other fields. Only a few of my journals were rated in this index and even those received very low scores. For three full days I surveyed the internet looking for other measures that would reflect the quality of my academic work. Navigating Scopus and Scimago Journal @ Country Rank (SJR), the h-index and other measures, I became aware of how vast the field of content-indifferent indexes is. Gradually my publication list was filled with small numbers which I copied diligently from online sites. This is what it looked like:

  • Hager, T. (2008). Compassion and indifference: The attitude of the English legal system toward Ellen Harper and Selina Wadge, who killed their offspring in the 1870s. The Journal of Family History: Studies in Family, Kinship and Demography, 33(2), 173–194 IF 0.333, History 53/89, CiteScore 0.400, Art and Humanities 190/250, SNIP 0.631, SJR 0.168 Art and Humanities 240/400, Art and Humanities Q3 (Q2 at the time of publication) (13 citations).

I stared unbelievingly at these numbers which lacked any substantial meaning. (I knew that the calculations were done by using various mathematical formulas, but the different numerical evaluations given by each formula to the same journal were a riddle, which I was too tired and uninterested to solve.) Yet for three days I obediently worked to turn my CV into a numerical chart. Increasingly, my academic lives lost the sense they used to have before I started this meaningless task. What was I doing? I wondered looking out of the window, feeling a sense despair.

Omri and Susan were amused at my numerical items. They thought it was hilarious and could easily be turned into a humorous sketch. I could see their point. The picture of a serious researcher investing all his/her academic research skills and efforts in participating in assessment rituals of promotion committees is quite comical.

I could visualize a crowded meeting room—a group of men and a few women, the most prominent academics in the institution—sitting around a table with a tray of sandwiches, a bowl of fruit and piles of documents. “The subject now is a humanities researcher,” the secretary declares. “We are going to open the file of x.” Obediently they all open the relevant file; one of them turns to the sandwich tray and takes one. The lines and lists have made him hungry. “So, about the list of publications,” one of them reasons, “I would say that the third article got only 0.21 and this is not enough, but 0.32 of the fifth article looks much better.” “You can see that she got a better grade in article number 15, 1.32 and the Q is higher,” says another, “It seems that she has learned lately to turn only to high profile journals.” “Yes, she is improving,” another participant confirms leafing through the document impatiently. “But since none of her scores is above 4, I would consider asking her for two more publications in high-impact journals with a rate of at least 5.” The others nod in agreement; one takes an apple and bites into the red fruit.

There were moments, looking at obscure colourful graphs on my computer screen and visualizing the promotion committee discussing numbers, that made me laugh. All this crazy useless effort, I thought. I was sure that the committee people don’t really understand or do not bother to investigate the meaning of all these numbers. It seems senseless that serious scholars eat sandwiches while appraising knowledge by using a system they don’t really comprehend only because neoliberal academia quantifies everything.

The meaninglessness of it had become apparent to me two years earlier when, as participant in a research group on the public role of academia, I had heard a lecture by a computer science researcher on content-indifferent measures. I learnt that the h-index correlates the number of citations of my work against the number of journal articles we publish, yet by randomly changing the mathematical formulation one can transform whole careers. He changed the h-index formula by dividing the same figures differently, showing how this slight insignificant change could either ruin or improve academic credentials. He was clearly advising against content-indifferent measures suggestion to go back to content-based assessments. One of the participants was concerned: “But this is the only way to accomplish unbiased judgment,” he said. “How else can we objectively appraise academic achievements? You cannot rely on peer reviews since political maneuvers are everywhere.” The computer science man did not smile when he said: “I wish I could confirm your aspiration for h-index to allow unbiased judgement. Yet sadly that is not how it works. It is only an arbitrary number that confers nothing about the value of scholars and their work.”

The thought that in neoliberal academia, work assessment is based on random estimations, which only a few people can decipher, forestalls any chuckle. “I cannot write a brilliant satire,” I said to my friends. “It is not amusing to consider the damage done to knowledge and to scholars’ lives by quantifying it.”

