Lindsay Waters’ essay in the Chronicle last year, “Time for Reading,” demanded a “revolution” in the way reading is taught, understood, and practiced, his prime recommendation being “Slow down.” Fast reading, he said, turns texts into information-bearers and kills the joy of books and essays and poems.
Waters also warns humanities professors that the fast-reading imperative (which he connects with a productivity demand going back to the 19th Century) threatens their work and livelihoods. “Is it any surprise that there is now a reading crisis worldwide that affects people at all levels, from preschool to graduate school, the affluent and the poor alike?” he says. “Don’t assume you are immune, people of higher education.”
Most humanities professors who never manage a freshman or sophomore classroom remain blissfully unaware of the reading problem. Most every student who enters their zones loves to read, and they can move forward to disciplinary matters applied deliberately to assigned works. But the speedy pace that hinders slow reading — close reading, textual exegesis, explication, conceptual analysis, deconstruction — has a flip side that touches humanities professors at the most distinguished research institutions.
It’s a different quickness obligation. Here, we have not reading, but writing, thrown into high gear. The “publish or perish” formula holds as ever, and from what I’ve seen it has decayed pretty far into a simple rule of output, the bare volume of printed words. (See more here.) Waters has decried the problem in an essay in last year’s Profession entitled “Tenure, Publication, and the Shape of the Careers of Humanists” in which he raised an important discrepancy. Citing sociologist Robert Merton, he wrote, “a system that rewards those who accumulate a large number of publications early in their careers favors certain sciences and works against the humanities.” In scientific fields, promise and genius often show up early (think Galois). In humanities fields, however, they tend to come late. So, making professional evaluations of people in the first few years out of graduate school makes sense in the former, but not in the latter.
Humanists, then, are pushed to bring their work to publication before they’re ready. What might have been a great essay with six months more research and composition turned out to be a middling essay, but one published in time for the fourth-year review. We have a schedule at odds with the necessary time for proper inquiry. Waters’ conclusion: “My fieldwork with humanists repeatedly suggests that if we were to plot the humanists’ increase in powers of refelction, judgment, and taste over time, we would see a curve much different from the one we have come to accept under pressure of the bureaucratized univeristy that wants uniformity in all its personnel.”
My recommendation (argued in the essay linked to above) is for humanities departments to limit the number of pages tenure candidates may submit for promotion. In the humanities, we should insist on a lower, not a higher, level of productivity. Slow the reading down and slow the writing down. Make it clear to young scholars that one excellent article is better that four OK articles. Two excellent and substantive essays count more than one OK book. If a candidate has published more than 100 pages, fine, but the department will not consider the extra material. “Just give us your best 100 pages,” should be the rule. And I bet junior faculty will agree.
