(*And for your musical accompaniment while reading, a throwback to the swinging nineties.)
I have had this quote from Cathy Davidson on the back burner for a while. She discusses the subject of academic publishing and specifically the monograph in English studies. Her main point is that nobody buys and nobody reads academic monographs in English:
I think that this comment is, on the whole, fairly accurate. I didn’t read many monographs through until I started my dissertation, and then I read too many of them through before I realized that it was the nature of the genre not to be read but consulted. (I did learn something from the experience: that you have to read monographs through until you understand when it’s acceptable to consult them instead.) And while I’m still fairly new to graduate teaching, I don’t (as a rule) assign entire monographs to my classes.
Anyway, assigning monographs in classes doesn’t seem like a viable solution to the problem. As Davidson points out, they’re not meant to be read. An academic book is a sustained investigation of a narrow issue or problem. As such they might have a place in Ph.D. programs–though I think it’s telling that I wasn’t assigned many in mine.
More to the point, however: they’re basically not teachable. Occasionally you might find one clear enough for really sharp undergrads: Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel and Christine Korsgard’s Creating the Kingdom of Ends are two I’ve seen floating around my campus lately. But it’s rare to have the opportunity to teach a course that lends itself to such focus. And when we do, the nature of the academic workplace–with all of us overextended in several directions at once–is that if we do create a class around someone’s narrow scholarly focus, it’s not going to be another person’s, but our own. And that is because of something they did teach us in graduate school: good time management.
Davidson concludes:
There’s something here [in this book collection she writes about] for everyone, articles selected from the pages of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing by someone who understands the business of publishing in a world where, as we have seen from the recent demise of Wall Street, there’s been an awful lot of over-extension, inflation, devaluation, Ponzi schemes, and sometimes, well, highway robbery.
Who are the robber baron’s? Sometimes (yes, I mean you, English professors!), it is our own short-sighted book writing and book buying habits that are the problem. Some of the “crisis of scholarly publishing” is of our making. Sometimes the Ponzi schemes start with us.
Throughout the essay Davidson has nodded, however briefly, at many of the forces that combine to make the book-for-tenure model a bad one: administrative, financial, market, disciplinary. Here all those concerns get truncated into “our own short-sighted book writing habits,” which allows her to circle back around to the idea that the crisis of scholarly publishing is really our problem. The suggestion seems to be that professors collectively lack virtue. Her solution is that we start buying, reading, and assigning academic monographs as a way of acting in good faith–to a system she describes as a Ponzi scheme, with ourselves as the perpetrators!
That last part especially troubles me. Academia might be a Ponzi scheme: for all I know it’s an apt metaphor, though I’d like a few more specifics before I buy in. But why should professors shoulder so much of the (moral and financial) penitence when, as Davidson acknowledges, there are a lot of other factors involved? And if these things are the case, I’m still not clear on why we should busy ourselves reading still more books that aren’t often meant to be read through.
Until we get those explanations, I think these suggestions work best in the category of things better honored in the breach than the observance.
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March 2, 2010 at 8:07 am
Dave Johnson
Lindsay Waters (Harvard UP) has been writing and arguing about this for years–that English Departments have essentially out-sourced their tenure decisions to the university presses. The problem, as Waters has noted, is that those presses are drying up, albeit more slowly than when Waters originally made these predictions (I believe I read his approach to this in roughly 2002 or so). What’s interesting is that his discussions preceded the current economic climate, which makes me wonder if we are, finally, getting to the point where academic presses will so drastically reduce their output that English Departments will be forced to rethink the tenure process.
Of course, the problem here is that the top R1 schools aren’t going to change their ways of doing business, at least not at first. And instead of taking advantage of different combinations of research, teaching, and service, other schools that are not R1 will still insist that they, too, require a book (or a higher amount of research than is reasonable) for tenure and promotion. I’m not sure what is to be done about this, and certainly, I don’t wish to stop encouraging research and writing altogether. That said, it does raise some of the issues you outline here in relation to the scholarly monograph.
