If it has to be overcast...
...I prefer not that of the unforgiving sign of rain.
It's okay, you can reread that as many times as you want and it won't really make sense. It's a line from the opening of my new favorite "editorial," found in the fall issue of The Undergraduate Quarterly.
The UQ is edited and published by a UCLA alum whom I knew of from last year's University of Chicago Law School Applicant Board (UCB, to those in the nerdy, nerdy know). In fact, he posted (at length) in late spring about the launch of the journal, and solicited people's work. I remember thinking at the time that it probably wasn't going to garner quite the cred within academic circles that he was planning, but whatev, cool project. It's pretty questionable, though, that one has to pay a $35 fee to submit a piece for consideration. Such is not the practice of any reputable academic journal, as noted by the venerable Brian Leiter. I have to say, it's quite the trick to be called out in Leiter's blog.
Set the application fee aside, though, and take a browse through the "editorial" by The UQ's editor-in-chief (link above). It's pretty indicative of the overall quality of the rest of the journal. I mean...where to start?
Part the first: I tend to be dramatically opposed to the resident Grammar Check function in Microsoft Word, but I think this qualifies as a place where it could be exceedingly useful. It might point out the author's apparent comma allergy and semi-colon misuse fixation, and hopefully more than half of the clause disagreements.
Part the second: since one of the aims of The UQ is to become a serious, integrity-laden piece of journalistic legitimacy, it seems abundantly wise to avoid publishing pieces that feature the words "shit" and "fuck." Wait, you say, this blog says fuck all the time! Yes, but I'm not trying to make this shit legit in the annals of academia.
Part the third, the most important part: this is bad writing. I mean, bad. (I'm channeling Jenna Elfman in Ed here, when she looks at the camera and announces that her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, played by Woody Harrelson, is a "bad lay...I mean bad...ugh!") Given the self-masturbatory tone to Zaky's bio, the site's "EQ Advantage" section, and the brief "about the author" blurb on the bottom of the editorial's first page, I have no doubt that he'll place his role in founding/editing the journal in the most prominent of places in his law school apps for the coming year. Fully knowing how patronizing and maternalistic this will sound, I think someone needs to tell him "dude, you do not want any law school seeing this. Ever. Evar."
I don't really have a closing thought here. I fully expect a string of nasty comments will follow this post, and that's your prerogative. Before you flame me for being an overly critical bitch, there are two things I'd like to request. First, please sign your comment. I don't care if you don't have a Blogger account, but toss your name or something in the comment itself...calling people on bad behavior anonymously is pussy beyond all measure. Second, I didn't pull the editorial off someone's blog, or personal site, or whatever place where one might have a reasonable expectation of benefit of the doubt for their shitty writing skills. It came from a journal, which you can apparently purchase at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. They (supposedly) circulate this thing through "graduate schools, law schools, medical schools, and university libraries." If you publish and widely circulate a journal, you've opened yourself to the possibility of critique from a number of sources. And this is one of them.
posted by Salle @ 10:15 AM
17 comments
17 Comments:
Far from being too bitchy, I think you were almost too nice.
Anyone who writes a sentence such as "Powerless to pass into the serenity of a calm, restful slumber, I moved to and fro between the insufferable fetal position; as if I were able to convince myself that sleep would soon come upon me" DESERVES to be flogged as often as humanly possible. And then some more.
My question, where's the fro? Between the insufferable fetal position and.....what? Hello?!? This is so bad, it's offensive to those of us that actually speak, read, and write the English language. AND, learn how to use the sacred semi-colon, freak!
On another note, what the hell were these guys doing sleeping on the ground anyway? I know the euro/dollar exchange rate isn't great these days, but couldn't you have split a room in a hostel?
Okay, rant over.
Signed,
The girl in hot pink pumps :)
If only the editor and chief of the undergraduate quarterly would use his powers for good. B and I have discussed this, and we agree that this guy could go on a national tour and make a lot of money, if only he admitted that this whole thing was a parody. The alternative of him being serious is just too sad and pathetic.
A brief review of the site, revealed that tortured writing is not limited to the editor. Another editorial recently published on the site discusses whether computers will ever have a philosophy apart from humans. I admit that when I read the title of the piece, my first inclination was to not take the author seriously. But little did I know that I was about to also learn the truth about philosophy, asking questions in a philosophical manner. The jury is still out on whether that requires a goatee or long hair and a wardrobe of all black. All those academics can just quit now - we've found the answer.