At lunch time we sit in the cafeteria. The guard didn’t allow us to leave our bags behind, so we hope to find a comfortable corner after the meal. We order food while sharing insights regarding Tamar’s criticism of promotion processes and academic evaluation methods. “Can we as senior academics in the departments where we teach, stand in opposition to the system which feeds us and critique it?,” Omri asks. “After all we are at the very center of it, armed with the power it provides us, and to a large degree representing it as well?” The discussion is quickly heated. It is a topic we feel strongly about since each of us is affiliated with an academic institution, yet at the same time opposes the way it currently functions.

Omri is worried that our stories might be perceived as hypocritical. “We are, at least according to our titles, at the top of the pyramid; our standing is assured. It seems too easy, here in London, far from our institutions, girded with the title of a professor or a senior lecturer, to protest against the system in order to write a book and gain academic credentials. We can’t ignore the fact that this book will be a significant item in our CVs and academic biographies. So perhaps it would be too pretentious to expect to have our cake and eat it too.”

Susan says she doesn’t want to write a book of complaint. “I’ve had my disappointments,” she says, “but also lots of support. Yet I don’t think that pointing to university drawbacks and blind spots, means betraying the institution.” Anyway, as Susan sees it, the institutional methods of evaluation such as the assessment of CVs, have their advantages since they enable head of departments and deans to check faculty members’ accountability. Otherwise, how can you know if someone is doing her job properly? “I would say,” Susan articulates the sentence carefully being aware she might be stepping into a minefield, “that the neoliberal academia has its positive sides.”

Tamar refuses the notion that academic audit culture has constructive aspects. She is visibly upset by the idea. She demonstrates that in her opinion our shared book should introduce an unequivocally critical position towards the capitalist agenda of present-day higher education institutions. How can one find any advantages in a system that drives academics to compete with one another, produces more at the expense of quality and sidesteps innovation? “I have learnt from Sharon Doherty (2002) that in the face of such an unjust regime we have three options. We can either give up dreams of equality and justice and adopt the neoliberal mindset which accepts and even cherishes the current state or entirely refuse to comply with the rules and consequently be forced to leave. We still have the third option to resist the system from within. This entails partly obeying institutional repressive dictates yet refusing to fulfil others.” In Tamar’s case it has led her to decline managerial positions, like head of the department, choosing instead an activist stance by, for example, initiating multicultural and gender equity units or by serving for five years in the workers’ union. “Some say that by choosing an activist position, I am in fact declining real institutional responsibility. I don’t think so. I don’t believe that you can improve the system from academic managerial positions since you are frequently compelled to serve the neoliberal agenda, often deserting personal values and ideals. I saw it happen to my colleagues.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” Omri says. “[T]he refusal of faculty who hold humanist values to take managerial positions and risk their ideological beliefs, means that the seniors who remain in power, are those that have internalized the neoliberal rules. Junior lecturers and young researchers cannot afford challenging or resisting the system since they risk their chances to be promoted. How demoralizing the academic power structure has been was revealed to me a few years ago.”

Omri’s Story: The One-Way Corridor

I was then invited to a conference of doctoral students at the Literature Department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I was invited because I am a graduate of that department and I work at another academic institution in that field. The heads of the department wanted me to talk to the research students about “success.” They wanted the Master’s and Doctoral students to meet with graduates who work in literary fields in academia, in order to instil inspiration and hope; to demonstrate to them that there is a professional future in literary scholarship, that it is certainly possible to succeed and make a living from it in the academic market.

That of course isn’t true, at least regarding most doctoral graduates. Only a small number of them will ever be accepted into the universities or colleges in Israel. The nature of the academic labour market dictates that the demand for jobs is significantly greater than the supply. The department heads are well aware of that, but they feel it is their duty to wrap the scholarly commitment in a glittering marketing package. “Your investment is going to bear fruit” they regularly reassure students.

The reason I was invited to the research students’ conference was not because I am an exceptional scholar (I’m not), but it had to do with the fact that soon after I finished writing my doctorate, I joined the team that established a new department of Cultural Studies in a public college in Israel. Prior to that, I experienced worrying months of indecision, familiar to anyone who has crossed the finish line of a doctoral project: whether to leave the academic life or stay and thus settle for employment as a casual low-ranking academic teacher, or perhaps solicit postdoctoral grants, thus participating in the academic rat race of building a strong case before applying for a competitive academic position. The solicitation of postdoctoral grants, which are rare and competitive, is always driven by a combination of optimism, naivety and constant anxiety.

