Notes from the Field | Neil J. Diamant & Shawn Bender, Where Are All the College Faculty? Editorial Inequity in East Asian Studies Journals
Ed. Note: For a response to this essay from Japan Forum Chief Editor Dr. Hannah Osborne, see “Response to Diamant & Bender, Where Are All the College Faculty?” The original article was emended by the authors on July 1, 2022 after receiving Dr. Osborne’s response to include: 1) an addition to footnote 4: “We note that, as of Summer 2022, Japan Forum has one Board member from a liberal arts college (Lafayette College). We applaud this addition”; and 2) footnote 5: “This applies to journals based in the US. For those based outside the US, our recommendation would apply to the proportion of the Board from US institutions.”
Ed. Note (Aug. 1, 2022): Read a second response from Sabine Frühstück and Morgan Pitelka, co-editors of The Journal of Japanese Studies.
Introduction[1]
In recent years, calls to recognize a broader range of voices within the field of Asian studies have grown stronger. This no doubt reflects the diversification of Asian studies, the expansion of Asian studies programs across the world, and political mobilization in the United States that is historic in its size and scope. The Association for Asian Studies (AAS), to its credit, has been responsive to these shifts. The Association has recognized that inclusivity does not happen by itself but rather is the result of concerted action. In 2020, the AAS Board of Directors urged members to “pledge themselves to take action aimed at building equitable institutions, departments, classrooms, and communities.” We could not agree more. We also think effective action depends on a clear understanding of existing inequities within the field. In this brief paper we examine one of these: the underrepresentation of college faculty in one of the field’s most important citadels of power.
As faculty working in East Asian studies for decades (in political science and anthropology respectively), we have long noticed a bias toward university faculty in positions at the upper echelons of the field, whether this be as leaders of academic associations, as participants on fellowship selection committees, or as editorial board members of academic presses and journals. These observations were nevertheless piecemeal and diffuse, and we could not be sure of their empirical basis. To remedy this, over the past year we examined the institutional affiliations of individuals selected to serve on the editorial boards of influential journals in the field of Asian studies. We view service on such boards as both a marker of professional status and a measure of power and authority. Boards decide what kinds of research gets published and, in effect, help shape academic discourse.
Since the field of Asian studies is large and our resources for research were limited, we consulted those journals that are more familiar to us as scholars of China and Japan respectively, and which are known to us as “high impact” (well-before the emergence of quantitative measures of such designations): in the China field we selected The China Quarterly and Modern China; in Japanese Studies, The Journal of Japanese Studies and Japan Forum. These journals, in addition to The Journal of Asian Studies, we suggest, offer a sufficiently broad overview of the field, although not comprehensive. While our study cannot speak directly to Korean Studies or to areas outside of East Asia, we suspect that similar dynamics apply there as well.
Prior to undertaking this research, we had some sense of what the data might tell us; the two of us have published in major journals and read them as a matter of course, noticing names and affiliations of editorial board members in the process. Still, the disparities in the data we collected surprised even us. Liberal arts college faculty (hereafter, college faculty) are significantly underrepresented in positions of authority among the journals we studied. In this essay, we review our methods, analysis, and results. We then discuss possible reasons for our findings and offer a potential solution.
Data
As noted above, time and resource constraints limited our investigation to the top journals in the field, resulting in a selection bias towards well-known titles in the social sciences and history. Ameliorating this problem to a certain extent is the JAS, which frequently includes articles dealing with literature and the arts, and whose editorial board is drawn from scholars of many regions and more disciplines than the interdisciplinary journals we looked at. This variation is also reflected in the institutional home of the journals (UCLA for Modern China; SOAS for China Quarterly, the Universities Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and Pittsburgh for JAS, the University of Washington for the Journal of Japanese Studies and the University of East Anglia for Japan Forum), as well as the length of their publishing history, with JAS and China Quarterly (CQ) representing the older end of the spectrum (1956-2021, 1968-2021), Modern China (MC) and the Journal of Japanese Studies (JJS) in the middle tier (1975-2021, 1974-2021), and Japan Forum (JF) the relative newcomer (1989-2021).
There are, to be sure, many other journals in the field with other institutional homes, older and younger ancestry, or somewhat less prestige; adding these to our sample might have changed our results. However, we considered this unlikely given our journals’ interdisciplinarity (which results in editorial boards reflecting more disciplines) and representativeness in terms of attracting “mainstream” approaches (unlike this journal—Critical Asian Studies—which was founded in opposition to dominant perspectives in the field, or positions: asia critique, which intends to “[offer] a fresh approach to Asia scholarship”). From the perspective of our research question—the representation of college faculty on the editorial boards of major journals—the bias towards the more well-known journals of the field is not problematic because we set out to measure inclusivity and status. Gaining a position as an editorial board member on a major journal is a better reflection of prestige, or its opposite, than relatively new or lesser-known publications.
