Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 15, No. 201.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 08:46:28 +0100
From: scaife@uky.edu
Subject: [STOA] Rescue Tenure From the Tyranny of the Monograph
This article from The Chronicle of Higher Education
(http://chronicle.com) was forwarded to you from: scaife@uky.edu
From the issue dated April 20, 2001
Rescue Tenure From the Tyranny of the Monograph
By LINDSAY WATERS
Call the ambulance, the patient is dying! That urgent appeal
needs to go out -- and quickly -- to two groups: college
administrators and scholars in the humanities. I make the
appeal as a publisher, a reader, and a humanist. I hold books
sacred and hate to see them losing their value, which is
exactly what they are doing today, rapidly. The currency of
books is becoming deflated in a way that is reminiscent of the
decline of the German deutsche mark in the early 1920's, and
the culprit is the same: hyperinflation. Our system of book
publishing, which rests on the premise that we promote people
who publish, is spiraling out of control. Indeed, the whole
system needs to be changed.
The problem is that university presses are publishing books
that they should be turning down. It is not that the books are
unworthy; just that they do not justify the expenditure of
time and money that goes into them. So my question to
administrators and humanists is the same: Why do any of you --
I mean us -- want this system to go on?
The system produces many excellent scholars, but it does so in
spite of, not because of, itself. The exaggerated emphasis on
the publication of books pushes young scholars to go on record
earlier and earlier, with less and less to say. That is not
good for colleges and universities, and it is not good for
scholarship. Furthermore, overproduction conceals an identity
crisis in the humanities that has been developing for the past
30 years, but one that we dare not continue to ignore.
I think that the patient is terminally ill. We mislead those
in positions of authority, like deans and the heads of tenure
committees, who take the books we publish as a stamp of
authority, and we delude the young who keep on preparing books
to get tenure, if we don't face the current realities of
academic publishing. What we should be doing is thinking about
ways to prepare for the death of the tenure monograph in the
humanities, and to counsel those who will soon be grieving.
That could provide us with a great occasion to redirect the
efforts of not just the young but also their elders, if they
-- I mean we -- dare to reconsider our situation.
Some defenders of the monograph dismiss talk of its demise.
The obituaries are little more than wishful thinking, they
say, stemming more from discomfort with new types of
scholarship than with reality. I agree that a fair amount of
the bellyaching about ever more esoteric monographs with ever
fewer readers has come from people who just wish that the
likes of deconstruction, feminism, gay studies, and
postcolonial studies would go away. But that doesn't change
the fact that we have a crisis.
Yes, we academic publishers increased the number of titles we
produced throughout the 1990's, according to annual figures
prepared for the Association of American University Presses.
But the increase could well be seen as a desperate effort to
keep dollar income up at a time when per-title sales are flat
in scholarly publishing. Dollar income has often increased at
presses, but that's because publishers are bringing out more
titles at higher prices.
I have experience in publishing books in economics,
philosophy, literature, anthropology, and law. In economics, a
treatise -- a major effort to synthesize knowledge -- might
sell 7,500 copies at $50 a copy; major books in literary
studies -- books that others use as tools in the classroom or
for their research -- can sell 3,000 to 5,000 copies. But, in
my experience, monographic studies in the humanities, and I
definitely include history here, whether written to win tenure
or later in a career by established giants in the field, now
usually sell between 275 and 600 copies, no matter how good
they are. (Paradoxically, outside of literary and historical
studies, the smaller the field, the higher the sales. Most
philosophy books sell, in cloth, a minimum of 1,200 copies;
books in classics do even better.) At Harvard, we figure we
lose about $10,000 on every book that sells only 500 or so
copies. So what do we do? We hedge our bets.
That produces an untenable situation. On one side, we have
university presses that can afford to publish monographs --
particularly in the humanities -- only if they can find
respectable "trade" books that sell enough copies to subsidize
the books that lose money, or if they find subsidies (in some
form or another) from their universities to cover their
losses. On the other side, we have an academy that is
demanding more and more publications from scholars at a
younger and younger age.