I was eventually saved from this tormented conflict, when I was granted a position as a head of a new department. That success was dependent mainly on good timing—that is luck. The opening of a new department is a rare opportunity for jobs. But perhaps it wasn’t entirely due to luck. I was given an opportunity because I’m a good teacher, and because I have been writing literary and cultural reviews regularly in the press for many years, so my name has been known in literary circles. I wasn’t given the position because of my CV, or the impact factor of my publications, which were few at the time. I gained it due to trust. That trust was dependent on the vision of the founder of my department; a scholar but also a noted author who has lived both in and out of academia. She gambled on me because of my public writing, and not because of the academic output chronicled in my academic CV. It was in fact a case of scandalous luck—unfair, non-competitive, happenstance.

The invitation to the conference came six years after I had completed my doctorate and left the institution, and I was flattered to be invited back. I was glad to tell the research students about my journey and following my experience I also urged them to demand that the institution provide them with appropriate training for various jobs in the literary world: workshops on translation, editing and journalistic writing on literature and culture. I told them that they must be offered information regarding the literary market structure, relevant agents and possible roles they could occupy.

It was important for me to clarify to them that there is a world outside the bounds of academia. Universities sign up research students because they are funded by the number of students who earn higher degrees. But Humanities departments are shrinking, and only a few graduates will find work in higher education institutions. It was important to me to point out that a broader horizon of opportunities exists beyond the academic walls, because I remembered the hermetic ethos of research, as it has been conducted in the academic departments: an ethos barricaded against the labour market outside it. I wanted to clarify to them that they have power: the power to demand that their department be provided with skills and intellectual knowledge enabling them to survive in the cultural world, should they choose (or be forced) to go there. I thought and still think that the responsibility of the academic institution towards its students should not be restricted by its own purposes. Public intellectuals have many options, and such opportunities are especially missing in Israel.

Perhaps I was naïve. How can students demand new skills and content from an academic department? And from whom exactly should they demand them, in an academic entity that protectively secludes itself from the outside? At least that’s the situation in Israel: a small consolation for Israeli intellectuals—who feel under attack, misunderstood, facing a cultural climate of opposition to academic elitism, contempt for intellectualism and therefore take refuge in their indignation. Most of these academics write articles in English, travel abroad, are no longer collaborators in Israel’s dwindling intellectual worlds, beset by a constant sense of alienation and resentment.

Nonetheless, despite what Tamar thinks, neoliberalism does have some dubious advantages: the students are “clients,” a concept despised by many academics—rightly so, in large part. Clients, as in any organization that provides services, are a nuisance, even though they are necessary in order to receive funding and survive economically. In this sorry state of affairs, the clients have consumer power. Other literature departments that do offer such skills are more successful, more attractive. Pressure by students may nudge the institution out of its comfort zone, enable it to open to the outside and enable its students to engage in what they love and what they’ve studied.

I stood there, slightly agitated and certain of my justness, facing about a dozen young scholars. I gave examples, waved my arms, spoke fervently: the imperative of the CV is not exhausted by following the well-trodden path, I said, because that path may lead to a dead end. But there are other possibilities, even for someone who has chosen to study literature. It is your right to demand and to receive these skills, I told them, and you are also entitled to develop non-academic elements of the CV: edit books, write reviews and opinion columns in the press and cultural websites and participate in commercial launches and festivals. If this is the field you love, the field that excites you, then take part in it: not just in case academia should not accept you, but because it can be thrilling and rewarding.