"When one first encounters philosophy, he will invariably ask useless questions.2 However, if he asks them in a philosophical manner, he will learn to identify which questions have value, and to separate these out as diamonds from ruff."
I prefer to seperate out valuable questions as diamonds from woof - but hey to each their own. And I am certainly not published in the undergraduate quarterly:)
read the rest here: http://www.undergradquarterly.com/EJournal/2004Q2/HurwitzEJournal.pdf
JD
Your mama. I say it again, your mama. I mean that in the nicest way possible, however.
By the way, B.Leiter, my heart's ignighter, is not really telling the whole story when he notes that no reputable journal would require you to pay to submit an article. I suppose I agree with him, but I don't think that the undergraduate quarterly has ever rejected an article. Thus, you are in essence paying to have your musings, as twisted and poorly written as they might be, published. Strangely, paying for the publication of your article once it is accepted to a journal is not uncommon. In fact, I believe that PNAS (the proceedings of the national academy of sciences) requires per page fees. The more you write, the more it costs you. And I seem to recal that each article has a disclaimer on it about how since the person publishing it actually paid money to have it published that technically the article wasn't an article but was actually an advertisement.
We all know the truth. The Undergraduate Quarterly no es bueno. And PNAS has the most boring advertisements ever.
Hey do you want to do something on saturday? Or even before saturday? I talked to some compatriots and they may be up for it.
Ninjadude423
Actually, their stats show that they rejected 51 of the 78 submissions for the most recent issue...so I don't think the pay-for-play argument can come in. (Oh my god, it's happened: Law School Speak has invaded my most casual of interactions!)
Saturday, hell, if there isn't a Ninjadude423 sighting at bar night *tonight*, I'm going to totally flip out.
Would this "flipping" involve "flailing"? If so, I must be there. :)
AK
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I've told you a hundred times--you won't know where, you won't know when, but you'll witness the flailing one of these days.
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I like the (I assume unintentional) pun about a weekend of "flee markets".
Someone needs to learn that you don't have to use all the big words instead of the small ones, just because you more or less know what the big one means.
Well, well, well, Nurse Mayhem, we meet again.
That is some awesome writing. Seriously. I think he should enter it in the Faux Hemingway contest. Although the runons might work better for the Faulkner. Could he work a castration or an angry dog in?
CC
Ah, Captain Chaos...my partner in crime. I think the Faulkner aspect might be a better avenue for him to pursue. What if he worked in a castrated angry dog in the part about rocking to and fro the fetal position? I think that would work nicely. Or possibly in the part about the way angry bulls don't fuck about.
Not that I can convince anyone here of our motives, I would still appreciate it if you would take a look at the following for the sake of being fair:
Pay particular attention to question 2.
http://www.undergradquarterly.com/FAQ.asp
Thanks,
Andy Zaky
P.S. I do think it's unfair to criticize the writing of others by virtue of my writing abilities, which I've never claimed or presumed to be good.
Let's call it a draw on the submission fee. Your FAQ section does a fine job of detailing the ways in which it isn't suspect...at least on the surface. My principle objection remains grounded in the fact that people are paying money for something that isn't going to help them further much of anything for themeselves. Publication in a journal that isn't peer-reviewed carries about the same weight as publishing stories in undergraduate newspapers. When it comes to the adcoms, that isn't going to measure in the same way publication in a more scholarly journal will, and it seems like there are several sections of the website that overpromise on that front.
No one is using your writing to specifically judge the other authors. Reread the comment above from the reader who posted a link to the other editorial; he finds *that* editiorial weak on its own merits.
Thanks for reading,
Salle
Look, even if we concede that the UQ has its heart in the right place, the fact remains that the journal as executed is at best flawed. At worst, the entire enterprise comes off as egotistical and absurd. I am admittedly partial to the latter interpretation.
Speaking of which, Andy, please remove the section of your bio that explains you hope to be attending Harvard, Yale, or Northwestern. It's enough to say you want to go to law school. Not only is your grouping of schools odd, but the whole thing comes off as a more than a little pretentious. Less is more - learn it and love it.