Today, in most cases, it seems to be a matter of quantity over
quality. Quantity is empirical, quality is elusive. The rule
-- unspoken at some universities and set out in guidelines at
others -- is getting to be two books for tenure. With the
decline in tenure-track jobs in many fields, thanks to the use
of adjuncts, that has led to frenzied behavior on the part of
graduate students now trying to multiply the number of
publications on their C.V.'s. (Intimations of a little good
news on the job front certainly aren't enough to change such
behavior.)
In a recent essay in an M.L.A. newsletter, Profession, "No
Wine Before Its Time: The Panic Over Early
Professionalization," Cary Nelson, a literary critic, reports
asking a provost whether the university had any qualms about
raising the bar and demanding two books for tenure. "No," the
provost replied. "Increasing expectations for tenure only
proves how good a school we are." But does sheer quantity
really offer conclusive proof that the enterprise is "good"?
Above all, the crisis of the monograph is a crisis in
leadership. From the desperation of some publishers, madly
producing more new books to stay alive, to the increasing use
of adjunct professors by universities eager to save money, to
the demands of tenure committees, you have a lot of factors --
and a lot of people who should know better -- making a tough
situation increasingly intolerable.
It was 10 years ago that another literary critic took me up
short by coming by our Harvard press booth at a Modern
Language Association convention and saying, "Lindsay, you must
be a desperate man." Why? Because, he said, it was clear that
anything could, by then, be published, and he was wandering
the aisles in boredom. Another scholar put it to me more
gently. Some five years ago, I asked an anthropologist if his
colleagues were reading a book that he had read in manuscript
and recommended glowingly several years before. "Oh, Lindsay,"
he said, "don't you know? No one automatically pays attention
to books anymore." Why? Because potential readers no longer
assume that, if a publisher went to all the expense of
bringing out a book, it had to be worth at least poking into.
Once bored, twice shy.
The final blow was administered recently by a scholar who said
out loud what I was beginning to fear. The refereeing system,
this scholar told me, had become a joke. There are many people
who take refereeing extremely seriously -- and, from the
bottom of my heart, I thank those selfless referees I have had
the privilege to work with -- but there are also many who use
the opportunity to review a manuscript for a publisher as a
chance to promote like-minded individuals and friends; and
there are some publishers who choose readers because they can
be counted on to provide positive reviews of particular
projects. That adds up to a general crisis of judgment: Too
many of us seem to subscribe to the sentiment promoted by the
Lake Wobegon Chamber of Commerce, assuming that we are all
above average and, therefore, that severe criticism of one
another is never in order. But as Lester Bangs might have
instructed Cameron Crowe well before he was "almost famous,"
you gotta be ruthless to be a good critic.
When things come to such a pass -- all of my sources were at
the top of their fields, not one a slouch or a disgruntled
malcontent, and I have heard similar complaints from scholars
in history and art history -- I think some speculation is
indicated, as well as some changes in practice. The crucial
point here is that the overproduction of the most endangered
species in the preserve, the monograph, is a symptom of bigger
problems in the humanities wing of the university. If you will
allow me to lapse into the cadence of a preacher: Anxieties
about authorship and authority have led to the present
profligacy, in a desperate attempt to win back lost
legitimacy. But I say unto ye, It is never going to be won
this way!The problem of the humanities monograph is, mutatis
mutandis, the problem of the university and what counts for
knowledge there. Is the university a place where intelligence
is made manifest? It is, and always has been, a place where
careerism makes itself manifest. But what about intelligence?
Just a few years ago, Stanley Fish, then head of the Duke
press, challenged humanists to buck up and stand tall. Why
should they be second-class citizens, wearing tweed like
sackcloth, he asked in an essay on "The Unbearable Ugliness of
Volvos"? But chutzpah won't be enough to save us now. In a
university increasingly committed to business values, the
humanities have grown to be beside the point. The free fall of
the monograph in the humanities is a symptom of the loss of
stature of the humanists who write the books. Technology
transfer, licensing the fruitsof university research -- that's
the game being played now. More and more, the only interesting
unit of knowledge is the patent.