But the more the presentation progressed, the more I felt a cloaked swell of fury arising against myself. The anger had to do with my remarks coming across as patronizing—for having them come from my lips; someone already in a secure position. To them my words were confusing and threatening. In retrospect, I believe what happened was this: When I said to them, “Write in various venues, not just academic,” what they heard was “Don’t commit yourselves to scholarship.” When I said to them, “Become familiar with the world of literary editing,” what they heard was “Deviate from the course you’re now taking, the one-way corridor of completing the doctorate, dismembering it into articles for submission to peer-reviewed publications, ultimately to arrive at self-fulfillment, excellent pensionary rights, and worthy symbolic status.” The discomfort was directed back at me because they felt I was encouraging them to betray the path they stood upon, everything they had been promised by their teachers and supervisors, by virtue of their very standing as “research students”—a betrayal that could have grave consequences for their futures.

They weren’t entirely mistaken. Yael—who sat in the back row, whom I had known previously from the reviews she had published in the press (and done them capably)—raised her hand and spoke. She told us all—as though to emphatically disprove my desperate and dangerous attempt to subvert them—about the opposition she encountered when she began to write reviews of contemporary literature. She said that her popular writing in the newspaper had aroused deep suspicion towards her: an oppressive disapproval which was conveyed to her as a covert message by her teachers, intimating that she was not dedicated to her scholarly work, that she was a populist and a traitor to literary scholarship. She was accused of wasting her time on a public discussion of books that aren’t “important enough,” because their academic significance had yet to be proven. Her doctoral supervisor summoned her to a meeting and in a friendly fashion, motherly and protective, she proposed to her that she stop publishing reviews. She told her that “it doesn’t make a good impression.” What she meant was that it wasn’t relevant to her CV; it gave the impression that she wasn’t “being serious”—not just academically, but in terms of her habitus in the academic world. The unfortunate divide between literary scholarship and the literary market must be absolute. You can be a critic, or a literary editor, or a translator or a publishing house lector—OR you can be an academic.

Her story didn’t surprise me. I recognized this type of warning, even though I hadn’t directly been the object of one at the time. I remember that I once wrote a newspaper review of Fifty Shades of Grey—a cultural phenomenon that I found highly significant, because it reflected a broad and hidden collective agenda. The book’s phenomenal success was gripping testimony to gender power relations and to passion and fantasy in contemporary culture. My review was a serious critical article, which demanded intellectual reflection. The success of the book was like a riddle I had to solve. (See, even now I’m still apologizing. It’s a ridiculous and unnecessary apology, but old habits die hard.) After the review was published, I arrived at work to find staff members gaping at me and making ironic comments, literally raising their eyebrows: Is this what you’re interested in, what you’re investing in—Fifty Shades of Grey? I had instantly turned from a promising scholar into a frivolous populist. They hadn’t read the review, let alone wasted their time on the book. But just my going outside the institution, outside the rules of the CV, was testimony to my infantile rebelliousness, my irresponsibility, my vulgar surrender to the power of popular ratings.

Yael rejected my attempt to unlock the students’ imagination about the breadth of opportunities available. Her experience had proven my efforts as mistaken and dangerous. And she read the academic landscape much better than I did. Academia’s distaste for current developments in the literary world is expressed in the indoctrination drilled into young literary scholars, according to which nothing of interest is happening in the field of contemporary literature, and it’s best to stay away from it. The head of the department had proudly told her students that she “doesn’t read literature written by living people.” She related with arrogance towards contemporary texts whose value and impact we cannot assess due to lack of perspective. And therefore, young scholars are sent repeatedly to study the great novels, the same ones their teachers also studied. The reasons for this conformity are clear: a stable contemporary canon which offers academic surety towards promotion and acceptance as a “serious” scholar hasn’t yet taken shape; it’s preferable not to take risks in order to avoid being suspected of populism or lack of historical depth. From a research aspect, it’s far better to remain in the relatively secure domain of the traditional writers and writings and just add to the existing research.

That’s the situation, and those at the presentation unanimously agreed with Yael. To stay away from the contemporary literary market is wise—so research students do not risk their standing and prospects within academia. But it drives a sharp wedge between the active literary market and academia: new books are hardly ever read in the academy (even though students undertake their literature studies because they love to read—or used to read—the literature of their time). When scholars and teachers do not teach, review, research or edit contemporary literature, that is are not actual agents in the ongoing literary arena, the latter is more given to the decisions of the marketing people in the popular printing houses thus creating a vicious cycle. The quality of contemporary literature is perceived as inferior, and therefore there is no point in dealing with it in a scholarly fashion; and because there is no scholarly engagement with contemporary literature, there is no resonance enabling an assessment of the quality of new and good books. This is where the contemporary literary arena is entirely irrelevant to academia, and academia in turn is entirely irrelevant to the contemporary literary arena.