As to your plea for fairness, I've read the FAQ section and I've also perused some of the other submissions. The writing is not all as bad as the TWO editorials that have panned, but then it isn't very good either. If you are hellbent on not turning this thing into a parody and cashing in, I would get some real editors involved. I'm sure the folks involved are wonderful people who we'd all like to have a beer with, but being an undergraduate philosophy, history, or poli sci major does not qualify someone to effectively critique the work of other undergraduates. I don't care if these people are at Yale or the University of Dayton, they are still undergraduates and simply lack the experience and skills to be effective editors.
In the end, the way in which the journal has been executed is undermining its very mission. I do not believe that any academic department will take publication in this journal seriously. At best such a claim by students will be deemed the equivalent of having your poem or short story published in the campus lit magazine. If you want greater credibility than that, then you need to get some credible folks reading the submissions. Genuine peer-reviewed journals demand and obtain changes from their authors. Journal editors take work that is important and they help make it better by creating a standard of excellence that potential authors strive to meet. The work has to be considered worthy of publication from a panel of judges that have standing in their field, something that the current group of editors cannot claim.
1) The fee structure of the journal is inherently unfair as you depend on the people who are rejected to subsidize those who are accepted. The reason that per page fees are widely used is that it allows people to pay to disseminate their ideas once they have been deemed acceptable. Isn't it kind of perverse to tell someone "give me 35 bucks so I can evaluate your work" and then tell them "your work sucks."
2) Running a journal takes time. Lots and lots of time. That is why there are extensive advisory boards and associate editors along with a large array of people who volunteer their time to screen prospective articles. This is what is known as "peer review" and may be the key to an academic journal
3) Losing money is not a justification for charging for submissions. Nor is the desire to cut down on the number of submissions. The point of a journal is to get submissions so you can find the good articles. There is no reason to believe that charging a fee up front dissuades bad articles with any more frequency than good articles. In any case, it is 2000 dollars that the world of academic journals widely agrees is not fair to charge.
4) I hate to be picky, especially with my horrific spelling, but the word you are looking for at the end of the "well, how do you guys propose to go on?" section is intact, and not in tact. It changes the meaning a touch.
5) Anyway, you should get an actual editorial board and staff if you want to have an actual journal. I don't mean this in a degrading way, it is just that the world of academic publishing is maybe just a little bit complex.
I think all of the problems could be avoided if you chose to refer to the AQ as something other than an "academic" journal. That word has a special meaning to many people and implies special standards.
Whatever. You should just bump up the cover price for the journal to a thousand dollars or something like that. You could then claim that you published the most expensive journal ever. The "Trump" of undergraduate journals. That would be really funny.
Anonymous said, “Speaking of which, Andy, please remove the section of your bio that explains you hope to be attending Harvard, Yale, or Northwestern.” It’s done. Your right, it does sound pretentious. I eliminated Harvard and Yale, yet I did keep Northwestern because I do like their Business Enterprise concentration, want to intern at the Bluhm Legal Clinic and be a part of their Journal of International Law and Business. I know these are three wholly different fields, but I am not going to law school to be an attorney. I simply want to pursue a legal education because I do think it will be an enjoyable experience. I want to go to law school, but I don’t want to be an attorney. Interning has taught me that pretty darn well.
Concerning the Editorial Board:
It certainly is a little weak but the editorial board isn’t simply filled with undergraduates. We do have a few graduate students and a professor, who is the chair at the UCLA Philosophy department. We are pursuing other professors, 2 for each subject in the journal. This could easily be done by simply picking and choosing UCLA professors but I do want to have a wide range of professors from different Universities. I pretty much have the chair and the undergraduate advisor from the UCLA philosophy department, but I do not know whether it would be such a great idea to have both Philosophy professors be from UCLA. FYI, it is the task of the professors to pick and choose the essays they think should go into print from a shortened list of essay we give them (sort of like the relationship of Clerk to Justice) after a first full round of review. They will also clean up grammar etc. My whole job right now is to see that the journal is entirely organized and self sustaining by the fall of 2005 when I’ll hopefully be shipping off to law school. Just to defend Gus a little, I am sure you’ve talked to him on the Chicago message board, he did write that editorial in a day and it is nothing more than a mere summery of research he is conducting. He is a bright individual and provided much needed help and continues to offer his help even though he is beginning 1L at Chicago.
