I have never been a fan of the rapper, Rick Ross. And yet his cut, “Everyday I’m Hustlin,” is my work anthem.  Katt Williams’ skit didn’t help matters and made the opening hook go viral in my head for years.  Today, I have folders, notebooks, mugs, and all other manner of appropriated paraphernalia to remind myself that this academic game is just that: A HUSTLE.  I even have a file folder that says “#keephustlin” so I can label and be clear on the things that are the hustle. These reminders help me remember and get through the week, day, semester, and year.   Since Rick Ross’s misogynoir, misogyny, and disingenuousness match up quite nicely with life in academia, I don’t even feel bad as a feminist claiming his definition of a hustle in my work life. “Everyday I’m hustlin/Hustle, hustlin hustlin/Hustle, hustlin hustlin/Hustle, hustlin hustlin.”

I should have written this post when the song first dropped circa 2006 but I couldn’t have articulated the nature of my grind in the academy then.  And it’s only been the questions I have received about my stance on 4Cs/NCTE and the academic job market that has compelled me to sit down and write all of this now.

I have been on the market four times now, was successful in each round, and got the job that I liked best at that moment.  I have explored all kinds of institutions, never committed to any one kind, and plan to maintain my stealth, always-on-the-move style until I meet an institution that treats me fairly.  I have seen the insides of search committees, hiring committees, national award committees, and tenure committees and it ain’t never been pretty.  I have walked out of some of those meetings traumatized and exhausted for what/who I had to argue and fight for. I have learned and seen a lot, most of which I can’t even (legally) disclose.  I’ve learned the rules all on my own because no one ever told me, many don’t seem to even see what is right in front of them, and others purposely conceal the strings behind the puppetry.

I am calling this post “Part I,” because I am sure that I will remember more stuff later and will build on this.  Think of this as the raw, uncut, de-bourgeois-professionalized version of what you get on those websites about the hows and whys of the academic market.

I love the WORK that I do as a college educator teaching first-generation, racially marginalized, urban young people of color.  I enjoy fighting for my own language, narrative, geographies, epistemologies, and styles in my research and scholarship.  That’s the WORK… surviving the academy as a job is a whole other game though (see my previous post here on the difference between the work and the job). I call this job a hustle, quite deliberately pushing against the snobbery and tomfoolery that would suggest what we do and what we are about is any different from corporate America.

Let’s start this series talking about publishing: with the research and scholarship.  For the sake of clarity, I will also say that I am talking explicitly here about former or current historically white 4-year universities and colleges. At the end of the day, publishing is still what counts most.  It’s how you get tenure, promotion, or merit pay; it’s how you get the next job; it’s how people know your name and ideas.  I have worked at the first tier of research, the second tier, and now at a teaching college… with “remedial,” undergraduate, master’s degree and Ph.D. students.  The expectations for publishing have not been different for me in any single one of these spaces.  I teach a 3/4 load now with big classes and have to publish as rigorously as when I taught a 2/2 with small classes if I want to ever be full professor.  That means at least one more monograph and 6-12 articles.  All of that is on top of what I did for tenure (a monograph and 10+ articles).  Yeah, do the math.  Don’t get fooled.  If your university wants to be “prestigious,” this is what it’s gon be, regardless if the institution actually even has any prestige. I have colleagues who tell me that publishing at a community college is less “rigorous.”  I have never worked at a community college (only a comprehensive college) but I will say here that I seldom believe these kinds of flat statements since publishing looks very different today than what it did decades ago.

