Star NFL linebacker Junior Seau committed suicide in May 2012. It was later concluded that he suffered from chronic brain damage.

Each year, it becomes a little harder to be a football fan. I have loved the game since I was 11, and I always intellectualized it, an attitude that is now rewarded with the renaissance in football analysis online.  But while I could somehow always look past the politics of the game, the new findings on concussions seem to be a whole other level of destruction visited upon the bodies of players.

It may be Super Bowl week, but concussions are in the news.  The Atlantic ran a short piece on scans showing brain damage in living former players.  Scans of Junior Seau’s brain show that he had a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head trauma at the time of his death even though, according to the NFL, he “never” had a concussion.  The news is only going to get worse, not better, for the NFL.  Helmet technology is not going to save players, especially when there’s resistance to even marginally better helmets.  Players who have come up in the system won’t report concussions when they should (they’re the same with other injuries) and the league head office seems mostly interested in head injuries as a PR problem, a problem that continues to get worse as public figures–including the US president now–say they would not let their sons play the sport competitively.  I can imagine two possible futures for football in this situation.

1.  The first is that the game will continue to change to the point that it is substantially different from what it is even today.  Obama isn’t the first president to weigh in on football violence.  If we go back to the 19th century, people were getting killed because of the rules.  In 1906 Teddy Roosevelt threatened to ban organized football, because college students were getting killed off–the 1905 season saw 19 player deaths and countless major injuries (Roosevelt’s own son played for Harvard and suffered a malicious broken nose).  In response, the NCAA legalized the forward pass and changed several other rules, such as banning mass formations and the creation of a neutral zone at the line of scrimmage.  This was after rules changes in 1894 banning the flying wedge and other exceedingly violent tactics.

From the standpoint of concussions, we are at some point before 1894.  If someone like Seau can go through his career “without” a concussion (note the scarequotes) and probably die as a result of brain injuries, then massive reforms are needed.  I don’t have a clear program, but in essence what we’re looking at is either a transformation of player equipment to make it less possible for them to hit each other as violently as they do, or a transformation of the rules to further favor offensive players, perhaps making it more like arena football or flag football.

2.  The other future for football is visible in the state of boxing today.  Boxing was a major American sport for a large chunk of the 20th century.  Boxers were cultural icons and the sport, like football, developed a following among intellectuals.  But today, it’s fan base is heavily diminished.  It has lost a good deal of its cultural respectability, its cache with fans, reporters and writers, and most importantly, with parents whose children might go into the sport.  Part of this is a business question, having to do with boxing’s relationship with television, and the challenges it now faces from competitors like the Ultimate Fighting Championship.  But boxing also declined because its violence went from being aestheticized by sportswriters and other intellectuals–as “the sweet science”–to being deplored by those same people.  The NFL and NCAA clearly have good media sense, and it is possible that their PR machine can hold back the attacks that will come as more information about the extent and effect of player concussions is revealed.  Perhaps football will become more of a lower class sport, as parents who have intellectual or knowledge-economy ambitions for their kids move away from it.  It’s one thing to think your kid might break a bone or tear a muscle from playing a sport.  The prospect of brain damage resonates quite differently with parents.

Today, boxing suffers from an association with its athletes as members of a disposable class of society.  If football’s rules don’t change, it risks joining boxing as a sport whose athletes will be imagined as disposable people–even more than they are now.

However much I like the sport, and however much money is behind it, I don’t think we’ll see the same game in a generation’s time.

Search committees need advice too. So I submit this letter to search committees in the US and Canada. It probably doesn’t apply to committees in Europe and elsewhere, since the expectations and protocols are different.

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3 August 2012

Dear Search Committees,

Soon, I’ll be writing you letters. Right now, I’m writing with some requests.

1. Consider requesting less from people in their initial applications. How much of an initial dossier do you really need? When I go through a set of applications, it’s usually obvious to me from a letter and CV that a good proportion of the applicants in a pile aren’t a good fit for the job. Sure, there are still many people left over after that, but couldn’t you ask for additional information then? Do the student evaluations and statement of research philosophy really matter if you advertised a transnational media studies position and someone writes in with an organizational communication CV (but they took a postcolonial seminar once)?

