Abstract
A reflection on what academics can learn from skateboarding culture.
During the pandemic I picked up skating again. I had to remind myself that it had been six years since I stopped, obviously I was going to be bad. Nevertheless, skating changed the way I approached academia. I learned a lesson about the inevitability of failure. The more I skated, the more I understood that I wasn’t going to land every trick, especially because every new trick is harder than the last.
As graduate students, we enter with varying degrees of anxiety, depression, and ability. We may feel like imposters even though we were selected and highly vetted from an elite pool of applicants. That tension can be unsettling. I still recall how the administration emphasized that we were the chosen few among hundreds of applicants. Even still, I wish they had also told us that we will inevitably struggle and that we were susceptible to failure. I still remember the first reading response we got back from our theory seminar. We’d commiserate in our shared office space, sarcastically laughing at the candid nature of our feedback: “get a writing guide,” “I’m worried this writing is not up to graduate school standard.” Many of us confronted the sobering reality that maybe we weren’t as good as we thought we were.
Attempts to normalize failing in academia tend to be from the most successful faculty. After all, the more published a faculty member is, the more rejections they’ve secretly hidden away under the guise of success. According to the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) 2020 annual report, the American Sociological Review (ASR) received 814 submissions, of which 230 (28.2%) were desk rejected and another 417 (51.2%) were rejected following the peer review process. Of 438 sent out for peer-review, 398 (90.8%) were rejected outright. Overall, ASR’s acceptance rate in 2020 is 5.4%. Most of the journals affiliated with ASA have a low acceptance rate. Even Contexts Magazine hovers only around a 15% acceptance rate and their publication model and article categories are quite nuanced and different from traditional journals. But, rejection does not necessarily mean failure.
Like not landing a trick, we try again.
At their core, academia and skating normalize failure. The former however, stigmatizes it more than the latter, which embraces it and accepts it as inevitable. I believe the fundamental difference between the two is the time between failures. The interval between failure when I skate is shorter, and I receive immediate feedback from my peers. In academia there is more time between failures, therefore more time to ruminate on individual faults. Taking ASR as an example again, the average time from submission to decision is about six weeks. For papers going through the review process, the average time from submission to decision is just under 9 weeks. For those who receive a revise and resubmit, the average turnaround time is just over 11 weeks. The uncertainty and sometimes lack of constructive feedback makes failure harder to swallow, especially for those not used to that type of uncertainty. And again, most journals are similar in set-up and approach to ASR.
Skating is defined by its emphasis on overcoming fear and embracing repeated failure. Academia needs to do the same and find ways to embrace it. If we know failure inevitably leads to success, how can we reframe failure in academia among graduate students? What of the graduate student who fails a comprehensive exam or a dissertation proposal defense? The mental, emotional, and physical labor of having to do it all over again in secrecy can lead to an unbearable sense of isolation and loneliness.
Since the 1980s, skateboards have been engineered to come in different sizes and shapes to accommodate different styles and bodies. Similarly, it is imperative to promote different ways to accommodate different writing styles, methodologies, and avenues to support graduate students. After all, there are different ways to do academia.
Academic culture would benefit from better ways to embrace failure instead of using irony, self-deprecating humor, or simply blaming the reviewers. Irony is for those accustomed to individualizing trauma. As we head back into academic spaces and departments, we should reflect if we even want to go back to “normal.” Do we really want to go back to spaces where failure is stigmatized and alternative pathways are discouraged? So-called successful faculty should take the first step to normalize failure, especially early in their careers.
Accordingly, what would an academic department that embraces failure as a community look like? It might have faculty more openly share rejection letters, what they learn, and how they improve their scholarship. It might destigmatize comprehensive exam failures as a way for budding scholars to better perfect their research plans. It might lead to fewer mental health issues and burnout. Centering failure might make the academy a place where people feel they belong, and might lead to disciplines struggling to get seats in classes, boost majors, and increase graduate student applications transform their departments for the better.