Here is what I have learned now from MULTIPLE PLACES:

1. Book chapters do not count.  This is a good strategy when you are in graduate school (as well as book reviews).  What you publish in graduate school cannot be used for tenure; you are only making yourself more “marketable” with chapters in graduate school but you are not building a tenure profile. You gon need to publish to get an academic job these days so chapter it up.
2. If you are on the tenure track and a book editor comes at you sideways with an inordinate amount of revisions, bow out. You are doing the book editor a favor, not the other way around.  Don’t get this stuff twisted. Publish the piece as a journal article elsewhere. It will count that way.  And show that uppity editor your bare behind (I truly believe this can relieve stress).
3. Humanities folks will insist that book chapters count (and BTW: book reviews and encyclopedia entries do not count either so don’t do them after graduate school).   If the university is forced to concede, your book chapters might get counted but know that other disciplines at your college think you are a joke and say it out loud every chance they get. Wait and see how that pans out for you when the new dean/provost/president are not humanities scholars.  Good luck with that.
4. Collaborative publishing does not count unless you have MANY, MANY of these joints and/or your name comes first.  As faculty, collaborative pubs with graduate students are always the best: you get credit for publication AS mentoring that way (many “top-tiered” PhD programs expect faculty to publish with graduate students now). You might get a concession and get through tenure with collab pubs but know that your campus colleagues think you are a joke. Good luck with that.
5. Publishing with your Ph.D. advisor/diss committee does not count when you are on the tenure track.  You can do this in graduate school but know you are only making yourself more “marketable.”  You gon need to publish to get an academic job these days so go ‘head and roll with your advisor now cuz that’s gotta stop soon.
6. Publishing a piece in the journal and/or book you are editing does not count.  If you publish in a special issue journal, be ready to argue in your tenure statement that you do not know the editors (make sure that is true).  Special issue journal publications are taken less seriously because it is now commonplace that your friends bypassed a real peer review process for you (even if the editors aren’t your friends, the review process is still not considered as rigorous with special issue journals today).
7. Publishing in a journal or book series that your colleague down the hall edits does not count.  See #6 above about “commonplace.”
8. Presentations at local and/or campus conferences do not count.  You will be laughed at if you include these in your tenure narrative unless you force the issue that these presentations were related to your research.  It still won’t count, but you won’t be laughed at.  Don’t let your tenure be Comedy Central. Let the laughs happen somewhere else.
9. You need to attend conferences but you better be smart and choose wisely.  Time is ticking, money is scarce, and conferences cost way too much.  One or more of three things needs to happen at a conference to make it worth re-attending: a) you get REALLY good feedback that will propel publication; b) you get a REAL offer for publication from an editor of a journal or book series; c) you team with a group of colleagues and work on a new, publishable article (remember #4 above though).  If these three things ain’t happening, you wasted your money and time.  Don’t be a fool listening to folks who act like a conference is a center of gravity for tenure in academia today.
10. Habitual conference attendance at a single venue is for those who intend to hold HIGH leadership positions at that conference.  Otherwise, if there is a conference that you must attend pre-tenure, then do what I did: swoop in, do your thing, and be out.  Put the line on the CV and be clear that’s all you got from the experience and find another space to sustain you intellectually.  The point for a tenure/promotion committee is to see that you can get regularly accepted to a peer-reviewed national and INTERNATIONAL (you must always stay connected to international scholars) conference, not stay wedded to an organization. if you can swing it, do not pay for the conference hotel— why keep a conference afloat if it is not doing much for you?  If your department chair (or wanna-be chair) demands that you attend a certain conference, make sure that he pays for it (do not use your start-up funds or travel money for their personal edicts).  This ain’t the 1990s.  No one gets tenure or promotion anymore because they have micro-celebrity status at these venues.  You can get that from Twitter, Facebook, or the Gram.  In fact, my Academia.edu account has done more work bringing real bodies to my research and scholarship than any conference I have ever attended. If you are a scholar of color, especially a woman of color, you need to know better than to rely on traditional means of knowledge dissemination in the 21st century anyway.
11. One book is no longer enough for tenure at most places, especially if that book was your dissertation (and only university presses and Routledge count).  You will be regarded as someone who has not done any serious research and scholarship since graduate school.  You might get a concession and get through tenure with only that one dissertation-turned-book but know that your colleagues think you are a joke. Good luck with that. (Oh, and make sure you are really clear whether your particular institution will accept galleys of your book at tenure/promotion or if they only want hardcopy.)
12. Citations, citations, citations!  This is the order of the day.  It’s not just about publishing but about who is reading you… yes, even at teaching colleges now.  Stay amongst like-minded scholars who are thinking with you.  If you are marginalized in your field, find a new home.  If folk in your field are not reading and citing you in their research, you are wasting your time with them.  Move on and drop the dead weight.  You might get a concession and get through tenure without the citations but know that your colleagues think you are irrelevant. Good luck with that.
13. Grants count as a publication but only the big ones.  Be clear that a grant is the equivalent of running a program so it’s a lot of work… but just like a publication.  If you don’t have grants (especially since there is little money in the humanities), publish more articles.  No way around this anymore.  In the humanities, post-doc work will weigh as nicely as grants so pursue that!
14. Internal grants do not count but you need to apply for every single one of them that comes across your desk/screen (since they usually come from deans, provosts, etc).  You need to make sure that you keep your name and the topics of your research in folks’s mouth.
15. Accept only the speaking engagements that are meaningful. They take a lot of time away from your research, family, and sleep cycles.  If you like the people, are getting paid, can connect intellectually/professionally with like-minded folk, can introduce your work to a new audience (see #12 above), get to work directly with young folk, and/or can add a line to your CV, do it.  Otherwise, keep it movin and work on #1-14 above.