2. Consider accepting as much of the dossier as possible in electronic form. As someone who writes dozens and sometimes hundreds of letters in a year, it makes a huge difference to me and to my printer when letters can be sent electronically. If your HR department requires paper recommendations to make an offer, request them for finalists only. But imagine how convenient it would be to have electronic dossiers for candidates: no more running around trying to figure out who has that file you need.

3. At every stage, consider telling candidates as much as possible about what you want. Do you want them to design new courses or to teach ones already on the books? Do you hope they’ll build a new lab or bridge two areas of the program? Unsure of what you want? Why not tell the candidates and let them make their best pitch possible? Let them know what’s important in the letter or interview.

4. A Skype interview is a phone interview with video, nothing more. Every Skype interview I hear about from applicants has a bizarre or wacky component to it. No two are remotely similar.  Phone interviews and campus interviews are genres and have predictable protocols. Skype interviews are about as predictable as an LSD-enhanced disc jockey on a 1970s freeform FM radio station.

Skype interviews are not substitutes for on-campus interviews where candidates give research presentations and have lengthy discussions with committees. They are also not occasions to submit candidates to surprising challenges. Keep them short and to the point, and treat them like phone interviews: you’re getting a sense of the person at the other end, and they’re getting a sense of you. That’s it. If you want to get to know the candidate better, invite them to campus. Please don’t add tech support, camera, mic work and troubleshooting bad connections to candidates’ stress.

5. Send out rejection letters as soon as you can. Sure, you’ve got to hold onto your finalists and maybe a few others as you’re sorting out who will actually be offered the job—and whether they will accept—but most of the people in the pile could get their letters right away. A swift and kind letter is one of the most humane things you can do for your candidates who aren’t going to be hired.

6. For on-campus interviews, consider having a formal interview with the entire committee, or even the entire department. The formal interview is a great place for everyone to ask their questions of the candidate, and for the candidate to respond once, in front of the group, so that everyone hears the same thing. It makes deliberations easier, and it also helps clarify which questions are really important.

7. Also, consider keeping the on-campus interviews to about a day in length (plus meals).  Are all the meetings really necessary to decide if the person will be hired or to properly recruit them?

8. Be good hosts on the interview. Sure, it’s nice to go out to dinner on your school’s dime, but make it a place where the candidate can actually eat something, and make an effort to include them in the conversation. And I don’t mean by firing more interview questions at them about how they will deal with late student papers. Also, if there are unexpected things that go against conventional interview wisdom, please tell all candidates up front. For instance, when I was running searches here in Montreal, I made a point of telling candidates not to wear nice shoes, or to bring indoor and outdoor shoes, since they’d be walking through snow banks and slush pools.

9. Don’t ask candidates to front the costs of the interview. For instance: don’t make them buy their plane ticket. Ideally, the only reimbursements they should have to submit at the end would be cab fare if you live in that kind of place. Unless you’re making a senior hire, odds are that your candidates are broke, and while your school may be as well, if you’re interviewing them, you’re probably acting like you’re not broke. So why not keep up the act? It’s the decent thing to do.

To sum up: try and be a little kinder to your candidates this year. Ask them all the difficult questions you can think of; challenge them as part of the job talks or the interview. That’s all fair, and good for everyone. But try to make the rest of the process as humane as possible. Not only will they appreciate it, you’ll feel better about the process and do your department’s reputation a service at the same time.

Sincerely,
–Jonathan

Even so, there is much to defend in peer review. I like that in our business, authors have to have their work reviewed by readers who are, if not strangers, at least chosen by an editor with vision for a publication and not the author. I like that there is a difference between self-publication and other kinds of publication. Authors are not necessarily always the best judges of their own ideas or their own prose (and I would include myself in this group). But clearly, it is time for reform.

