One of the joys and challenges of being an academic is being able to help to shape the future of scholarship through the peer review process. Much has been written about the issues with academic peer review, most notably the limited incentives to spend time reviewing submissions and the increasing length of time between when an academic submits a paper to a journal and when they finally receive feedback. Heck, I wrote about this issue five years ago when The Review of Higher Education stopped accepting new submissions for about a year and a half due to this imbalance.
Throughout my ten years as a tenure-line faculty member, what I give to and take from the peer review system has changed considerably. When I was first starting on the tenure track, I was reliant on relatively quick reviews on my own submissions and was receiving 5-10 requests to review each year from legitimate journals. And since I keep a spreadsheet of the details of each journal submission, I can see that I received decisions on many articles within 2-4 months. I have never missed a deadline—typically around 30 days—to submit my thoughts as a reviewer, and have tried to accept as many requests as possible.
The peer review system changed considerably in the late 2010s. As I got closer to tenure, I received more requests to review (25-30 legitimate requests per year) and accepted them all because I was in a position to do so. Decisions on my article submissions moved more toward the 4-6 month range, which was frustrating but not a big deal for me because I figured that I had already met the standards for tenure and promotion. My philosophy at that point became to be a giver to the field because of the privileged position that I was in. I needed to review at least 2-3 times as many submissions as I submitted myself to account for multiple reviewers and so grad students and brand-new faculty did not need to review.
Going through the tenure and promotion process exposed me to another crucial kind of reviewing: external reviews of tenure applications. Most research-focused universities expect somewhere between three and eight external letters speaking to the quality of an applicant’s scholarship. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers who accepted my department chair’s invitation to write, and now a part of my job most years as a department head is soliciting letters from some of the most accomplished (and busiest) scholars in the world.
All of this is to say that being a full professor in a field that loses a lot of full professors to full-time administrative positions (the joy of specializing in higher education!) means that my priorities for external service have changed. I am focusing my reviewing time and energy in two areas that are particularly well suited for full professors at the expense of accepting the majority of journal review requests that I receive.
The first is that I just started as an associate editor at Research in Higher Education and am thrilled to join a great leadership team after being on the editorial board for several years. I took this position because I am a big fan of the journal and I believe that we can work to improve the author experience in two key areas: keeping authors updated on the status of their submissions and quickly desk rejecting manuscripts that are outside of the scope of the journal. Researchers, please send us your best higher education manuscripts. And reviewers, please say yes if at all possible.
The second is to continue trying to accept as many requests as possible for reviewing faculty members for tenure and/or promotion. I am doing 6-8 reviews per year at this point, and it is a sizable task to review tenure packets and relevant departmental, college, and university standards. But as a department head, I am used to doing faculty evaluations and rather enjoy reading through different bylaws. It is an incredible honor to review great faculty from around the country, and it is a job that I take seriously. (Plus, as someone who solicits letters from colleagues, a little karma never hurts!)
As I prepare to enter my second decade as a faculty member, I wanted to share my thoughts about how my role has changed and will continue to change. My apologies to my fellow associate editors and editors at other journals (I will complete my term on the editorial board at The Review of Higher Education and continue to be active there), but I will say no to many of you where I would have gladly accepted a few years ago. I hope you all understand as I rebalance my scholarly portfolio to try to help the field as much as possible.
Robert Kelchen 