So what’s left? What’s taking place in the corridors of the literature departments is a closed cocktail party of commentators who respond to each other, devise examples of the thinking of smart people who once lived in Paris, or regarding the theoretical whims of the hour. As in Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony (1941), the machine writes its own apparatus on the body of the convicted. In an introverted world that has raised the banner of narrow expertise as testimony to academic legitimacy, and with the energetic assistance of neoliberal techniques of academic promotion and reward, it seems that the study of literature has lost its potential for activism.

Literature unwittingly devotes itself to steps already taken, histories already told. Large portions of the scholarly activity are characterized by the elaboration of minute differences, differences in differences: articles that are nothing but footnotes, again and again relating between a canonical work and its creator’s biography or using the text to demonstrate an expectable theoretical argument. This is the research norm, making it possible to place articles and achieve publication in the leading periodicals, which exclusively—and in very similar ways—determine how literature may be discussed. The greater irony is that this conservatism is anchored precisely in a theoretical platform that rejects it: poststructuralist elevator music accompanying a rather oedipal drama of academic initiation.

When Yael told of her conversation with her supervisor, she was accusing me, without saying so explicitly, of being misleading and naïve, of not understanding the system and providing foolish counsel. I didn’t know how to answer her, because she was right: she had been punished for transgressing. She hadn’t played the game the way you’re supposed to, and now she regretted it. The others listened to her, nodded and cast accusatory glances my way, and I still didn’t know how to answer. I felt I couldn’t disappoint them and reveal the statistics regarding the percentage of graduates who obtain a position in the academic system. The reason they were there was precisely because they hoped to beat the odds. And then there is the gulf between the price paid by independent agents within the academia and the slowness of academia’s gravitation towards renewed relevance. Academia has no choice. It must happen. If academia wishes to survive, it must be more relevant, more involved on the outside. However, that was not these students’ concern: to be a good academic, if I may put it bluntly, is to manufacture a CV. And while I was proposing to unlock their CV and future potential, they knew the traditional CV was the sole mirror of one’s worth in their world.

In Hebrew, the concept of CV (korot hayim—literally, “happenings of life”) suggests that the events that accompany life shape it in its entirety. But a CV is of course a biographical document that functions as a declaration of one’s capital in the academic labour market, and also exposes its boundaries and limits. It includes the familiar items: academic positions, peer-reviewed publications (in order of importance: books, articles in periodicals, articles in anthologies, reviews and critiques), participation in conferences, awards, scholarships and research grants. It is measured by quantitative parameters, regarding publishing output (how many articles published, how prestigious the periodicals in which they appeared), fundraising (how much of it collected) and signs of recognition (which awards won). As Tamar has already demonstrated, while assessing the CV, promotion committee members don’t read articles (sometimes they read a short writing sample usually nothing more than paying lip service), but they quantitatively measure the output by impact factor in a given year (the number of citations, received in that year, of articles published in that journal during the two preceding years, divided by the total number of “citable items” published in that journal during the two preceding years) and by the number of their publications. They also examine career “consistency,” that is whether you distinctly adhere to a specific intellectual field, have special expertise; whether you can be subsumed under one of the predetermined rubrics of intellectual classification. And They take no notice of non-peer-reviewed publications.

I feel compelled to repeat the obvious: most of the influential writings of our times—Woolf and Pound, Shklovsky and de Saussure, Cixous and Irigaray, Foucault and Barthes, Blanchot and Levinas—were not peer-reviewed. They would not have successfully passed any review mechanism. Public writing—in the press, artists’ books, postscripts in non-academic books, essays—is of no consequence in inward-looking academia. It is an addendum to the CV, at its irrelevant margins—even though it testifies more than anything to the Eros of scholarship, intellectual passion, the thirsting for knowledge and originality.

