You are at a conference, wandering around the book exhibit. A former colleague greets you. A few minutes into the conversation, she asks the inevitable question: “So, what are you working on?”

“Nothing,” you say. You are met with visibly suppressed shock, which fails to obscure your companion’s dark thoughts: You are living “deadwood,” and worse, someone who has the gall to admit it. You quickly add, “But I am actively engaged in research in new areas of interest, which I fully expect will result in a series of articles or books.” Not really deadwood, you see. Just taking a working hiatus. Never let it be said, or even thought, that one is not productive.

I have three articles sitting on my computer desktop, in various stages of completion. I haven’t touched them in months, nor have I moved forward on a book project. I’ve written blog posts, some relating to my field, philosophy, as well as miscellaneous unpublished writings. But I’ve stopped writing scholarly philosophy.

The decision wasn’t premeditated. I have been trying to understand what happened. No doubt this motivational desert was created in part by personal and family challenges, as well as by the extraordinarily disturbing current political climate. But I’ve become convinced that the proximate cause is my deepening disappointment with professional philosophy, and what it reflects about the contemporary practice of the liberal arts.

Academic disciplines in our time have been subjected to the principle that more productivity is better, and a lot more is better than better, giving rise to a kind of productivity syndrome. While we may complain about the importance of quality, how often have you heard of someone not receiving promotion or tenure because his or her colleagues said the quality of the work was unacceptable? This happens, of course, but I am asking you to consider how often.

Having served on many internal and external reviews, I’ve learned that quantity and prestigious venues are typically what win the day. Yet there is no guarantee that a book or article published by a prestigious press is of high quality — we all know that weak or mediocre books slip through. Quantity is so much easier to evaluate. Professor X has eighteen, twelve book reviews, twenty-one conference presentations, two monographs, and an edited volume. The university’s tenure and promotion committee is going to be impressed. End of story.

Academic culture — like American culture more broadly — has become monomaniacally infatuated with productivity as the marker of a successful life, and quantitative measures have become central to determining what counts as success. Although academics can be found resisting (mildly) the metrics of productivity foisted on them by administrators, they also enthusiastically measure themselves.

I recall one young philosopher telling me years ago that he wanted to publish 100 articles by date X, and 150 by date Y. We can all recite warnings going back to the ancients to avoid the temptations of Mammon, or Mammon stand-ins. For academics, the stand-ins are recognition and prestige, which invariably require productivity and yet more productivity.

The productivity syndrome affects not only those on the tenure track and the tenured. It is also part of the system that exploits contingent faculty members. One of the justifications for the discrepancies in salary and benefits between tenure-stream and non-tenure-stream academics is that the first are more productive than their adjunct colleagues. Just look at how many more articles and books they produce!

Of course, if people with tenure were teaching five or six courses a semester at different institutions, their productivity presumably would take a significant hit. Further, once someone has not produced much for several years, it becomes virtually impossible to find a tenure-stream position. The assumption is, well, once a productivity loser, always a productivity loser. How marvelously insidious: a self-fulfilling, self-justifying framework for exploitation.

What’s more, adjunct colleagues who do manage to write must send their work to journals that are overloaded with submissions, leading to interminable delays in the peer-review process. This certainly hurts those with less work to submit more than it hurts those who can circulate several articles at once. No doubt, if people were driven less by the productivity principle, the peer-review process would be more streamlined.