To many of the people who run universities and to many faculty
members, the humanities are at best a source of confusion, and
at worst an embarrassment. Can you believe, the woman on the
street is justifiably asking herself, there are professors of
literature at major universities now writing books for
reputable university presses defending sexual harassment of
their own students? It is as if Bill Clinton were demented
enough to write an essay for The Atlantic Monthly defending
his activities with Monica Lewinsky. Scientists, by contrast,
are turning their departments into "profit centers." He who
cannot cash in has no cachet, and humanists seldom can.
The first step we need to take out of this crisis is to
recognize that the assumption that a humanist needs a book
(or, more likely, two) is based on a bad analogy. That analogy
has a history, and we are its prisoners. For more than a
century, we humanists have been trying to model our behavior
on that of our scientific colleagues. Anglo-American
philosophers, for example, have been trying to make their
discipline look like mathematical logic and scientific
argumentation. By contrast with the misdirection and moral
confusion that is spreading self-doubt in the humanities,
scientists like Steven Weinberg and E. O. Wilson have a strong
sense of agenda. Wilson's line, which goes by the sweet title
of "consilience," is that science is the queen of modern
thought, and he says that those who live in the university
must choose between one of two and only two roads: scientific
empiricism -- the road of reason -- or religious
transcendentalism, which is no road at all, but a maze where
passion is the only compass. The choice is obvious and
inevitable. Thus is the social Darwinism of the marketplace
received with welcome arms into the university.
The monograph fetish is a prime example of the desire of
humanists to fit in and be scientists, just like all the rest
of the Big Men on Campus. That scientists themselves no longer
cling to the fetish seems to matter not a whit. (As any
university publisher can tell you, trying to get a book out of
a scientist has been impossible for decades.) When the modern
research university took hold in the United States toward the
end of the 19th century, scientists were writing monographs.
Why should not humanists do the same? Well, as the crisis of
the monograph makes it absolutely apparent, because the
strategy won't work -- and was dangerous all along.
No one is ever going to mistake us for junior scientists --
not even if we take to wearing pen protectors in our shirt
pockets. Yes, we still consider the book valuable, but too
often not because it is well done. Edward Said was right when,
in one of his 1999 presidential columns for the M.L.A., he
chastised humanists for being so hard to understand. No, in
our profit-driven university, the book is valuable because a
universitywide committee can understand that it costs a lot of
money to produce. Even if committee members can glean nothing
about the book's content, they know that it cost somebody a
lot of money to publish and, therefore, somebody else a lot of
effort to mobilize support to get it published. All that's
true. Books also have the distinction of thumping when you
drop them on a table, and they stand up in a display case, the
way an offprint cannot.
Humanists can do better than this. I am afraid we M.L.A. types
are a bit like the railwaymen who thought that their job was
building and maintaining track, train, and station, and not
moving goods and people. They did not keep their eyes on the
prize. But just like them, our job in the humanities is moving
people and understanding what moves them. Why do we want
people to write? Why do we want to see their writing? Because
we want authors and readers, alike, to be humanists. An
old-fashioned word, "humanist," but not outmoded. A humanism
that dares speak its name speaks in a way that is persuasive
to humankind.
Of course, although we in the United States do have a
particular penchant for the fetishization of the narrow and
passionless monograph, we have glorious precedent in Europe: I
remember the shock I felt when I saw the first German edition
of Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama. It was
in an antiquarian shop in Vienna. I don't know why I expected
it to look like that surrealist publication of his, One-Way
Street, but it looked just like a scientific monograph meant
for 275 research libraries.
In recent years, some people have tried to resuscitate the
rhetoricians under the new name of "public intellectual." That
is a welcome development, but we should remember that it
sounds new and feels urgent only because, for some years now,
we have subscribed to the very different ideal for the
practice of intelligence that we know and respect under the
name "science." Trying to shove our round pegs into science's
square holes just doesn't work.
We need to highlight the differences between the humanities
and the sciences, and we need to get over the vulgar phobia
about science that hobbles so much humanistic discourse. We
have to insist on the thing we do -- which is not finding a
place for ourselves as evolutionary eager beavers in E. O.