Let us now turn to our data. With the help of our research assistant Leah Goldberg, we collected nearly complete runs of our selected journals and compiled a database of every name on their editorial boards. Since our focus was institution type, we coded each name for their institutional affiliation: research university, college, or “other” (such as a museum or think tank).[2] We were careful to distinguish between traditional liberal arts colleges (which only offer B.A. degrees) and institutions that were mostly liberal arts but also provided M.A. degrees in a limited number of fields, coding institutions such as Wesleyan University as a college despite its name. We found our journals either by examining the hard copy, conducting online searches, or, in the case of Modern China, by contacting one of the managing editors because online versions of the journal did not include the page with the editorial board. To establish a baseline about the distribution of Asian studies programs at universities and liberal arts colleges in the United States, we consulted the AAS Asian Studies Programs & Centers website. The website lists (mostly based on self-reporting) 256 programs and centers of Asian studies in the United States, with 196 (77%) housed at universities and 60 (23%) at liberal arts colleges.
“The results of this research do not speak well of institutional diversity in publishing in our field.”
The results of this research do not speak well of institutional diversity in publishing in our field (Chart 1). For example, in the sixty-five years that the Journal of Asian Studies has been in print, there were 3,608 members of the editorial board from universities (92%), but only 323 members from colleges (8%). Comparable marginalization was found in the Journal of Japanese Studies (1975-2021), where 712 members of the editorial board hailed from universities (94%) and 45 members came from a college (6%). The situation was even worse at The China Quarterly (1968-2021): 99% of its 2,147 board members have been university faculty; only 0.7% were faculty at a college.[3] But, in terms of college faculty representation, nowhere was the situation as imbalanced as Modern China (1975-2021) and Japan Forum (1992-2020). These journals, with 1,357 and 904 editorial board members respectively, have yet to include a single college faculty member.[4]
Discussion
The data presented above demonstrate that college faculty are underrepresented on the editorial boards of several important journals in China and Japan studies. The reasons for this, however, are not as obvious, and we can only offer educated guesses. We do not think it is explained by what many would consider the obvious reason: lower scholarly productivity. Measured by quantity of books or articles published (or, perhaps more controversially, by the quality thereof), there are college faculty who equal or surpass their university peers on the editorial boards. This should not be surprising: college faculty have the same entry qualifications to the field; the tight job market means that highly competent, well-published people are found everywhere; and college faculty, like their university counterparts, often find it difficult to change institutions after getting hired.
What other possible causes might there be? For one, we would not be surprised that prestigious institutional affiliation—the Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvards of the academic universe—helps raise the stature of their faculty, and therefore of the journals that ask them to serve on their boards as well. Second, it is also possible that faculty at so-called Research 1 (or R1) institutions, having superior access to resources, have more opportunities to publish, organize conferences, and network with faculty visiting their campuses, thereby raising their visibility and making them more attractive candidates to serve on editorial boards. In this respect, the marginalization of college faculty correlates with individual achievement, but in a way similar to how higher SAT scores correlate to higher socioeconomic class. Third, many editorial boards appear to have policies in place that put on-campus faculty (such as faculty at SOAS on the board of China Quarterly, the University of East Anglia for Japan Forum, or UC Irvine for JAS) or citizens (such as the board of The China Journal, based in Australia) on editorial boards, which limits the opportunities for non-affiliated faculty from other R1 universities and liberal arts colleges. With the remaining slots, faced with the choice of inviting a well-published scholar from, say, MIT, or a somewhat less well-known scholar from Colby College, journal editors likely opt for the former. Finally, the presence of just two colleges (Oberlin and Smith) on editorial boards—just 3% of sixty liberal arts institutions with Asian Studies programs!—likely speaks to the institutional prestige factor, as well as to the undergraduate background of senior scholars and their personal connections. Of these possibilities, we think that the first and second explain most of the marginalization demonstrated in our data: the prestige factor and greater opportunities for publishing and networking create a built-in advantage for scholars at R1 institutions even as Asian studies programs have expanded beyond the most prestigious institutions. Prestige almost certainly influences the selection of which liberal arts college faculty are chosen when given the opportunity to join.
