MLA Panel Finds No 'Lost Generation of Scholars' From the Tenure Track

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By JENNIFER HOWARD

Academic departments should beware of "the tyranny of the monograph," and consider projects like translations and electronic publications in making hiring and tenure decisions, a Modern Language Association panel said last week in a much-anticipated report.

The report leaves the challenge of specific reforms up to individual departments and institutions.

"Department chairs said to us, 'Don't prescribe one specific thing for all of us,'" said Rosemary Feal, executive director of the association, during a teleconference announcing the report's release. "Each institution has its own standards, its own norms, and even its own policies."

The Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion was led by Domna C. Stanton, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the association's president in 2005.

The report gives a thorough historical analysis of "the shifting nature of academic work over the past decades." It lays out the well-known financial pressures on university presses and the ever-increasing demands for teaching and publication faced by junior faculty members as they navigate "changes in the resources for disseminating scholarship," including digital media.

It also declares that while those factors, along with changes in educational policies, have brought the profession to "a threshold moment," the situation has not yet reached a crisis.

"We can state that faculty members hired to tenure-track appointments over the last 10 years have been tenured in ways — and at rates — similar to their predecessors," the report says. "There has, to date, been no 'lost generation of scholars' from the tenure track."

The report offers 20 broad recommendations to improve hiring and tenure practices, including a call for "transparency throughout the tenuring process." Many of the recommendations had been discussed at a panel held at the December 2005 meeting of the MLA.

The MLA's Executive Council established the committee in 2004 "to examine current standards and emerging trends in publication requirements for tenure and promotion in English and foreign-language departments in the United States."

Taking Stock

Some of the most striking findings in the report involve data from an extensive survey of 1,330 language and literature departments conducted in the spring of 2005 at 734 American colleges.

Fifty-one percent of all departments and 67 percent of all institutions responded. The committee solicited detailed information about publication, tenure, and promotion over a 10-year period beginning in 1993-94.

In addition to considering the results of its own survey, the committee reviewed a number of reports and studies, consulted with other professional organizations, and interviewed department heads and administrators to put together a picture of the challenges facing scholars.

The resulting set of data "substantiates some worries and mitigates others," the report concludes. On the positive side, the committee found that, as late as 2004, there was no evidence to confirm the belief that humanities publishing is in crisis, "although there are reasons to believe that publishing opportunities may be narrowing further."

Junior faculty members' fears about tenure appear to be overblown as well. Based on its survey and data from unspecified "other groups," the committee concluded that only about 35 percent of Ph.D. recipients in MLA-represented fields go on to achieve tenure.

But, its report says, "55 percent to 60 percent of the tenure-track assistant professors hired to a tenure-track position actually go through the tenure process and receive tenure at the institution where they held the original appointment."

On the gloomier side, the report confirms that those Ph.D.'s do face increasing pressure to publish, a trend driven by leading research universities but also in evidence at institutions where faculty members carry heavier teaching loads.

"Over 62 percent of all departments report that publication has increased in importance in tenure decisions over the last 10 years," the report says. "The percentage of departments ranking scholarship of primary importance (over teaching) has more than doubled since the last comparable survey, conducted by Thomas Wilcox in 1968: from 35.4 percent to 75.7 percent."

Recommendations for Reform

The report suggested that departments "develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph" and "recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media."

Although articles published in refereed print journals carry weight in tenure evaluations, the MLA's survey found that many other forms of scholarship do not fare as well. Translations, for instance, were rated "not important" by 30.4 percent of departments, including 31.3 percent of foreign-language departments. Textbooks, bibliographic scholarship, scholarly editions, and editing scholarly journals also took a back seat to monographs and journal articles.

The committee was dismayed by a widespread lack of experience in evaluating digital scholarship. More than 40 percent of departments at Ph.D.-granting institutions said, in response to the survey, that they did not know how to gauge the merit of refereed electronic articles, while 65.7 percent reported that they had no experience judging monographs in that format.

The committee also observed that the expectations for tenure candidates at doctorate-granting institutions had rippled down to become the standard for candidates at master's and baccalaureate institutions as well. The report strongly recommends that such expectations be re-examined and, in many cases, altered.

"The demands of research universities have been spreading through the higher-education system," Ms. Stanton said at the teleconference. "Aligning institutional values and mission with tenure expectations is, to me, one of the strongest recommendations to come through in this report."

The panel also called for changes within the hiring and tenure process, including a recommendation that scholarly presses or referees outside each department "should not be the main arbitrators in tenure cases." It also urged that no more than six outside letters of review be considered in the tenure process, and it called on institutions and departments to set expectations for tenure requirements in hiring a scholar.

The report also recommends further study of several issues, including faculty salaries, unions, tenure appeals, the role of scholarly presses, and how minority faculty members fare in hiring and promotion decisions.

The members of the committee agreed that putting their recommendations in to effect would be a long-term effort. "These kinds of shifts take time," said the MLA's Ms. Feal.

Ms. Stanton agreed that the members of her committee were "emphasizing the long-term nature of this endeavor because not only would we hope that it would move beyond the fields represented by the MLA to the humanities, but more broadly, institutionally, ... and hopefully a modification of practices."

The full report (http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion) is available on the MLA's Web site.