Wilson's flow chart, and which is not just serving the
almighty green-back. Quite simply, unless we recover our sense
of overall orientation, we are not going to be able to
encourage the young to get Ph.D.'s in the humanities. And the
world will be the poorer for that.
The reason so many of the book proposals I see from the young
today fail is because all of the frameworks that would justify
writing a book seem to have collapsed. People pay lip service
to interdisciplinary study, but that's about it. (Why else do
we need all those interdisciplinary humanities centers?)
Professionalism rejects the notion that it is worthwhile to
have real expertise in a field of knowledge other than one's
own. Stanley Cavell tells me that he is certain that the young
man he was some 50 years ago, when he wanted to switch from
music (he was being trained as a composer) and was admitted to
the University of California at Los Angeles to study
philosophy, would now be rejected by his own Harvard
philosophy department as too high a risk.
I find myself spending an increasing amount of time trying to
persuade the talented that it is worth writing a humanities
book filled with gusto. I feel bad that some of the really
interesting young intellectuals -- like those who edit and
write for the journal Hermenaut, kids passionately interested
in philosophy, rock 'n' roll, and zine culture -- prefer to
drive cabs, think, write, and have zilch to do with the
university. I don't share Bob Dylan's dismissive attitude
about "the old folks home at the college," because I love the
university and think a thousand flowers might grow in its
fields.
Sales of individual titles are down for university-press
publishers not because we are so good and society is so bad,
but because we can't convince even ourselves that what we are
doing makes a difference. Humanists buy books because books
excite them, not out of duty. Our publications need to be more
like those of Swift and Voltaire -- proper humanistic
emanations that offer persuasive accounts of the world, no
matter how much they flaunt their improprieties, rather than
empty exercises of scientific competence designed to please
two men in New Haven and no one else in this world.
The second step we need to take to get out of the crisis of
the tenure monograph is to consider what should -- and should
not -- be a monograph. Write we must, but why must it be books
and not essays? Jerry Green, Harvard's provost in the early
1990's and an economist, recently asked me why the people in
many of the disciplines in which I publish want to waste so
much of the time of young people in the prime of their lives
with such a lot of make-work. In economics, he said, they want
to keep the kids working hard to generate new ideas that the
rest of the profession can feed off of, because youth is the
leading edge. We need to remember that the humanist ideal of
publication that flourished for years took the form of books
and articles. It was embodied in books like Thomas More's
Utopia, Michel de Montaigne's Essais, Erasmus's Adagia, Wayne
Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction; and in essays like Jonathan
Swift's "A Modest Proposal." Think of the people whose best
work appeared in essay form: Barbara Johnson, Nina Baym, W. K.
Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Burke, William
Empson, John Freccero, Erich Auerbach, E. R. Curtius, Georg
Lukacs, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul de Man, Walter
Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Gianfranco
Contini, Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg. I could go on, but
won't. You can.
Sometimes, to make a group of scholars turn on a dime, we need
a publication not as thick as a brick, but as thin as a dime.
Something like Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent,"
Wimsatt's "The Intentional Fallacy," Gayatri Spivak's "Can the
Subaltern Speak?," John Van Engen's "The Christian Middle Ages
as an Historiographical Problem."
The third step we need to take is to recognize just whom and
what the current system of publishing serves. The benefit of
the system is that it allows universities to outsource tenure
decisions to university presses. That looks like a win-win
situation: Institutions can count on a decentralized
decision-making system to legitimate the credentials of their
employees, and the people who love books so much that they
want to be part of the making of them can get their money for
doing what delights them, and can get their books free. But
there are hidden costs here that we have not considered, and
the bill is coming due.
My personal concern is this, and it is very personal and may
seem sentimental: I love books, and I love the humanities, and
I see anything that undermines their value as a threat. We all
worry about electronic publications' putting books out of
existence, but I fear that the overreliance on books by
bookish people is an equal threat. The sacredness of books is
not something that needs to be inflated, least of all by the
people of the book. The idea that you can cook up a book fast,
the way we used to cook up burgers when I worked at McDonald's
as a kid, deeply disturbs me. Books should take years to write
(although, even then, deadlines can help). "You can't hurry
love," sang the Supremes years ago. Well, you can't hurry
scholarship, either. Pushing young scholars to publish books
doesn't lead to more better books. It leads to more books --
that is, until the system collapses.
