Under consideration

Four months ago, I submitted a fourteen-page paper to a well-regarded journal. Within days, an editor was assigned. The status changed to “under consideration.” It has not changed since. I have not received a message—not an acknowledgment, not an estimate, not a line saying we have received your work and will be in touch. The paper sits somewhere in a queue, under the care of an editor who is, and I say this without malice, almost certainly drowning. Overcommitted, underpaid, or more likely unpaid altogether, assigned to a manuscript they did not ask for, on top of a teaching load and their own research and their own submissions sitting in their own queues, waiting. I know this because I am also that person, and so, in all likelihood, are you.

Here is what academic publishing costs, for those fortunate enough not to know. You conduct the research. You write the paper. You format it, cover-letter it, submit it, and wait. The journal receives your work at no cost. The editor handles it without compensation. The peer reviewers assess it, also without compensation. The entire apparatus runs on voluntary labor—on the quiet, structural generosity of people who believe the work matters. And at the end of this process, which can take anywhere from three months to well over a year, the journal may inform you that publication requires a fee. An article processing charge. Somewhere between three hundred and three thousand dollars, depending on the venue. To pay it, you apply for a grant, which means another submission, another queue, another anonymous committee reviewing not your scholarship but your budget justification, another wait. And if it comes through, you use it to pay for the privilege of giving your work away to an industry that could not exist without you. This is not a dysfunction. This is the system working exactly as designed.

But I am less interested in the system than in what we do inside it, because here is what an apparatus that treats people as inputs requires: that we treat each other the same way. Every unreturned email, every months-long silence, every “under consideration” that means we have not thought about you since the day you submitted—these are not merely inconveniences. They are small enactments of the same logic, each one saying: you are a manuscript, not a colleague; your time is not a claim on mine; your presence on the other end of this exchange does not require acknowledgment. We learned this from the system, and we pass it on. The editor who has not written back is not a villain—that editor is, in all likelihood, teaching, reviewing, applying, waiting, trying to keep up with a workload that was never designed to be kept up with. We are not adversaries. We are the same person at different points in the same circuit, and we have collectively decided—or simply failed to decide otherwise—that basic courtesy is a luxury the circuit cannot afford. I want to suggest it is the only thing the circuit cannot afford to lose.

There is a version of politics that does not operate at the level of manifestos or structural reform but at the level of the minimal gesture—the act that says, simply, I see you, your presence registers. An email takes four minutes: I have received your manuscript and hope to have a response by such-and-such a date. No promises, no guarantees, just the acknowledgment that a person wrote something and sent it into the world and deserves to know it landed somewhere human. The same applies to the prospectus inquiry, the tentative question about whether a project is worth pursuing, the email from a colleague trying to find a footing. A reply is not a favor. It is the smallest possible enactment of solidarity, the recognition that we are in this together and that the inhumanity of the system is not something that happens to us but something we either interrupt or continue, daily, in how we treat each other. To spare someone the silence is not a grand gesture. It is closer to the minimum—but minimums matter, especially when the system has made us forget they exist.

We are a field that takes ideas seriously, that trains itself in careful attention, that asks hard questions about power and recognition and what it means to be heard, and then we disappear on each other for months. We keep doing it anyway—submitting, waiting, applying, teaching, thinking, writing, submitting again—because the work matters, or we believe it does, which amounts to the same thing. Until we find a better way.