The Long View

Who else but thousands of scholars in language and literature would fly from around the world to a cold northern North American city between Christmas and New Year’s (as if American air travel were not bad enough) in order to confabulate, cruise, interview job supplicants . . . I mean “applicants,” be interviewed as job applicants, browse book exhibitors, pitch book proposals to editors, present papers in cramped overheated conference hotel rooms, listen to papers in cramped overheated conference hotel rooms, see and be seen? As surely as salmon swim to spawn, so the scholars come to the Modern Language Association annual meeting.

Like some exotic combination of mating rituals (that’s the job interview process) and pecking-order rituals, we have converged on and convened in Chicago.

Fortunately my first meeting usually is (and was today) the first session of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals <http://www.celj.org>. In addition to announcing award winners for distinguished achievements by journals and their editors (including my friend, mentor and colleague George Greenia of the College of William and Mary, who was a awarded a kind of “lifetime achievement” recognition [see his pic below with Jana Argersinger, outgoing CELJ president, courtesy of Lars Engle]), we heard an engaging reflection by Lindsay E. Waters of Harvard University Press, entitled “Getting Off the Book Standard: What Can Journal Editors Do?”

 In recent years, publishing a book (a monograph on a single topic) has been de rigueur for young scholars on the tenure track. The professional requirements for getting a job, getting tenured, and getting a promotion have ratcheted up in the past 20 to 30 years. A senior medievalist told me once, “I’d never’ve gotten a job if the same standards applied when I was first applying for a position.” Colleges and universities that once required only a few substantial articles in respected journals now insist on a book . . . or two.

Even the MLA has said, “Stop the madness!” and issued what it calls a “Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion.” (Visit http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion for the full scoop.) Stop me before I write another book that no one is going to read!!!

 So interestingly, it took a book editor, Lindsay E. Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at Harvard UP, to preach to the choir of journal editors at the CELJ keynote session. (More about him at: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/authors/editors/lindsay.html) He and I had exchanged some emails after he published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education in which he called for a revolution in reading: a manifesto for a “slow reading” movement. (You can find it on line at: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=2d5vgc4cyyyt05hqy3kxw5kln981j0wl)

Waters is the author of Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2004) and of a 2000 article in PMLA, “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Books of the Members of the MLA from Being a Burden to Their Authors, Publishers, or Audiences.”

In a recently published article, “Tenure, Publication, and the Shape of the Careers of Humanists” (Profession 2007 published by MLA) Waters argues persuasively and articulately that the intellectual trajectory of scholars in the humanities differs dramatically from that of scholars in mathematics and science. Most scientists produce their ground breaking work early in their careers; most humanities scholars, much later in theirs. So the expectation that a young humanities scholar should produce a book in order to earn tenure within the first decade of his or her career is counterproductive.

The salutary benefits of beginning the MLA meeting by attending the CELJ session (and the business meeting afterward) are: 1) You get to hang out with very talented, intelligent people; 2) You get to hang out with people who are passionate about ideas, scholarship, high academic standards; and 3) You get to hang out with people who are actively engaged in disseminating knowledge and who are committed to improving traditional media and to exploring innovative media in order to do so.

Gleanings:

• Books are often over-written articles, and articles, over-written notes.
• Humanities scholars need more venues for publishing shorter notes and for publishing reviews, not only of books but also of special issues of journals. (What better venue for those two kinds of scholarly production, each requiring timely publication, and the first welcoming reader comments, than an on-line journal?)
• A natural sciences and social sciences model of “rating” scholarly journals is infiltrating into administrators’ quantitative evaluation of humanities journals, driven by administrators’ need to assess the “rank” of a journal in which a scholar who has come up for promotion or tenure has published an article. (Thus eliminating the need for the administrator a) actually to have read the scholar’s work and b.) actually to know something about another scholarly field. These rankings are about as relevant to humanities scholarship as the number of You Tube downloads is relevant to cinematic quality.
• A white paper by the Association of Research Libraries (”The E-only Tipping Point for Journals: What’s Ahead in the Print-to-Electronic Transition Zone”) predicts a “steep decline in the coming 5 to 10 years” for the role of print journals among academic customers (e.g. university libraries) and makes recommendations. (See http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/Electronic_Transition.pdf for the full scoop.)
• The MLA is discussing new formats for scholarly dissemination at its annual meeting, including poster sessions (damn, those natural and social sciences again!) and workshops. In a meeting that already takes up three hotels just for the official business meeting, it’s uncertain where they can fit poster sessions. However, this might be an opportunity to employ on-line digital technologies with wikis or blogs, or podcasts with interactive chats with the authors. (And its less embarrassing when you walk out of or fall asleep during a presentation in a virtual parlor.)

And so, to bed.