Neoliberal academia upholds the tools of objective measurement. The IF for example, the measure most appreciated, is a formula invented by Eugen Eli Garfield and contributed to the fortunes of two corporations in succession, the latter one is Clarivate. Yet this measurement is evidently arbitrary. Other formulas owned by other corporations such as Scopus and SJR, produce different calculation for the same journals. However, in a privatized and exposed neoliberal market, which sets value by output, this is the easiest way to assess the value of labour. The academic marketplace classifies academics on the basis of the products that maintain the global system of the publishers’ market. Much has been written about the luft gesheft of academic publications, the great majority of which are read by only three people: the writer, the editor and the reviewer. It’s an industry with an inbuilt market failure: it works according to the laws of supply, but much less—in fact, almost never—according to the laws of intellectual demand (except for academic superstars, an issue deserving of a separate discussion).

The market’s failures are a well-known fact. A new article is no longer good tidings, but a piece of mass merchandise that appears and then fades back into the dizzying abundance of publications, most of which are inaccessible to the public and function according to the rules of industrial standardization. The manufactured CV is a friend to academic success, but often a foe to independent thinking: not because scholars are not interested in or capable of breaking through imposed boundaries, engaging in original intellectual endeavour or challenging basic assumptions, but because they cannot afford to do so. Their fate may be sealed in the academic court that rewards the “peer-reviewed” and indicts the “non-peer-reviewed.”

All this I didn’t say to the students facing me at the Hebrew University. I felt it wouldn’t have been fair. It wasn’t the time or the place to say it. They are captive, struggling for their futures within rules they haven’t chosen nor can they change. In this race, it’s every man and woman for themselves, each CV for itself.

“But maybe this is wrong.” Tamar notes. We are back in the Welcome Trust library happy, to find our previous table empty. The guard is not around so we move the antique map and put down our computers, planning to work and talk intermittingly. Near us a group of young intellectuals is engaged in an enthusiastic discussion. Nobody hushes them. On the other side someone is reading a text, typing quickly, maybe the summary of its content. “What is wrong?,” Omri asks, “The choice to avoid telling them that they are victims of a misfunctioning system which takes advantage of their intellectual aspirations. In fact, I don’t tell them myself. I even encourage them to continue their academic studies and aspire to be scholars. Maybe I should tell them since, by not warning them, I am damaging their future.”

Tamar relates that when she was working on her doctoral dissertation she worked as editorial board coordinator for a daily newspaper, and then as assistant editor of a magazine. “Contrary to the young researchers in Omri’s story, I had no illusions,” she says. “I knew that my chances of getting a tenure track position were very low. And anyway, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to stay in academia. I aspired to write literature and I thought I would make a living out of editing. But then a friend invited me to teach at an Israeli branch of a British college that grants an academic degree to teachers who only have a diploma. It was a very significant year in my life—because it was feminist and critical academe. But then the husband of one of my colleagues who was at the time the head of the education department in Tel Hai College invited me to teach academic skills, so I started teaching there.” At about that time A Completely Ordinary Life, her collection of short stories, was published. “And then the job was expanded and instead of a literary author I became an academic. But for many years I stayed ambivalent regarding my academic career and I still hoped to be a writer.”

Omri had worked as a literary critic and editor, and made a living working in the advertising industry. But then he had been invited to head a new Cultural Studies programme and found himself in academia. Susan was also an accidental academic. She came from a professional field: “I worked for a church group, finding students homestay accommodation and volunteered at The Women’s Shelter for victims of domestic violence while studying my undergraduate degree. While working on my PhD I was tutoring at the university and did a locum at the Women’s Hospital. Later I worked with the Department of Family Services as a community resource officer, and then as a group facilitator for a domestic violence perpetrator programme and a post-traumatic stress disorder unit at the Mater Hospital. I did not see myself as an academic, I just wanted to work with women and children. But then I was encouraged to apply for a lecturer position when it came up at the university.”

What do these stories tell us? Apparently, none of us planned to be academics. Did these stories signify however that we begin our careers in a less demanding and competitive academia? We doubt it. It seems that luck, mere chance and personal connections played a significant role in our academic game. Even now young scholars with an excellent CV may remain without a proper job for years, while others who accomplish less yet happen to be in the right place and time and/or have the right connections may find a tenure track position.

