I think Dialogue has less of an image problem than is suggested by some of the above posts, although at the same time I agree Dialogue could benefit from a wider range of viewpoints (as could BYU Studies and FARMS).

I’m a generally conservative person with generally conservative employers living in a generally politically conservative location and attending a generally conservative ward. I’ve never sensed any complaint about my use of Dialogue in a class, although given the increasing emphasis on using only the manual in church classes, I am more cautious in my use at church of any Mormon Studies publications.
There have been a couple of suggestions above that publishing in Dialogue can be a negative for a BYU-bound professor. I haven’t published in Dialogue, but I’ve discussed the topic of “how to maximize job chances at BYU” over the last few years with several people at BYU. My sense is that in most departments (including history, sociology, languages, theatre) publishing in Dialogue is not a negative, and I think each of those departments you can find BYU professors (before and after tenure) publishing in Dialogue (and BYU Studies). However, apparently there are English department faculty who have heard that publishing in Dialogue can be a negative. At the same time, there are English professors who publish there. If you’ve followed BYU’s academic freedom issues over the last decade, it won’t be a surprise to learn that the English department may receive a greater level of scrutiny than other departments.

Best wishes to Dialogue (and to BYU Studies and FARMS, both of which in some ways face challenges similar to those of Dialogue ).
Jeff

Aaron B

Jeremiah: I think that this is right. At the end of the day, the biggest problem that ALL academic (or quasi-academic) journals face is that 80 to 90 percent of everything is just not that good. I certainly don’t think that anyone who can publish a good Mormon-studies article in a non-Mormon journal should consider publishing in BYU Studies or Dialogue. However, if the best stuff that can moves increasingly into non-Mormon fora’s, what will be left in the exclusively Mormon fora will increasingly be the inside-baseball stuff that tends to hit closer to theological fault lines. It seems to me that this means that Dialogue should be more rather than less concerned about its positioning with in the market. It seems to me that the demographic that will strongly identify with a journal largely modeled on the faithful opposition model is shrinking fast. My (admittedly ad hoc and anecdotal) sense is that younger Mormon intellectuals simply aren’t as interested in this approach and will tune out fora that they think are primarily defined in these terms. In other words, Dialogue’s benefit in repositioning itself is that it gets to tap into the next generation of readers. At some point in the not horribly distant future for better or for worse, a large chunk of those who strongly identify with the Dialogue brand of the late 1980s through mid-1990s or so will be dead.

It also hard to know, because you never can tell what is solicited and what is simply submitted. I am guessing that the solicititation process is likely to veer “left” (with the usual caveats about the impercision of that word) simply because those are the sorts of people that Levi Peterson et al are likely to know and who are likely to submit stuff as a favor when asked. Without more inside knowledge than I have, however, this is nothing more than idle speculation on my part.

Nate’s description of Dialogue seems quite accurate to me. But his solution seems half-hearted since it doesn’t convince me that it will really help Dialogue.