Personal Experience

The experience of being an academic author over the course of professorship is unique to each professor participant. It differs and varies from one to another. Yet, their narratives suggest two significant aspects which have become central to their personal experience. One aspect is concerned with academic influence which—although its source of experience comes from the academic institution to which they belong—has shaped their development of academic authorship. The other one is quite personal and unique yet ‘illuminating’ and conceivable in the sense that it is a kind of personal experience which other academic authors can imagine but may not have undergone—that is, the experience of personal growth.

4.1.1.1. Academic Influence

The interview findings suggest that the personal experience of academic authorship is under the influence of academic conditions. The professor participants maintain that being an academic in a university is similar to being an author. Therefore, academic authorship is integral to their academic identity and there is an interrelationship between writing and identity. Still, the experience of academic authorship does not always run smooth. The recent academic climate has changed and these changes, they claim, have made an impact on their current experience of authorship.

Regarding the intertwined relationship between authorship and academic identity under the academic influence, Professor Wonnicott clearly states that to write for publication is part of being an academic. He remarks that a person becomes an academic because they enjoy writing for publication. Otherwise,

there is no point of being an academic. Moreover, Professor Wonnicott was ‘taught’ that many universities grant special privileges to academic scholars in the social sciences who establish sole authorship of academic books and articles. Therefore, most of his works are solely-authored and only some are written in joint authorship, especially those in recent years. Professor Wonnicott suggests that joint authorship in the social sciences in recent years is not a policy change but it seems to have evolved in the same way as the one in the natural sciences in which a lot of academic scholars are involved in the same paper and they all get cited.

Concerning the relationship between academic authorship and the influence of the recent academic climate, Professor Bracton gives another account and suggests that her recent experience of academic authorship is not as enjoyable as previously. She remarks that early on in her career, her articles were ‘much simpler and about simple things’ and that it was not difficult because:

When I started in the 70’s, there wasn’t the pressure to publish but there is now. So,’cause I’m old now. You know you’ll get [probation] as long as you come up with something. ‘Could you do another little article?’ ‘Yes, I will do.’ It was a much a gentler atmosphere because there wasn’t the financial crisis in universities in those days. So, you could do it at your leisure and therefore really enjoy it. … I didn’t do it as any, for any particular reasons. Initially to get probation. They say you’ve got to have an article so I wrote an article. But you know I was in the game because I like to do that and I was wandering about the library, finding things and having opinions about them and writing them, trying to persuade people ‘I’m right, everybody else’s wrong.’ (Professor Bracton)

Professor Bracton explains that her recent experience of academic authorship has changed because of the ‘pressure to publish’ which seems to originate from the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

In line with this pressure to publish, Professor Wonnicott also expresses his view that it is much harder now to publish because now it seems only ‘high quality, highly cited’ journals are required. In the past he was able to have fun, writing to the journals or anywhere he liked but the current system is far more ‘rigid and mechanistic’; hence, the competitive experience of scholarly publication in recent years.

Nevertheless, the current academic climate can offer more than pressure to the academic scholars. Professor Woodworth is well aware of the fact that publication is an integral part of the academic identity but she suggests that quality of the publication brings about her current experience of identity as an academic author. She contends that with the introduction of RAE in 1986 in the UK, British universities can review the quality of their research and that this exercise forms a basis for funding decisions. The publication in the most prestigious journals also indicates the quality of academic output of an academic scholar and it helps to build up their ‘academic credentials’. Further, academic scholars are willingly active in forming the panels of reputable reviewers in academic journals to judge the quality of the academic contribution made by other scholars; hence, the peer-review process as an important system of academic participation. Therefore, Professor Woodworth notes that it is not only the system but the academic scholars themselves who play a role in the quality control. Writing for publication—even though it may appear to be a lot of pressure and involve high competition—can meet the needs of academic scholars because their publication can act as an index of career advancement, and, as such, the current experience of academic authorship involves not only writing but also reviewing.

These three accounts of the academic influence on the experience of academic authorship given by the professor participants suggest a kind of external source of change for the development of academic authorship. Truly, to be an academic scholar is to become an author. Yet, the current status of academic authorship is likely to be interwoven with many changes, especially the participation in the peer review process to maintain the quality of academic scholarship in the recent academic climate. These changes might have taken away the ‘gentler atmosphere’ of writing for publication but they have benefitted both the universities and the academic scholars and, as will be described in the second aspect of personal experience of academic authorship, have contributed to the professor participants’ personal growth.

4.1.1.2. Personal Growth

Although the academic influence can be seen as an extrinsic source of change, the professor participants suggest that the experience of writing for publication

has contributed to their personal growth to develop their current state of academic authorship.

One experience of personal growth is identified with the volition to improve the quality of academic publication and the appreciation of feedback. Professor Bracton provides a vivid account of her personal growth when she says that the participation in the peer review process has provided her with feedback to develop and to improve her academic scholarship. Before the REF, she could write her ideas freely and argue, ‘I’m right, everybody else’s wrong’. However, when she first wrote for the REF, there were a lot of practitioners who criticised her works on the ground that ‘people may have a view’. Therefore, she has learned to deal with her ‘polarised’ worldview in her peer-reviewed publications because:

[I]f you write a book, nobody’s really criticizing it. You can say what you like as long as you like if you’ve got a publishing contract and as long as the copyeditor is happy with it. But more recently, they wanted us to write in a journal where we would get peer review. So with feedback from the university, and the feedback from the reviewers of the journal who tend to say ‘This is too polarised. This is too extreme. This needs to be a bit more nuanced, to be gentler. You know. You need to be appreciating that people may have a view. So I tried to calm it down a bit recently if that makes sense. So that you don’t want to always say something awful, et cetera. I could say ‘This could run into difficulty.’ [laughs] Something a bit less bombastic, I suppose. (Professor Bracton)

Similarly, the appreciation of quality control in scholarly publication is also evident in Professor Wonnicott’s account and it has formed part of his personal experience of growth regarding his recent status of academic authorship. He comments that with the current competitive system of academic publication he cannot prevent his papers from being rejected by the journals to which he submitted. However, Professor Wonnicott thinks that rejection is a good thing because it is a kind of ‘quality control’. Now he does not publish his papers in journals without peer review panels (or ‘open access’) because:

More people will be writing in blogs and in poor quality journals and [I] have a concern that in humanities and social sciences we would find it hard to maintain the quality control that we have of academic writing because the government policy and the research council policy is to go for more open access, to go for less quality control, to go for cheaper

publishing, and I think, that will harm British humanities, arts and social sciences, if it’s going ahead. (Professor Wonnicott)

The experience of personal growth regarding the quality of academic scholarship is also manifested as the level of confidence. Professor Woodworth recounts how she has built up her confidence alongside her scholarship. When she started off as an academic, she always felt worried about how her article would be taken by others. She says that there was quite a ‘big learning curve’ at the beginning of her career but she then realised she was ‘doing all right’. She explains many levels of confidence on her trajectory of academic scholarship. Her first level of confidence is her realisation that she knows more than her students and her second level derived from ‘making networks of colleagues’ and doing other jobs within her academic life. With promotions and trust from policy makers, she has now reached her third level of confidence, telling herself, ‘actually I’m all right. I’m confident now.’

In sum, these accounts of personal growth indicate the endeavours made by the professor participants to improve the quality of their academic scholarship in the recent academic climate of scholarly publication. The feedback from the peer review process, including rejection, not only provides different worldviews but also maintains the quality control of research. Yet, the feedback may be a source of worry during the early years, as Professor Woodworth suggests, and academic scholars might need to undergo a big learning curve before they can reach their next level of confidence.