Anonymous Said Dated September 27, 2004 (8:14 P.M.):
1) “The fee structure of the journal is inherently unfair as you depend on the people who are rejected to subsidize those who are accepted.” Easily the best criticism I’ve heard about the journal thus far. Brian Leiter and Mark Murphy from Georgetown failed to point this out to me in my e-mail exchanges with them. But it is certainly an unavoidable dilemma sans eliminating the application fee altogether. Yet, there is a small bit of information that takes a little away from the criticism. I figure that if a person knows what they’re getting into and knows there is a strong chance they’ll be rejected, then I suppose it’s somewhat O.K. (not that I am saying it is justified) to charge the fee.
3) “Losing money is not a justification for charging for submissions. Nor is the desire to cut down on the number of submissions.” I definitely agree with your comments here and I’ll tell you this much, if I were rich, then I would hire an advisory board big enough to review the essays and I would certainly eliminate the application fee. This journal comes entirely out of my pocket with the hopes that one day (hopefully before fall 2005) the journal will be big enough to have academic sponsorship, a huge advisory board, proper funding and enough volunteers to make this journal legitimate.
6) “I think all of the problems could be avoided if you chose to refer to the AQ as something other than an "academic" journal. That word has a special meaning to many people and implies special standards.” I am really considering do this. I think I might change the image a bit by making it more of a quarterly magazine than a journal.
I just want everyone here to know, I never started this thing with any intentions to offend anyone and that’s exactly what has happened thus far. My vision was simply to start a nationally recognized, interdisciplinary undergraduate journal that would be released more than 1 time a year and that would give students the opportunity to publish in a non-university pressed journal. The idea is modeled using the “Daily Jolt” forum where students from different universities have the opportunity to communicate with one another. The UQ is created simply for the purposes of offering undergraduate students the opportunity to publish their senior honors thesis, class written essays etc. in a journal that is made up of strictly undergraduate students.
However, I am not set on continuing in this fashion, especially in light of the criticism I’ve seen here and on B. Leiter’s blog, which I must say was the biggest slap in the face to see. Imagine reading a blog of an individual you highly respect and end up coming across a harsh criticism of something you’ve worked so hard on trying to make possible. That was definitely a very humbling and hurtful experience.
So it is possible that I might turn the journal into a magazine with cartoonists, blogs etc. The attorneys at the law firm I work at seem to know Seth MacFarlane pretty well. Who knows, perhaps we might see a Stewie and Brian satire/blog in the future.
If you have any further suggestions, I’ll check this board periodically.
Cheers,
Andy
I can't speak much to the state of mind of the other readers here (nor Leiter's, for that matter), but the read I get from the comments above isn't that anyone is "offended" by the UQ. Rather, it seems people (myself included) take issue with some of the publication's postures. As noted above, "academic" has a special significance when attached to a publication, and the connotations associated therein are not things one can simply opt-out of. You call it academic, we--the collective "we" of anyone who comes across the journal--expect something relatively specific.
I reread the FAQ and UQ Advantage sections of your site today, and I'm still struck by my original objection: you overpromise what submission and publication in the UQ can/will do for people. The role you claim it can play in people's admissions processes is overstated at best, and misleading at worst. As I'm sure you know, the application process is pretty harrowing for a lot of people, and I find it suspect to play to those fears by promising a sort of credibility the journal can't offer at this point. To that end, I would suggest limiting the scope of your promises. The goals you list above as being the heart of your project are ample and can fully carry the mission of your publication on their own; it's not necessary to promise admissions advocacy, too.
As you broaden your editorial board, keep in mind that the role of the peer-reviewers should *not* be to edit the pieces for grammar/syntax/etc. You need actual editors for this.
Here's my final piece of fully unsolicited advice: pick a stronger reason for going to law school. It's a monumentally expensive place to seek an "enjoyable experience," and I don't think that's enough to sustain you for three years.
Thus endeth the sermon. I'm heartened by the way you've taken all this criticism seriously, but keep in mind that you aren't beholden to me, my readers, Leiter, or anyone else. Run your journal as you see fit--it'll either float or it won't. Unsolicited criticism is a like a Jello dessert at the end of a buffet: no one should be offended if you don't take it.
Thanks for reading,
Salle
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