Goldburn Maynard Jr. (Indiana-Kelley Business School; Google Scholar), Killing the Motivation of the Minority Professor, 107 Minn. L. Rev. ___ (2023):
This Essay hypothesizes that a significant number of junior scholars with radical or non-normative ideas forego those ideas or mute them in order to fit their work within the dominant paradigm of legal scholarship. Even those who move forward and publish their radical or non-normative proposals spend significant time attempting to overcome internal and external resistance, negotiating with mentors, and finding ways to make the radical seem palatable. This disproportionately harms the productivity of minority law professors not only through inefficiency but also through the long-term destruction of intrinsic motivation that is vital and overlaps with successful, fulfilling, and productive careers. To counteract some of these stifling effects, the Essay proposes several ways universities and the legal academy can support radical and non-normative scholarship.
Conclusion: A Way Forward
The challenges of producing valuable scholarship should not be underestimated. Writing and synthesizing information requires high-level brain functioning. A normal amount of stress does not interfere with and might sometimes help with this resource-intensive deliberation and work. However, too much stress can be paralyzing, and minorities have disproportionately dealt with the effects of the COVID pandemic and the justice crises. Crises undermine scholarship production both because it pushes stress to levels that interfere with high-level brain functions and because it requires a commodity that becomes scarcer during a crisis: time. Research on scholarly productivity has quite consistently revealed that the most productive scholars spend more time writing. This seems intuitive and straightforward enough to understand and immediately brings to mind who gets to spend substantial amounts of time on scholarship and who does not have the luxury to do so.
During this time of crisis it is more important than ever to tap into the passions intrinsic motivators that drive scholars forward. As such, it is counterproductive to ask junior scholars who came into the academy with a goal of spurring social change to keep that pent up until after tenure. Scholarship that lines up with desire will ultimately tends to be of a higher quality and less vulnerable to the dizzying array of obstacles to publishing articles. If anything, increased collaboration and encouragement of a wider diversity of output would raise all boats and would lead to more incisive and wide-ranging discussions in the academy.
