I once agreed to eat lunch with a friend and he sent me a Google Calendar invite. I cancelled because of it. Since when does enjoying a meal follow the drumbeat of a business schedule? The answer is: since Dartmouth students have become so busy. Meetings, post-grad applications, clubs, homework, lab, drinking, scrolling TikTok — there is too much to do.
So I went in search of wasted time, something to efface from student life. A sort of DOGE for the Dartmouth student schedule. Most things however, can be justified. Most, that is, except for Dartmouth undergraduate student journals.
Dartmouth now has an undergraduate journal for sociology, linguistics, history, political economy, biology, comparative literature and others. It took me some research to find this out because nobody reads any of them. Nonetheless they exist. But for what purpose?
It takes great difficulty to imagine a defense, but I came up with the following: these journals give students the opportunity to publish their work; graduate schools could read these journals and admit students based on the work; professors could even cite the work; and student editors can learn the academic review process.
It is undoubtedly true that these journals give students an opportunity to publish what would otherwise remain in their Google Drives. But that is not necessarily an accomplishment. In order to motivate myself to write my final paper on “Anna Karenina,” I had to pretend that the world could not rest until it was done. But once submitted to the professor, I could admit to myself the despairing truth about nearly every final paper: nobody cares. Not everything must be displayed or published. Final papers included.
These undergraduate journals also do not help students earn graduate admissions. Applying to graduate school entails submitting the work you wish your admission to be judged by. It is not that the Yale History Department admissions committee was flipping through the Dartmouth Undergraduate Historical review and found the perfect candidate. You go to them.
Not only do admission committees not read these journals, professors do not either. 82% of academic work in the humanities is never cited, and this statistic covers established academic journals. Now imagine the likelihood of a professor citing an undergraduate paper. If it is so good, so worthy of being added to the repository of knowledge building, why isn’t it in a journal that competes with graduate students and professors? The answer is because the work is not good.
The last, and perhaps most persuasive argument, is that the editors of the journal can learn to edit academic papers. Yet reading that sentence ought to be unpersuasive to anyone with a sense of enjoyment in activities of the world. Professors often complain about having to peer review their colleagues’ works. And they get paid! Now imagine: you do not establish yourself professionally, you do not get paid, the writing is worse, and you have a greater variety of alternative ways to spend your time.
Then what explains the existence of these journals? College admissions already inculcated a biting feeling that resources were scarce and one must fight to take hold of what one wants. We students live with a precarious sense of our futures. That we ought to is debatable, but that we do is not. With this sense of precarity comes a need to spend our time in a way that can quell our restless sense of not doing enough. Of course, if you cross-examine most students, they will admit that getting good jobs has mostly to do with connections. But what do we do in the meantime, while waiting around for our parents’ friends to make calls? There must be some sense of using time well.
So, in come the “resume builders.” Writing or editing for undergraduate journals is a way to flee from the sense of not doing enough to advance oneself in the race for jobs and the race to continue to accumulate status. Until we learn a happier existence — i.e., until the Messianic Age — journals and other absurd time sinks will continue to exist.
But if you at least now reject the concept of undergraduate journals, what should you do with these papers? If it is really, really good, you probably already know what to do: submit it to a real academic journal. If it isn’t, print it out, give it one last read through, then put it into a paper shredder.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