W. H. Auden wrote that the sign of promise in a young poet is
technical competence, not originality or emotion. The same is
true, probably, for young scholars. Their work does not need
to be published with the full fanfare of the book of a mature
scholar, and there ought to be -- and no doubt are at many
institutions -- ways of granting tenure to the young person
who reveals such competence. But the imperative given by
universities to the untenured to publish promising juvenilia
as midlist books, and the proliferation of such publications,
has triggered Gresham's Law, creating a situation in which
even the best books come to be taken as mere exercises,
overproduced term papers, just as bad money drives out good.
My economist friend Jerry Green is right: Why should we
encourage young humanists to do a lot of Mickey Mouse work, to
go through the motions, when what they should be trying to
write are moving essays and -- maybe later than sooner --
passionate books like Empson's Milton's God?
The scholarly book has become an endangered species, I
contend, but not for the reasons most people think of. We have
put the cart before the horse. People should not be given
tenure because they have written books; people should be given
tenure so they have the leisure to develop big projects that
make good books. In any case, what a university really needs
to know about a young scholar is whether his or her writing is
competent and shows promise that the candidate will develop
into a person who really has something to say. Seen from that
perspective, the turning of a large percentage of academic
jobs into adjunct positions is hastening a waning of
scholarship that is already taking place.
Lastly, we need to rethink who should be evaluating scholars
and scholarship. Why leave it to book publishers? Maybe we
should consider independent bureaus, financed by the leading
professional organization in each discipline, to do the work
of judging. Alternatively, and probably preferably, we might
actually bring evaluation back into the department. If the
system has so evolved -- as I think it has -- that departments
can avoid direct appraisal and criticism of a colleague's work
by farming out that labor, is that good? If things were to
change, scholars might have to learn to be directly critical
of a candidate's ideas; the candidate might have to rebut
criticism, publicly if possible. (Many departments do ask
candidates to give a public lecture, but real discussion there
is scarce.) That might lead to a system closer to the one that
prevailed in the medieval university, with disputations among
scholars; and that, in turn, might have the big payoff of
making scholarship more public and evaluation less something
that goes on somewhere else -- at the faculty board of a
distant university press, or behind closed doors at home.
Students might even love it.
What I am urging is that publishers get more selective, and
also that they help scholars figure out how to write books
that will appeal to a broader audience than at present.
Surely, scholars ought to at least be able to explain what
they are doing in general-enough terms in their introductions
that people outside their fields can see what is at stake. I
don't tout massive shrinking of lists, but I do long for
better books. During the years that we could publish
monographs with impunity (and please bear in mind, that was
not yesterday), we all became too complacent.
If we can salvage anything from the present crisis of the
monograph in the humanities, let it be that we humanists see
that our lot is with rhetoric and not science; that ideas --
and young people -- need nurturing. If we can do that, we
would have much to be grateful for.
Lindsay Waters is executive editor for the humanities at the
Harvard University Press. His book Against Authoritarian
Aesthetics: Towards a Politics of Experience has just been
published in Putong Hua by Peking University Press.
_________________________________________________________________
Chronicle subscribers can read this article on the Web at this address:
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i32/32b00701.htm
If you would like to have complete access to The Chronicle's Web
site, a special subscription offer can be found at:
_________________________________________________________________
You may visit The Chronicle as follows:
* via the World-Wide Web, at http://chronicle.com
* via telnet at chronicle.com
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
-------------------------------------------
The Stoa: A Consortium for Electronic Publication
http://www.stoa.org
To unsubscribe from this list, send the command
unsubscribe stoa
to majordomo@colleges.org.
To send a message to the whole list, send it to
stoa@colleges.org
If you have any trouble using the list or questions about it, please
address them to the list-owner, Ross Scaife, scaife@pop.uky.edu.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sun Aug 26 2001 - 05:16:23 EDT