Monographomania

JUST BEFORE ITS big annual meeting in Philadelphia last month, the Modern Language Association, the trade guild for professors of literature, announced the results of a two-year study of hiring-and-promotion trends in English and foreign-language departments.

Who besides English professors should care, you ask? One answer is: Anyone interested in the future of the humanities in the modern university. Or if that's too highfalutin, here's an alternative: Anyone whose kid might ever take a college Shakespeare or American-lit course.

The report, weighing in at 84 pages, is based on surveys of 1,400 departments across the United States and was produced by a committee of academic luminaries led by Domna Stanton, a French professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. It tries to shed light on several of the trends keeping young professors up at night. These include the shrinking number of good jobs (about which the report says little new) and the increasing demand -- given the buyer's market for faculty -- that young professors produce ever more books if they want to win tenure (which you pretty much need in order to make a living as a professor).

A generation ago, at all but a few dozen research universities, professors could earn tenure by producing a solid dissertation, writing the occasional article or review, and teaching well. Today, according to the report, 75 percent of departments say research is a "very important" factor come tenure-review time, more than double what a similar survey found in 1968. And "research" these days almost always means a book.

Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, has dubbed this growing pressure to publish "the tyranny of the monograph." The demands to produce books are increasing even as academic publishers say they don't want to publish them. Libraries lack the money to buy them or just don't think they're important enough. The MLA report cites anecdotal evidence that the print runs for monographs on literary subjects have dropped from the 600-1,000 range to more like 250.

A third of departments surveyed said they even expected progress on a second book before granting tenure. As a standard, the committee concluded that's far too rigid and inspires pointless graphomania. And at colleges with heavy teaching loads it is particularly "excessive and unfair."

Waters, outspoken on this issue, says the members of the panel were, if anything, too kind. He sees "colossal bad faith" on the part of older professors who vote to deny tenure to 35-year-olds who've produced far more than they themselves ever had to. And more than fairness is at stake. "If you find a university where the faculty is foolishly chasing after numbers" -- of pages and books -- "the faculty members are not going to be happy, and you're not going to get a good education."

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In the shadow of all those monographs, once-respectable forms of scholarship languish. According to the MLA report, nearly a third of departments say that writing textbooks or creating translations is "not important" work for a young professor, for example. (Writing for a popular audience, meanwhile, is worthless -- unless you are the critics James Wood or Louis Menand, in which case Harvard's English department might hire you.)

In response, the MLA committee proposes that departments embrace a "more capacious conception of scholarship": Scholarly articles should make a comeback, and reviews in literary or political journals should count for something.

And electronic publishing, including peer-reviewed online journals, has been proposed as a way around the logjam in traditional publishing, but a third of departments reported zero experience with online journals.

The MLA report landed with a splash in academia, but it may wind up having all the actual influence of a State Department report on postwar Iraqi reconstruction. As the report itself notes, many department chairs think their own departments are doing just fine, even if there's a problem out there somewhere.

That's what I heard, too. Joseph Bartolomeo, the incoming chairman of the English department at UMass-Amherst, said that his department supports its assistant professors in some of the ways the report recommends -- with mentoring, clear advice on tenure standards, and a semester free of teaching to write. And it's happy to consider scholarly articles -- "but you've got to have a book," he confirms.

"We want people who are aspiring to be the best in their fields," he says. Were UMass to change its standards unilaterally, "it would put us at a competitive disadvantage."

Dwayne Eugène Carpenter, chair of the department of Romance languages and literatures at Boston College, says he personally believes a string of scholarly articles could be every bit as important as a book -- and ideally one's big book might come in midcareer. But he also says a published book has been the standard at BC for at least 15 years.

"I think this trend is going to continue," he says. "BC wants to play in the big leagues, and in many ways it is going to do what it perceives comparable institutions are doing."

A book is nice but not essential, says Robert Crossley, chair of the English department at UMass-Boston, where professors still teach three courses a semester (two is the norm at research universities) and grade all their own papers. His department had already been drafting a document making clear its standards, something else the MLA group recommended. Still, today, he says, you could never get away with the level of productivity that was expected of him in 1978, when he got tenure: a couple of articles in print, a couple more accepted for publication.

How does all this trickle down to the classroom? The MLA panel doesn't really say, but first there's the time issue: Hours spent churning out pages or desperately beseeching publishers is time away from thinking about teaching. But there are surely intellectual connections between teaching and research, too. "I am absolutely convinced that the best teachers are also the best researchers," says BC's Carpenter.

Yet Waters points out that that tidy teaching-research symbiosis is ruined if the research people are doing is largely make-work. Think harder about what constitutes good humanities research, he says, and improvements in the classroom are sure to follow.

Christopher Shea's column appears biweekly in Ideas. E-mail critical.faculties@verizon.net.