At the end of May, Ramus, an academic journal of Greco-Roman Classics that specialized in literary criticism, published its final issue—on Vitruvius.
Unless you are part of the very small and very niche crowd of scholars in antiquity, you have never heard of Ramus. Therefore, the quiet end of its fifty-two-year existence means nothing to you. And yet, the end of this journal is more important than it appears at first glance. It reflects the present moment in humanities publishing, both academic and popular. As a result, I think it is merely one of many such quiet deaths that we will continue to encounter over the next decade.
Put simply, the age of highly specialized academic journals in the humanities, born to support the modern research university in the German model, has come to an end. This much is clear from the two lead editors’ final editorial.
In their final General Editorial, editors A.J. Boyle and Helen Morales blast “the increasing corporatization of journal publishers and the nature of the production of literary articles.” They note, specifically, the shift to online publishing, which reduced readers’ allegiance to specific journals that they would read cover-to-cover. Second, they bemoan the rise of edited Companions and Handbooks volumes, which they view as “parasitic on the intellectual life of the academy.” Finally—and related—they complain that contributors to this journal and similar ones in previous generations were senior scholars, stars in the field. By contrast, in the closing years of the journal its main contributors have been “young, if sometimes brilliant, scholars writing for tenure.”
New Testament scholar Isaac T. Soon rightly noted more than a whiff of condescension in the editors’ remarks. The editors appear to be bitter at the loss of senior contributors to the journal, and the prevalence, instead, of junior contributors, writing for (gasp!) tenure.
There is, in addition, an elephant in the proverbial room that the editors do not address: the decline of the field of Classics in university settings. While Classics departments in colleges and universities were quite common fifty-two years ago, the field has been dramatically gutted even in the sixteen years since I received my PhD. Departments have been slashed left and right, greatly reducing the pool of scholars who might either read Ramus or wish to contribute to it. The senior scholars who used to write for such magazines have largely retired. None were replaced.
I contend, however, that there is an additional detail that the editors of Ramus appear to have missed, and it is one that pertains to the broader landscape of humanities publishing these days. There has been a general shift over the past decade or so in humanities publishing—from the hyper-specialized and academic to the popular and accessible. Yes, scholars of earlier generations were content to publish articles for highly specialized audiences that might only be read by the very few. This is why such magazines used to commonly quote Greek and Latin in articles without offering a translation—anyone who read them (cover-to-cover, as the editors note) didn’t need a translation.
For too long, humanities publishing seemed to revolve specifically around strictly academic publishing—done by academics and strictly for academics. Sure, in theory anyone could always buy any book they wish. This is a free country and all that. Except, academic writing styles (including all that untranslated Latin and Greek—and untranslated quotes from secondary scholarship in German, Italian, Spanish, French, etc.) made it difficult enough for other academics to read such books, much less anyone outside the guild. Besides, the cost of academic books and journals made them a prohibitive sort of luxury.
My peers and I, however, think differently of publishing. If I am going to put in the effort and thought, I want my research to benefit others, not just languish and gather proverbial dust in physical or electronic corners somewhere. As I write increasingly for the church, I want to translate my academic training effectively to present useful connections for people in the pews. And I want to be in conversation with other public scholars.
The conversation about the humanities, put simply, has shifted and grown more inclusive in the process. This is not a bad thing. For the evangelical mind in particular, this is a very good thing, and I hope this trend continues. The superb quality of books I’ve read in the past year alone gives good promise that it will.
This shift does relate to the trend towards electronic publishing, of which the editors of Ramus also do not approve. However one feels about this development, electronic publishing has brought about something important for which academics in niche subjects have pined for decades: public interest, attention, and access for writers and readers hungry for regular intellectual feasts. Call it a democratization of knowledge and culture—sounds grandiose perhaps, but it’s not far off the mark.