Omri’s story also reveals that in the humanities, although professional experience and work in the field at times increase chances of finding an academic job, the current neoliberal regime despite its talk about employability doesn’t give value to students’ acquisition of professional practice and frequently even hinders or prevents them from acquiring necessary skills. Susan says that in social work the estrangement between academia and the field in some ways is mutual: university management don’t really value professional experience, while the field may see academic theoretical contributions as less relevant.

Susan’s Story: A Self-defeating Cycle

In the real world of social work, a theory-research-practice divide is evident, she says. But it is different from and perhaps in contrast to Omri’s story. Most students cannot wait to finish their degree and leave their theoretical studies behind to do the “real world” work they have been learning about.

They are eager to exit academia because many of them have been studying part-time for many years—mature-aged students often desperately juggling studies, family responsibilities, paid work, poverty and their own mental health. Ironically, these circumstances are quite similar to those of the clients they will serve after graduation (Baglow & Gair, 2019). To list a degree on their CV, social work students must successfully complete all course work plus two full time field practicums of three months duration, each in a welfare organization. In turn, these practicums produce an additional but often devalued workload for both practitioners and social work academics. It is this important intersection of theory, practice and research in the discipline of social work, along with the neoliberal academic workload and what “counts” on the CV that I highlight here.

“How many students will you have this semester?” our Field Education Coordinator asked me pointedly. You know we all have to be liaison for six students each semester now, because we have more students and less staff. “Well, I still have some money left in my Services Account,” I tell her, “so I will use that money to pay for a casual contract for someone to do some of them.” “Well, how many will you do yourself and how many will you buy out,” she asks, somewhat frustrated, “and who will do them? You need to give us names.” I know she thinks it is better if I don’t buy out my agency visits to students, but I feel the pressure to keep my publications count up and focus on at least getting one small research grant this year—and I can’t do it all! It is the case that on their field practicum, which accounts for almost six months of their degree programme, students need academic input and guidance. “Maybe I will do two,” I tell her. “Well, you know the organisations and the students prefer university staff to visit them in the agencies rather than sessionals.” She sighs, and her voice trails off as she enters her office across the corridor.

I know she is right. The weight of this professional dilemma returns to haunt me every semester. I tell myself assertively that I need to be single-minded. No academic has been promoted for their ongoing commitment to supporting students on their field practicum. It is true that our academic role is divided into research, teaching and service. Teaching has gained traction as a highly worthwhile area of scholarship in more recent years. Service also is seen as important, and lots of things count for service. Serving on a university ethics committee or academic board or serving as an equity officer for matters like bullying, stalking and racism, all of which I have done, count as university service. And service to your profession counts, for example serving on professional committees, being a reviewer for professional journals or serving on editorial boards—and all which can take an enormous amount of time. Supporting students on field practicum is very important too but it is one of those valuable but invisible roles. And service and teaching do not have the elite status of research on the academic CV.

I felt guilty about the conversation in the hallway, about “buying out” student liaison visits to the agencies. Placements are critical learning times for students, and students are always very anxious about their practicum. It is a “make or break” moment in their studies—a hands-on extended test where they must demonstrate they can apply theory to practice across two three months placements—and they need significant support to get through. University staff visit students on a varying number of occasions, depending on how well the placement is going, they read students’ journals, and they push students to stretch their thinking and learning wherever they are located, most commonly in sectors such as health, mental health, homelessness, child protection, disability or domestic and family violence.

But the metrics are looming. How many publications did I achieve last year, what research did I complete, what grants or awards did I gain—our head of department will ask. I wish the quality and relevance of the research was considered more important, but quantity seems to trump quality. If I cannot produce an adequate list of achievements, then unfortunately my teaching load will be increased. Like service (including supporting students on practicum), teaching is a privilege and an opportunity to make a difference, but I do not want my teaching load to be further increased, because then the opportunities to contribute to new knowledge through research is less possible. Each year it is a stressful skirmish to carve out time for research; meanwhile an internal battle with my “ethical self” about my obligation and accountability to our students on field practicum ensues.