March 2, 2010 at 8:48 pm
Christopher Vilmar
The R1s (and R2s, pretty much) give their people a lot of incentives to get major work done, so I’m not sure it’s in their interests to drop the requirements too much.
Comprehensives like us, on the other hand, that require a book for tenure need to get a better handle on reality! I think that’s where the real disconnect lies. If you’re teaching 3-3 and higher, requiring a book is simply ludicrous. (I’ve heard that’s the case, or was, at some of the Cal State campuses where the load is a 4-4!) I am thankful pretty much on a daily basis that I didn’t wind up somewhere like that. Our department is terrific for many reasons, and that is definitely one of them.
It’s also annoying when you hear stories about people who wind up at comprehensive universities but can’t quite face up to that fact, and start to try to remake their departments over in the image of the R1 where they got their degree. In fact, one of the reasons I started this blog was to write about–and therefore get a better understanding of–issues in higher ed that are larger than my rather limited experience of four campuses, two as a student only.
March 2, 2010 at 1:37 pm
rmaitzen
These are really interesting problems–and comments on them. I guess what I find the most distressing and dishonest aspect of the “value” attributed to scholarly monographs is that they are expected or demanded (for tenure & promotion, that is) as if “a book” is a thing in itself to be aimed at and rewarded. “You need a book,” is what we are routinely told about tenure and promotion, and so we write books even if the argument we are making does not in fact require monograph-length treatment. We don’t read them because we can get everything we need from them (most of the time–to be sure, there are, probably, exceptions) by dipping into them. Shouldn’t we write a monograph only when we are dealing with something that can’t be adequately treated in any other length? Why should “a book project” be a goal in itself?
In Aurora Leigh Aurora remarks about ‘women’s work’ that is consistently devalued,
Alas, alas!
This hurts most, this–that, after all, we are paid
The worth of our work, perhaps.
I’m tempted to apply this to our situation. I think Davidson is right to say that “if we believe in what we do … we should be writing for readers.” I agree, except that I am not sure that the part of “what we do” that I believe in is the part that produces specialized monographs, or that the “readers” we should be aiming at are ourselves.
March 2, 2010 at 9:21 pm
Christopher Vilmar
To begin with an aside: I hate the phrase “book project.” Do novelists work on “book projects”? Maybe they do nowadays, but what happened to the good old fashioned word “manuscript”? Just think of how lame it would be if someone told you that, because of rationing during WWII, Bakhtin was forced to roll cigarettes with the pages of his book project. No! No! He rolled his cigarettes using the pages of his manuscript.
Now that I’ve forgotten what I was originally going to say, I will reply and say yes, we should be writing for readers. I would add the caveat “sometimes,” because I believe in the value of rigorous scholarship. But not many books written nowadays would qualify as rigorous scholarship by the same nineteenth-century standards that invented the idea of “research” in the humanities. Just mentioning the nineteenth century puts into perspective how dated research requirements have become. We’d never use or accept nineteenth-century methods in our professional work, but for some reason, we’re still wedded to their models of university life and work. Why is that standard graven in stone? It’s peculiar.
(Then again, why don’t more humanists start publishing journals online and making them free, like Digital Defoe does?)
The problem of writing for readers is coming to some kind of agreement on how it “counts” for T&P. And we all know how hard it is to get a roomful of professors to agree on anything! And then, too, how many venues are there for public writing about literature? If we all start trying to write for The New Yorker, we’re back to square one in terms of anxiety over limited venues and an excess of submissions.
I’ve been thinking that the short, sharp book, clocking in at the 125-150 pp. mark, is where it’s at. The flabby 250+pp. tome is almost always padded with too many digressions. (I’m thinking in particular of one 500+pp. beast I had to review; it took more cups of coffee than I could count to get through that thing, and in the end, none of its 10+ chapters was much more than a slender elaboration of the main points made in its 100pp. introduction.)
Why not encourage shorter, but better books? (He says, knowing how sticky the quality argument is.)
March 5, 2010 at 9:12 pm
Further back about academic publishing. « Perplexed with Narrow Passages
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