So how do we keep some of the good parts of the system while changing the problematic ones? One of the main features of peer review, and one of the most criticized, is the unfortunately-named “double-blind” process, where authors and reviewers do not know one another’s identities. I say it is unfortunately named because it partakes of all sorts of problematic constructs of blindness and sight. It oversells the importance of vision, and it assumes that the blind can’t identify things, which is patently ridiculous. These notions have been well criticized by Georgina Kleege (2005) in her analysis of the “hypothetical blind man” of philosophy, but “hypothetical” (as she calls him) also wreaks havoc in our scholarly world as well. We assume certain things of “blind” review that are untrue in practice. Many of us have been able to guess the identity of the author we are “blind” reviewing, and many of us have been able to guess the identity of our “blinded” reviews. Blindness is supposed to indicate objectivity, where the words on the page signify for just what they are. But of course they never do: we all have our critical hobby-horses, our preferred and, well, not preferred approaches to theory and method.

There are many proposals to transform institutions of peer review, and perhaps in time some will come to fruition. But there is a simple step that every concerned reviewer could take, right now, to make the process better, fairer, more useful and more human.

Reviewers, sign your reviews, and tell your editors that you decline anonymity.

This would have a few immediate effects. First, authors could read the reviews against the reviewer’s work, which would help them understand where the comments are coming from. Second, they would also get to see who is performing gatekeeping functions for the journal or press, which would help them evaluate it as a potential publication outlet and make editors accountable for their decisions. Third, it would make reviewers responsible not only for their words but for their tone since their names would be attached to it. This would result in fewer irresponsible reviews dashed off that are of little help to the author, and fewer “seek and destroy” operations. It would pressure reviewers to more carefully consider the author’s standpoint. It might even, in some cases, nurture some of that solidarity that Richard Rorty says scientists have over humanists as a result of their consensus on first principles.

I have begun the process over the past year and largely been successful. It is easy with book manuscripts where you know the authors’ names—you can just send them the review. With journals it’s a little trickier. And I have found that journal editors have wildly differing interpretations of what the “ethics” of disclosure might be, under what conditions I am allowed to attach my name to the review, and so forth. That in itself is revealing because it shows there is no clear consensus on the advantages or usefulness of the anonymization process. My choice has had no effect on my acceptance/rejection rate, but it has led to some interesting conversations. It has also forced me to be both fair and careful in my reviews. I think I was before, but now even moreso. Perhaps there are also people out there silently cursing me, I don’t know. But the beauty of tenure is that it doesn’t matter as much.

Of course the mere proposition of authors signing their reviews is a tremendous pain in the ass for everyone involved. Editors aren’t going to want to reveal the names of their reviewers because of the likely flak from authors. Reviewers aren’t going to want to spend the extra time or be accountable for saying “no” on a journal submission or book project (despite the fact that we do that all the time to students who know very well who we are). Authors may underestimate the value of a review from a person they don’t know. And reviewers without the security of tenure may not want their names out there in case vindictive senior colleagues get wind of their rejections.

My proposal is not a panacea, and it certainly won’t solve lots of other problems in publishing. It probably introduces lots of problems I haven’t even considered yet (which is why this is a blog post and why I won’t be responsible for anything bad that happens as a result of my proposal). I’m not even 100% convinced it’s a good idea. But naming has a way of imposing responsibility, and that seems like a good reason to give it a try. We could just limit it to tenured faculty to begin with and see how it works.

And unlike so many fixes to the peer-review system, we can try it out right now. All you have to do is sign your reviews.

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Blair, Carole, Julie Brown, and Leslie Baxter. 1994. “Disciplining the Feminine.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (November): 383-409. doi:10.1080/00335639409384084.
Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2011. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. NYU Press.
Kleege, Georgina. 2005. “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account.” Journal of Visual Culture 4 (2): 179 -190. doi:10.1177/1470412905054672.
Schwartzman, Roy. 1997. “Peer Review as the Enforcement of Orthodoxy.” Southern Communication Journal 63: 69-75.

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Jonathan Sterne just edited a big collection of essays entitled “The Politics of Academic Labor in Communication Studies,” where 21 authors ask us to confront and deal with the big issues we now face in a changing landscape: from defunding of universities to feed the war machine, to the politics of careers, to tyranny of powerpoint, along with a host of proposals and programs for organizing. It appears any day now in the International Journal of Communication at http://ijoc.org.