There is a good article in the Careers section of the Chronicle this week by James McGregor on productivity and compensation in the humanities. Department heads assign salary increases each year to faculty out of a limited pool granted by the dean and other purse-holders. Faculty submit their annual reports listing research, teaching, and service for the year, and raises should follow accordingly. It’s a tricky process with livelihoods and egos on the line, and when McGregor came into office five years ago, he didn’t know how to proceed. The dean handed him a ready method:

“Every year, he told me, just rank and count up the publications produced by each faculty member. Some departments have a point system — one point for a book review, two for an article in a refereed journal, 12 for a book, and so on. Once you know what the raise pool is going to be, just divide that number by the total number of points earned by the department’s faculty members that year to find the dollar value of a point. Multiply that figure by the total number of points each faculty member has earned to find his or her raise.”

Simple and fair, right? Productivity equals paycheck. Make a few distinctions (articles refereed and not refereed, edited books and authored books . . .) and who can complain?

McGregor follows, however, with several fairness questions. A book completed in a big budget increase year, for instance, brings more than the same book does in a lean year. A book requiring years of archival research counts no more than a book of pop culture readings written in ten months. And what about valuable scholarship that has a hard time finding any publisher at all (say, for commercial reasons)?

These and other examples point to inequities of reward for produced work, all of it good in one way or another. His account, then, ignores a crucial factor in the productivity equation. What about work that is downright awful? What of the journal article that is poorly conceived, poorly researched, and poorly written? It passed peer review and got published, and another line appeared on the colleague’s vitae, but that’s no guarantee of merit. Quality in humanities work is always a complex and flexible combination of learning, logic, evidence, judgment, insight, and prose style. Those things take time to evaluate, and the remuneration comes to somewhere around minimum wage. But it’s a crucial duty for professors to assume, and those of us who read often for presses and journals regret that the field produces too much material for gatekeepers and peer reviewers to exercise sufficent quality control.

It’s a vicious circle. The productivity measure makes people write too much too fast, and the ensuing output may lengthen CV’s but it loosens standards. Quick research and topical matters are the better option. The dean’s formula above turns scholarship into a simple numbers game. And what department chair wants to tell a faculty member, “Look, your work just isn’t that good”?

So, the incentives work against patient, careful research, ideas tested out in classrooms and symposia over many years, and revised and revised and revised prose. Under this system, we might not have gotten The Mirror and the Lamp, Blindness and Insight, and other classics. They appeared well into the author’s careers, and the authors would have been let go before they appeared. Can one imagine saying to de Man, “Sorry, Paul, I see only one article this year, yes, a refereed one, but Professor X had two articles and gave six talks. Get in line.” That’s the way it works today, though, and it’s making humanities professors distort their better aims into a ridiculous paper chase.