Your
Dissertation
Is Done.
Move On.
I
that it’s not a good
’M CONVINCED
idea to advise newly minted scholars
to revise their dissertations into first
books. Doing so is an unwise career
move and a poor financial decision—a
paltry return on a substantial invest-
ment of time and effort.
Publishers will continue to publish
revised dissertations that address
broad topics, contribute new knowl-
edge, are well written, and will sell.
Increasingly, however, those will be
the exceptions. Perhaps this not-so-
good news could be turned to an
advantage, especially if graduate
students are urged early in the
writing process to accept the fact
CONSIDER THIS
that their dissertations should
remain just that.
By PATRICK ALEXANDER Recent changes at universities
and libraries are having a star-
tlingly negative impact on the fate
of monographs in general and on
revised dissertations in particular.
Several factors are in play.
First, the value of revised disserta-
tions in decisions on promotion and
tenure is diminishing. We know that
universities are making tenure more
difficult to obtain by demanding more
publications and awarding tenure to
fewer faculty members. That higher bar
increases the investment of time and
effort required to revise a dissertation,
as well as the competition to publish
the resulting monograph. At the same
time, publishers are less likely to buy
B4 THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
monographs, because libraries are buy-
ing fewer of them.
Part of the reason for that is the so-
called serials crisis. Ironically, much
of the weakened demand for revised
dissertations began not with mono-
graphs themselves but with the sharp-
ly rising prices of periodicals in the
STEM fields. These high prices have
affected the very existence of scholarly
monographs since the late 1980s. The
Association of Research Libraries has
reported that monograph expenditures
remained essentially flat for the previ-
ous 30 years (prices rose, but unit sales
did not). But the cost of serials—chiefly
those STEM periodicals—rose more
than 400 percent over the same period
and have sucked up funds from librar-
ies’ acquisitions budgets at the expense
of the monograph.
Another factor is universities’ chang-
ing attitudes toward libraries. An
article published this year in Library
Journal caught many people’s attention
because it amounted to an assault on
a presumed tenet of tenure at a major
institution. The administration at the
University of Saskatchewan had decid-
ed to “reconfigure” its seven libraries
by cutting them down to three. A dean
spoke out against that decision and was
shown the door. An uproar ensued. The
rehiring and subsequent return to the
faculty ranks of the dean, and the res-
ignation of the provost who had been
behind the debacle, left unclear wheth-
KATY LEMAY FOR THE CHRONICLE REVIEW
er the plan to shutter the four branch
libraries was still in play.
Libraries everywhere are under
increasing scrutiny and pressure to
adapt and be more campus-relevant.
According to Saskatchewan’s acting
dean of libraries, Ken Ladd, in that
same article, “The vision is to free up
some of the stack space and repurpose
it into new things that are needed to
support teaching, learning and research
on campus.”
On many campuses, relocating
The dissertation
should be a stage of
the educational
journey, not to be
retraced.
books to off-site storage facilities has
become commonplace and is the most
practical solution to the decline in
book use and the costs of maintaining
a print collection. Without shelf space,
it’s hard to collect books. And even
with most publishers trying to provide
e-versions of their books, the multi-
plicity of platforms, devices, delivery
mechanisms, tools, and packages—and
SEPTEMBER 5, 2014
researchers’ general dissatisfaction with
e-books—has made e-book collections a
poor alternative. Particularly given the
increasing interest in “patron-driven ac-
quisitions” of e-books—purchases made
only when it is clear that someone wants
a book—attention to collecting books in
any form, digital or otherwise, seems to
be waning.
As far back as the 1990s, the costs of
shelving books have pressured libraries
to cut monograph purchases. Anecdot-
ally, publishers lament, “We used to be
able to print and sell 1,000 cloth mono-
graphs; now we’re lucky if we sell 250.”
Additional factors, like exploding inter-
library-loan rates and emerging policies
governing shared collections further
minimize the likelihood that mono-
graph purchases will rebound. Perhaps
more than anything else, the urgency
to satisfy new users’ expectations that
everything be digital is discouraging
libraries from collecting print or even
e-books in the traditional, build-a-col-
lection sense.
That trend shows no sign of reversal.
The University of Utah’s associate dean
of libraries, Rick Anderson, doesn’t
sugarcoat his view of print monographs
when he states that “university presses
all too often publish books that no one
needs to use or wants to read.” Insults
like that, whether or not based on fact,
become credos for libraries that are run-
ning out of shelf space and money while
being pressured to keep people coming
through their doors. The fundamental
mission of academic libraries has shifted
away from building scholarly book col-
lections, and the trends suggest that this
recalibration of the library’s mission
will be permanent.
rather than later rebalances the role of
the dissertation in the life of an academ-
ic career.