But this is the neoliberal academy. The workload, outputs and research benchmarks have increased significantly even from a decade ago, with accelerated timeframes. Equally, students are core business for the university, and they must be highly satisfied with their learning experience while acquiring demonstrable graduate attributes. I find it almost impossible to complete all expected workload milestones—yet I must try. So, paying for sessional appointments to undertake my role to support students on field placements is one way of reducing my teaching/supervision workload. It could be seen as a workload choice, but it feels more like an ethical compromise. This “choice” is also for my own survival and mental health.

But there are deeper ramifications that I wanted to illuminate in making this move to casualize my support role for students on their field practicum. In doing so, I know that I am feeding the “practice-research divide” that is undesirable but palpable in social work. It is a false divide, I tell students, research must inform practice and practice must inform research. The skills of practice and research are very similar I assert in the classroom—listening, observation, open questions, clear method, documenting stories, recording, empathy, critical reflection—the skills and knowledge you need for social work practice are the same skills you need for theorizing about and researching your social work practice.

There is a strong sentiment in the profession that social workers in the field are doing what they are trained to do and staying in the academy to focus on theory and research to inform that practice can be seen as an anathema to this practice-based profession. Students and bystanders seem to hint at a notion that those who do not have enough skills to be grassroots social workers stay on or return to the academy. What is your practice history some ask, and when did you last practice social work? Do they ask that of medical researchers?

But social work academics do need to keep their links to the field, including through supervision of students on their practicum, at the same time emphasizing the links between theory and practice. In every subject in our degree programme theories are linked to practice. Yet students seem keen to sideline theories as soon as possible. I think once graduates have been in the field a few years they regret time not spent focusing more on theories and research-informed practice. But by then they are caught up in their own organization’s neoliberal culture: reduced funding, reduced staff and enormous workloads. Time for revisiting theories and undertaking their own practice-based research may be fleeting thoughts in the everyday chaos of grassroots practice.

Osmond and O’Connor (2006) discussed theoretical knowledge as playing a critical and long-established role in social work. They were interested in exploring the diverse theoretical knowledge base used by social workers in Australian child protection practice. They admitted their findings could be described as alarming. They said that while some social workers’ interest in research may have motivated them to volunteer to participate, the emerging data was clear. Social workers in the study did not discuss their practice as informed by theoretical knowledge. Osmond and O’Connor revealed that no participant in the study referred to any empirical research as informing their practice, and in the observation phase of the study no participant was observed reading research articles. To exemplify this point, they noted that when asked about theory informing their practice one experienced worker said it all: “When I was at university, I remember reading some articles.” In summarizing, Osmond and O’Connor stated that during the time of the study (18 months) no participant referred to, read, considered or appraised any research, even though there is a professional development requirement for social worker to do so. They also reported that in more informal conversations with child protection workers across the time of the study it was conveyed to them that reading about research was seen by their managers as an indicator that they had an insufficient workload. More recently Bigby (2019) reported that staff in smaller to medium sized organizations knew little about what research was being undertaken in their field in Australia. One important mechanism that Osmond and O’Connor identified for strengthening evidence-based practice was to maintain a purposeful focus in social work training on how theory and research-informed practice will help graduate practitioners make and justify ethical, effective decisions. One such opportunity is to stress these links to students while they are on their field practicum.

So perhaps my laboured point is clearer now—by buying out student placement visits and replacing myself with casual contractors who are social work trained but not active researchers, I am caught in a self-defeating cycle. In making this decision to withdraw my input into students’ learning on their practicum and leaving the task to others in order to slightly reduce my workload, I am contributing to the devaluing of research-informed social work practice; the same knowledge base I seek time to contribute to with my publications. And it seems this divide can only expand if theory and research continue to be undervalued or invisible in the field and supporting students to better understand theory in practice is undervalued in the academy.

Meanwhile, in the current neoliberal academy, the metrics clock is ticking, and achievements must be evidenced on the academic CV. The year rolls on, and the same conversation with the Field Coordinator has come around again. “How many students will you take this semester?,” she asks.