Why does this matter? Or, more precisely, to whom does this matter? For college faculty we think the answer is straightforward: limited opportunities to serve on editorial boards lowers our status in the profession, reduces the “brand awareness” of our institutions, limits opportunities to learn about and influence new research in the field (owing to the gatekeeper function editors are granted), and makes it more difficult for us to bolster our cases for promotion within our own institutions. Beyond this, we would also argue that the journals themselves are negatively affected by not including enough college faculty on their editorial boards. As faculty who primarily interact with undergraduate students, we often have a keen sensibility of what sorts of articles, and writing styles, can be understood by younger students. In our experience, it is quite rare to find articles from these journals that are appropriate for undergraduate students, a situation that could be ameliorated by increasing the institutional diversity of editorial boards. Finally, we would argue that the domination of editorial boards by R1 university faculty layers privilege upon privilege in a self-perpetuating manner that does not come close to reflecting the distribution of individual talent and merit in the field. Indeed, in some cases, multiple members of the same institution serve on the same editorial board. In others, the same person serves for multiple years on an editorial board, only to be replaced by a new faculty member from the same institution.
Is there anything that can be done to diversity editorial boards so that college faculty members can achieve greater representation? Taking a page from the intentional—and sometimes successful—efforts to increase gender diversity in legislatures, state governments, and private corporations (mainly in Europe), we propose a quota system. Simply, editors should allocate around 15% of their editorial board positions to college faculty.[5] This is a modest goal, and one journal, the JAS, already exceeds it, but only in three of the past 15 years. For its February 2021 issue, the most recent in our sample, three of sixteen members of its editorial board (19%) came from liberal arts colleges. The JJS is not far behind at 6% (Winter 2021), but CQ has not had an editorial board member from a college since 2009. And, as noted earlier, JF and MC never have. Although our research focuses on mainstream journals in the China and Japan field, we suspect that even journals that position themselves as progressive or anti-mainstream will have the same issue with representation. We urge editors of these journals to examine this issue and take a leadership role in applying a similar quota standard.
Increasing representation could be accomplished by expanding the size of editorial boards or easing out members who have served for multiple years; such positions should not be treated as tenured jobs. This strikes us as a win-win proposition: institutional diversity would be enhanced; faculty from colleges (and their institutions) gain the prestige associated with being invited to serve on these boards; students might be exposed to articles that are more accessible; and editorial boards benefit from gaining fresh perspectives. We also think that it is critical to increase the diversity among colleges whose faculty are represented on editorial boards. Given the large number of liberal arts colleges, it is unclear why only two—Oberlin and Smith—have had significant representation on editorial boards.
College faculty, for their part, also have a role to play in achieving more representation. As reviewers for manuscripts submitted to these journals, we would be well within our rights to demand greater diversity on the editorial board as a condition for reviewing manuscripts (“no reviewing without representation”). If hundreds of college faculty insist on this condition for their unpaid and largely unrecognized labor perhaps journal editors will be more inclined to listen. We would, of course, prefer that editors do the right thing on their own accord, but should they not such a pressure campaign would be justified.
Notes
[1] The authors are indebted to their research assistant Leah Goldberg for compiling the database of editorial board members examined in this paper. We would also like to thank Alex Bates, Nan Ma, Evan Young, Sarah Niebler, Erik Love, Maura Cunningham, Catherine Phipps, and Neil Weissman for their comments on earlier drafts. The paper is stronger as result of this collective feedback. Any errors that remain are our own.
[2] In some cases, like the JAS, we consulted every issue; in others, we look at one issue per year (Editorial Boards usually change once a year).
[3] The China Quarterly figure excludes 12 members of the editorial board from Lingnan College, Hong Kong (now Lingnan University). Notably, the editorial boards of The Journal of Japanese Studies and The China Quarterly drew from only one college (Oberlin College and Smith College, respectively).
[4] Numbers for Japan Forum are calculated based on editorial board membership per volume (i.e., each calendar year), not journal issue, since the number of issues per year varied over time. We note that, as of Summer 2022, Japan Forum has one Board member from a liberal arts college (Lafayette College). We applaud this addition.
[5] This applies to journals based in the US. For those based outside the US, our recommendation would apply to the proportion of the Board from US institutions.
Dr. Neil J. Diamant is the Walter E. Beach ’56 Chair in Political Science and Professor of Asian Law and Society at Dickinson College (Carlisle, PA). He is author of Revolutionizing the Family: Politics, Love, and Divorce in Urban and Rural China, 1949-1968 (University of California Press, 2000), Embattled Glory: Veterans, Military Families, and the Politics of Patriotism in China, 1949-2007 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), and co-author of The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the 20th Century: A Comparative History (Cornell University Press, 2020). His most recent book is Useful Bullshit: Constitutions in Chinese Politics and Society (Cornell University Press, 2021). He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Dr. Shawn Bender is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies and Anthropology at Dickinson College. His research interests range from music and performance to human–robot interaction, eldercare, and discourses of demographic change. His most recent book is Taiko Boom: Japanese Drumming in Place and Motion (University of California Press, 2012).
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Neil J. Diamant and Shawn Bender, “Where Are All the College Faculty? Editorial Inequity in East Asian Studies Journals,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, May 31, 2022; https://doi.org/10.52698/YPUZ9807.