It may seem counterintuitive to advise
students against revising a dissertation
when the demand to publish, for a job or
for promotion or tenure, has never been
greater. But the time and money spent
to remain in graduate school probably
won’t offset any “gain” in having con-
ceived of the dissertation as the basis of
a first book, especially in today’s pub-
lishing climate.
A better alternative may be a peer-re-
viewed journal article derived from that
dissertation. The value of such an article
might carry as much weight in one’s ca-
reer as a book, and with the increasing
devaluation of the revised dissertation
as an item to be collected, there’s little
sense in revising it. Besides, universities
and academic societies are beginning
to emphasize employment for Ph.D.’s
outside of the traditional tenure-track
route. If new Ph.D.’s get jobs outside
of academe, the time and energy spent
writing a dissertation with a view to-
ward revising it later are potentially
wasted.
A few months ago, Daniel Smail,
chairman of Harvard’s history depart-
ment, organized a panel on the future
of the history Ph.D. The panel com-
prised Robert Townsend, director of
the Washington office of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences; Caroline
Winterer, director of the Stanford Hu-
manities Center; and Robert Darnton,
Harvard’s librarian and a cultural histo-
rian. In the course of the conversation,
as reported by Ann Hall, director of
communications at Harvard’s Graduate
School of Arts and Sciences, Darnton
called for radical change. For example,
acknowledges that the capabilities of the
newly minted Ph.D.’s extend beyond the
limits of the dissertation. They can de-
velop new knowledge and mastery over
another subject area, becoming poten-
tially better teachers, communicators,
or researchers.
The dissertation should be a stage
of the educational journey, not to be
retraced, but to be used as a stepping-
stone to edge further down the path.
Publishers, including this one, will con-
tinue to publish revised dissertations.
It is, after all, intrinsic to our scholarly
mission to foster, publish, and promote
first books. But technology, economics,
and new modes of communication are
transforming scholarly communication,
and publishers will publish even fewer
revised dissertations than they have in
the past.
It is time to recast the real value of
the dissertation. It should be a tool
that equips a researcher with the criti-
cal-thinking skills necessary to create,
in Darnton’s words, “new modes of
knowledge and scholarship.” The payoff
for graduate students will be a quicker
and more economical path to a Ph.D., a
shorter step to applying what has been
learned in the doctoral process, and an
opportunity to find, as soon as possible,
an individual voice in the academy.
Patrick Alexander is director of the Penn-
sylvania State University Press.

T
HERE’S A BRIGHT SIDE to the
dismal prospects of revised dis-
sertations’ becoming books: The
possibility of finishing a Ph.D.
sooner rather than later. The current
median time of nine years to complete
a humanities degree (according to a re-
cent report from the Modern Language
Association) is far too long, especially in
a field where only 60 percent of Ph.D.’s
find jobs in academe.
Measuring the cost-benefit ratio in
any time-to-degree calculation should
include the tendency of graduate stu-
dents to regard the dissertation as a
book, a mistake inadvertently fostered
by their advisers who probably revised
their own dissertations into books. Ad-
visees may also imagine an audience and
impact for their work that far exceed the
reality of the six committee members
who may (or may not) read their disser-
tations.
Graduate students thus persist in
writing what they regard as a book,
and so they overinvest their time and
energy.
Of course, anything is possible. Land-
mark, game-changing dissertations have
been written, but the odds that one will
change the course of a scholarly conver-
sation are inordinately low. The payoff
of the dissertation is the degree, not the
dissertation itself. So counseling advi-
sees to complete their degrees sooner
the profession should consider cutting
the average time to a degree from eight
years to four, with a series of articles
replacing the traditional book-length
dissertation. “Let’s end the overspecial-
ized, trivial Ph.D.,” Darnton said. “Let’s
develop thought and new modes of com-
munication that will create new modes
of knowledge and scholarship.”
With fewer and fewer jobs available
in academe and with the trend toward
funneling students to alt-ac careers, it
makes even more sense that the ma-
jority of dissertations will not need to
be the basis of first books. Rather, the
aim should be to write the dissertation
and complete the degree as quickly as
possible.
Revising a dissertation properly can
be a time-consuming and frustrating
task. It has shackled many a scholar
both in pursuit of the degree and after
receiving it. Many agonize over revis-
ing works that should never be revised.
Some spend years and never complete
the revisions. Others eventually finish
the revisions but cannot find a publisher.
Shouldn’t the successful disserta-
tion be proof that a scholar has been
equipped with the research and criti-
cal-thinking skills necessary to tackle
another subject? Perhaps the new study
will be related to one’s dissertation
topic, but it needn’t be a rejiggering of
that original thesis. Such an approach

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