Every single item that I listed above is almost a direct quote. D.I.R.E.C.T. These are NOT my interpretations.  If anyone tells you differently,  they are lying or do not know what time it is in the academy today. These same people will turn around and smile in your face and tell you everything is okay with your tenure packet. When you do book chapters, large-scale anthologies (which are the equivalent of textbooks— which also do not count), articles in friends’ journals, and/or publications with advisors, it is for name recognition in that topic, bigger record/concert sales (oops, I mean books), solidarity with your peeples, and/or how-to statements that will make people want to pay you to come give workshops. These are their own legitimate reasons… it won’t count for your tenure/promotion or stature at the university though. KNOW THAT! These rules will likely change 5-10 years from now but I suspect stuff will escalate, not de-escalate.  I can promise you that #1-15 are how it goes down TODAY.

No one fights for or defends you or your field in these closed-door meetings; your record alone has to do all of the work so you need clarity on what has value in that record.  I have witnessed a case where the room did not think a woman deserved to even make it to her mid-tenure review because she only had two articles in print that, combined, had only been cited 5 times.  This was at a teaching college with a heavy teaching load.  Her chairperson gave her NO mentoring whatsoever (and may have even sabotaged her) and since that department still only has an interim chair today, she still has not received any sustained mentoring. Only one person (a senior male scholar of color) in that room argued on her behalf about the absurdity of dropping her.  No one else said a word in her defense. I have no idea what has happened to her.  So yeah, it gets REALLY REAL out here.

I have fought on behalf of colleagues in many of these instances. When I won those battles in those closed-door meetings, it was never a full victory.  People just conceded my point but regarded the scholar in question as a good teacher, a good administrator, or as a good person who works really hard.  These too are direct quotes and these are not compliments.

In between #1-15 above, you will have to fight to do the work that you love, the work that means something to you, the work that transforms your social circumstances.   You will notice that there is nothing INTELLECTUAL, ACTIVIST, or SOCIALLY TRANSFORMATIVE in #1-15.  It’s a pecking order and ranking system only (hence, my overuse of the word COUNT).  It’s… a… hustle… and like I said at the beginning of this post: “Everyday I’m hustlin/Hustle, hustlin hustlin/Hustle, hustlin hustlin/Hustle, hustlin hustlin.”  

I am exhausted just thinking back and chronicling all of these lessons … but I ain’t done yet.  The next posts will tackle service, teaching, and digitation.  I hope to get even blunter with it.