Last week in The Chronicle Review, I wrote that in several areas of the humanities, scholars are facing (or not facing) an identity-shaking prospect. It is that their objects of study have received so much critical attention in the last 50 years that further attention, at least of the same kind, is unnecessary. After 100 books on novelist X, do we really need #101?
Perhaps a tiny coterie of experts in X will take a look at it, but it won’t change the teaching of X in high school and undergraduate classrooms across the United States. Lay readers of X won’t bother with it, and once it enters the library the chances are good that it will never leave the shelf. As for buyers, if you take away standing library orders, sales of literary monographs to individuals hover in the mid- to low-two figures.
You can find a mass of data and references here, in a paper I did for American Enterprise Institute. It lays out some startling and dismaying evidence for the curious phenomenon at work: the production of scholarship going up at the same time that an audience for it goes down.
A few people have written me notes drawing the wrong inferences about the point of the article. It is not to attack humanities professors and graduate students for producing research that won’t find a reception. Instead, it is to criticize a system for forcing them to do so. With productivity the measure of value these days, people have no choice.
Only one thing will end it. Change the incentives. Stop asking people to publish publish publish. Stop measuring them by the number of lines on the resume in italics.
We need some leading names in the field and some bold deans and provosts to stop the insanity. My idea is to have departments limit the number of pages they will consider in the portfolio of people applying for tenure-track jobs and coming up for tenure.
Let’s set it at 100, no more.
What will happen? Well, young people will realize that doing more than 100 pages may be counterproductive to their advancement. Instead of churning out a book and seven articles for tenure, they will craft three finely-composed and deeply-researched essays. Quality will go up and output will go down.
As someone put it in TLS many years ago, five excellent scholarly works that emerge out of a pool of 50 is a better situation than seven excellent works that emerge out of a pool of 500.
6 Responses to Stop the Research Factory!
tech2doc - August 1, 2009 at 4:34 am
Better yet, stop reading X altogether! It’s time to move on to reading Y already, and probably start looking at Z.
goxewu - August 2, 2009 at 3:08 pm
Questions:
If the number of books on Thomas Jefferson had stopped before Fawn Brodie’s (or, given that she was rather pilloried for hers, before DNA proved that Jefferson fathered children by his slave, Sally Hemmings), wouldn’t we have a less complete and accurate historical picture of Jefferson? And what about all the closeted famous writers whose true sexual orientations weren’t considered in critical studies about them until well after the 100th book about them?
What if after moving on to writers Y and Z, as tech2doc suggests, there’s nobody left except minor mediocrities not really worth full-blown literary studies? Or is the first or second book only a really minor, mediocre writer necessary a better thing than the 101st on a major one?
Shouldn’t we apply the same limits to, say, sociological and nutritional studies? (Competitive sports are good for boys. No, they’re not. Yes, they are. No, they’re not. Yes, they are…and so on, study after study. Chocolate is good for you. No, it’s not. Yes, it is. No, it’s not…and so on, study after study.)
Isn’t the real problem not the actual number of books published, or the lines on a professor’s resume, but tenure and promotion committees who measure the professor “by the number of lines on the resume in italics” and not by the quality of those lines? Which is to say, shouldn’t those committees actually read and not simply count?
chuckkle - August 3, 2009 at 11:04 am
Sounds to me like Mark served on a tenure committee and discovered he was expected to read several files which were over 100 pages, or be an external reviewer for a tenure case and do the same………………
This also reminds me of discussions in the MLA c. 1970 in which bigshots in top rated Research 1 schools started to talk about “too many:” PhDs being produced (of course not their PhDs, but ones coming out of state schools) and that what was needed was to channel people into a “teaching doctorate.” Many responded saying that was a great idea, and they’d think about it as soon as those top schools started hiring people with “teaching doctorates.” You can see how well this worked out.
…………………………
The real problem is there is no incentive for what Mark proposes. Presidents, provosts, deans and department heads at Research 1 schools operate with a chain of command mandate to raise their unit’s national rankings. They want to do this to advance their careers, reputations, and achieve a goal they personally find important. How do you do this? You get a higher ranking than before from the NRC. How do you do that? Two main ways: 1.) increase faculty publications (quantity) and 2.) have your new PhDs get hired at schools ranked higher than your own. Forty years ago it was very rare for any new PhD in the humanities to have a published article (maybe a book review in a scholarly journal), and perhaps one or two conference publications. Today first year grad students are encouraged to publish articles and start applying for conferences. Reviewing new assistant professor applications today usually shows a bunch of journal articles, maybe 10-20 conference publications, and a contract for the dissertation to be reworked into a book. And that’s just for a person coming out of a program. Those who have been waiting in the wings as adjuncts may have been trying to prove their marketability by writing, writing, writing……………You have to look at the whole system and its economics and its power relations to understand what’s going on. Chuck Kleinhans
markbauerlein - August 3, 2009 at 3:42 pm
The problem is, goxewu, that for every Brodie book there are 1,000 others that go into the library and disappear forever. Are all the years that went into producing those books a good way of practicing the humanities?
And, Chuck, you’re right, the average promotion file is getting awfully heavy at this point, ridiculously so.
joeerwin - August 4, 2009 at 3:53 am
I have said this before, but feel I must say it again. Scientists and scholars are in the business of producing ideas and knowledge or creating art. Scholarly activity can involve summary, review, critical evaluation, and synthesis, as well as original works, and lecturing and teaching are quite appropriate activities for those who have something to say. I think people have a diminished capacity to teach if they are not capable of producing knowledge and/or art. Not only should we expect teachers to be scholars, we have a right to expect them to be productive and effective scholars. We should expect them to “break new ground,” not merely go where hundreds or thousands have previously trod. We are entitled to expect that faculty tenure evaluations will actually discriminate important from trivial work. Is that too much to ask? If the tenuring process is too cumbersome or difficult, and if the evaluations do not succeed in identifying merit, maybe the process should be reconsidered. Maybe tenure should be discarded. Or maybe continuing tenure should be contingent on continuing scholarly productivity. I see “heavy promotions files” as a good thing. Why would anyone not want faculty members to be busy and productive? I can see why spending excessive faculty time evaluating the portfolios of others would be seen as a burden and distraction from from spending time more productively. So maybe THAT is what needs to be changed, rather than suggesting that productivity be curtailed.
markbauerlein - August 4, 2009 at 9:31 pm
You hail productivity in the humanities, Joe, but what does it mean if nobody reads it? That’s the issue here, not what the produced thing does for the producer, but what it does for students, scholars, laypersons.