Stephen Shaviro discusses Lindsay Waters' new book Enemies of Promise, which brings up key points regarding the troubling state of publication in the humanities. In essence, Shaviro notes two interlocking problems: the first being increasing pressure for book publication as a tenure requirement; the second being a hyper-professionalization that carries faculty into narrower and narrower fields of study (with obviously smaller audiences).
I can see this problem here at SUNY-Cortland. I was recently approved for tenure, with a contract and a completed manuscript but no publication. I would have likely been approved without the contract, but there is growing pressure here for faculty to do scholarship, even though we in English teach a 4-3 load with heavy service obligations. It is not a matter of complaint, but just a point of reference that our recently retired chair, a full professor, never published a book. Indeed when I interviewed here, he told me that getting tenure was basically a matter of putting in the time and that one could choose to "focus" on teaching and wouldn't really have to do much scholarship at all. Obviously, that is changing here.
Now, I would not say that this new emphasis on scholarship is a change for the worse necessarily. Good teachers clearly need to remain active as scholars. On the other hand, simply adding this expectation onto our workload is not likely to result in much. Something's gotta give. I don't believe Cortland is alone in this. As a result, I think you see a new wave of faculty who have increasing pressure to publish.
The problem is, as Shaviro notes, that these faculty have been hyper-professionalized and can only see themselves writing in a narrow vein. Hey, let's look at it this way. With my teaching load, if I'm going to do research and publish, it's going to happen in the summer. Do you think I'm going to read widely and see what strikes me? Of course not! I'm going to find the first dozen or so articles and books and write my journal article from them...for good or for bad. Is that anti-intellectual? There's nothing intellectual about this process. The pressure for increased publication has nothing to do with increasing human knowledge; it's strictly about some weird academic commerce that doesn't even make economic sense!
Of course my problem is that I am not hyper-professionalized. I'm a maverick writing theorist. Shaviro writes I can't tell you how many stories I have heard of people whose writing was rejected by presses or journals because outside reviewers didn't find it disciplinarily normative enough. This has happened to me more than once. When I get rejected, it is always a matter of some outside reviewer saying, "You should cite this person rather than that person. You should discuss this in terms of x rather than y."
I would hypothesize, as I often do here, that this static hyper-professionalization is indicative of the limits of disciplinary knowledge and practice we are now encountering at this techno-historical moment, at least in the humanities.
Waters suggests that scholars think more and publish less (a wise but difficult task under the current rules of the academic marketplace). Shaviro counters that we need to focus more on writing, by which he means the rhetoric, particularly the style, of our prose. I take this to mean, in part, that we should be writing for a broader audience. The question is, can we find an audience, beyond the few hundred focus in our narrow specialities how have the time or interest to read our works?
Though I am as loathe as anyone to present the Internet as a solution to something (just b/c I'm sick of it being presented as a panacea), this seems a no-brainer. Online publication is quite cheap. In fact, I imagine that nearly every academic could publish all of his/her writing in the space alloted for his/her personal webpages by the university. Though the genre of blogging is not quite right for academic writing, the technology of indexing by category, pinging central tracking sites, and trackbacking/commenting would all work to make research accessible and provide a means for evaluating the reception of one's research.
Of course it would make it more difficult to keep an accurate score of who's the number one scholar. And it would make it easier for the hierarchy to be overturned.
And I suppose that in the end keeping score and maintaining the status quo is what research and higher education in general are all about...right?
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