I may be partial, but I think Current exemplifies some of the best of this new trend: just in the past couple of weeks, we have run an essay on “Shakespeare’s Worst Plays” by the President of American Society of Church History; an essay on Taylor Swift by a scholar of literature; a memoir excerpt-in-progress from a leading historian of American evangelicalism and politics; a stunning essay by an award-winning novelist on the Russocentrism of Western thinking on the war in Ukraine; and multiple superb book and film reviews that started conversations in the public sphere.
Do academic magazines do this? Of course not. To be fair, this was never their aim.
And so, I am going to wave a respectful goodbye to Ramus. It really was a good journal. I cited many an article from it in my research over the years. No, I never read a single issue of it cover-to-cover. And I never wanted to write for it.
The reality is that the humanities world now dwells in the era of post-academic publishing. Humanities in most universities are under attack. Yet popular magazine articles and books on the humanities, including the Classics, are reaching more readers than ever. It appears that the death of Homer has been greatly exaggerated.
Apt reflections, Dr Williams – and thanks for the shout out. About once a year a research article of mine still comes out in an academic journal, but my aversion continues to grow to the whole process and I am ready largely to pivot away from it. I believe in peer review, but its pathologies become more irritating as one’s career progresses. It is dispiriting how many peer reviewers do not confine themselves to evaluating the academic worth of the article that has been submitted but think they are being invited to commission the author to research and write about some aspect of the wider topic that happens to interest them. Revise and resubmit is way overused – if you can tell it is an article of worth you should encourage the author with a conditional acceptance. The author is not being paid anything to publish in a journal, is dealing with often long and generally unreliable time frames for every part of the process, if “successful”, will reach a tiny number of readers (maybe the article will never even be cited at all), yet you are treated as if you are probably not worthy of this high privilege. I do, however, still frequently do peer reviews for journals (for free, of course), and I do it as a service to early-career scholars especially. I am committed to writing timely reviews that are not petty, that do not unnecessarily require revise and resubmit, that evaluate what the author has done rather than asking the author to do something that interests me, and that take the time to be encouraging and notice strengths.
When you wrote “There has been a general shift over the past decade or so in humanities publishing—from the hyper-specialized and academic to the popular and accessible. … The conversation about the humanities, put simply, has shifted and grown more inclusive in the process,” I was thinking, Hmm, I bet Tocqueville would have thoughts about that. He’d probably see it as both a gain and a loss, powered by the gravitational force of democracy. And then you said, “Call it a democratization of knowledge and culture—sounds grandiose perhaps, but it’s not far off the mark.” Yes, in fact I think it’s right on the mark.
Democracy means things need to be digestible by and acceptable to the people. You need to meet them where they are. Academic discourse marches to a different drummer, sometimes out of preciousness or snobbery, but mostly out of sheer necessity. Democratic discourse is simple, relatable, requires few or no prerequisites (knowledge of foreign languages, eg). Much of the change that’s occured is good (and I agree, that’s what Current admirably aims at.) But the demos also wants fun, it wants entertainment, it wants its passions aroused (ie, things have to be “engaging”). It’s not looking for self-transformation (the “leading out” aspect of education), it wants enhancement of the life I already have. The popularity of unashamed pugilism in our politics is part of this.
I once read a quote from a city-paper owner-editor from the 1890s–when the yellow press was appearing–who said he knew when his reporters were crossing the line into sensationalism, because the circulation would rise above 5,000, and there were only 5,000 people in his city who had the character and sensibility to support a quality newspaper. Sounds horrifically snobbish to our ears, but I suspect he was onto something. If you decide your aim is to appeal to the people, the people are now your editor, as it were, your judges, your employer. You will have to give them what they want. That’s, after all, democracy, “the theory that the people know what they want,” as H. L. Mencken said, “and ought to get it good and hard.” Our snobbish Victorian predecessors feared in most cases taking that first step–they believed in slippery slopes. My students often demand that classes be “relevant,” which can sound reasonable, but it does put the listener or reader at the center of the equation, and once there, once acknowledged as being in his rightful place, who can tell him or her they need to move?