the publishing crisis and tenure criteria: an issue for research universities?

The Publishing Crisis and Tenure Criteria: An Issue for Research Universities?Author(s): Philip LewisSource: Profession, (2004), pp. 14-24Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595774 .

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The Publishing Crisis and Tenure Criteria:

An Issue for Research Universities?

PHILIP LEWIS

The essential background for a discussion of tenure deliberations at research

universities or for speculation about their future is of course the evolution of

research universities as we know them. Research universities?public and

private?are important institutions from the standpoint of our profession since they grant doctoral degrees to those who will teach in all kinds of col

leges and universities and they conduct in their facilities a great deal of the

sponsored research that is responsible for the leading position of the United States in the field of education worldwide. Owing to the status of research

universities as flagship institutions, their leaders are frequently called on to

speak for higher education as a whole, even though such universities consti tute only a small fraction of its universe. The standards they set for such pro cedures as faculty appointments and promotions have tended to have a

far-reaching, perhaps inordinate, influence in the profession, if only because

institutions below them in the pecking order often see fit to emulate them.

Research universities have been changing. Two decades ago, they were still

to some degree bastions of the old publish-or-perish order, under which it was

possible to proclaim that, for junior faculty members, books, articles, and re

search grants were the sine qua non for acquiring tenure. Concomitandy, it

was understood that the young academic's performance as a classroom teacher

or mentor and his or her contribution as a citizen of the community or of the

The author is Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University. A version of this paper was

presented at the 2003 MLA convention in San Diego.

Profession 2004 14



PHILIP LEWIS II 15

department were secondary factors that might have to be neglected during the pretenure years. The pressures leading to the promotion of good teaching or mentoring and of worthy collegial activity as factors to be seriously judged at the time of tenure have been multiple. These factors include the following:

political pressure from the "profscam" critics and their successors, who often

have the ear of state and federal governments that supply funding moral pressure from struggling parents facing the enormous bills charged by elite institutions

budgetary pressure inside the university, where the same deficits that cause the

elimination of faculty positions incline many administrations to grant tenure

less often to a lower percentage of the aspirants market pressure in higher education as universities competing for the most

qualified students, for viable minority students, for wealthy students, and for star faculty members seek to demonstrate their quality by holding to high stan dards and low promotion rates

economic pressure that is connected to the education market, although distin

guishable from it, to achieve greater productivity in research; to rise in the de

tested, yet worshipped, rankings; and to promote growth of the research machine in ways that provide for greater income and for a strategic advantage in both technology transfer and the production of graduates who are in demand internal pressure from both concerned faculty members and concerned alumni

who object to shortchanging undergraduate education in favor of research and

scholarship and who espouse the ideals of liberal education

It is fair to say, then, that over the past two decades, research universi

ties have responded to these diverse pressures by moving toward more for

mal and more elaborate specifications for the tenure dossiers that junior

faculty members are obliged to present. The typical dossier now contains a

substantial statement about courses the candidate has taught or plans to

teach and her or his pedagogical approach and goals as a teacher; this doc ument is supplemented by vigorously quantified, analytic evaluations of the

candidate's teaching performance that the department prepares, often with

input from faculty colleagues who observe the teaching and always with much input from students. If the dossier does not contain a separate state

ment about the candidate's work for the department or in the campus com

munity, the curriculum vitae and the report from the candidate's faculty mentor or department chair will cover this aspect of performance. Simi

larly, the reports on research, grants, and publications in the dossier are

normally supplemented by accounts of activity in professional organiza tions, and the external evaluations of the scholarly work normally include

pointed comparisons with other young scholars in the candidate's field of

expertise. In sum, we are now dealing with bulky promotion dossiers that

try to cover every aspect of the candidate's performance in scrupulous detail.



16 II THE PUBLISHING CRISIS AND TENURE CRITERIA

The general effect of this trend toward thorough, rigorously comparative evaluation is arguably to raise the tenure bar while boosting the quality of the

undergraduate experience. Most university administrations, sensitive to their

accountability to interested parties, are proud to represent this trend as

progress?often, indeed, as progress that involves undergraduates direcdy in

the experience of research in collaboration with their faculty mentors and thus gives them participatory benefits and hands-on training that other kinds of institutions can't match. They deploy this claim of progress as evidence of the research university's capacity to maintain American higher education at

the summit internationally and as justification for the large public and private investments required to keep their research machine running expansively, as

an engine that is essential to the dominant position the United States occu

pies in the global economy and in the macropolitics of globalization. A major and, it would seem, irreversible effect of the growth in invest

ment and in ongoing expenditures supporting the research machine has

been a certain marginalization of the MLA's main concern, the humanities.

Whether we look at the humanities' diminishing share of a university's bud

geted resources or at the factors that drive decisions by administrative lead ers about the distribution of resources, it is clear that the relative importance of the humanities continues to shrink. Yet as we know, that situation does not make tenure candidates in the humanities any less subject to the height ened scrutiny to which research universities have committed themselves. A

major article of faith in the research university's self-representation contin ues to be the qualitative parity of all the disciplines insofar as standards of

scholarly preparation and quality are concerned: humanists must be intel

lectually able to go head-to-head with their colleagues who bring in spon sored research and who strive for technological innovation.

Institutionally, the primary point of proof at which this parity of the dis

ciplines is demonstrated is the tenure evaluation. In the deliberations on a

young humanities faculty member's candidacy, publications remain central

since, as the indispensable evidence of research and participation in the

profession, they make external judgments and comparisons with other

scholars possible. The system thus requires that oudets for academic books

and articles be available to the young scholar. The concerns of those who

perceive a professional crisis in academic publishing have arisen because of

the decline or even disappearance of opportunities to place book manu

scripts in numerous fields of inquiry. This contraction of the market ex

poses a substantial fraction of young humanists working to achieve tenure

to inequities (some fields or intellectual horizons still provide a market; others do not) and to a specter of systemic blockage that established mem

bers of the profession appropriately find untenable.



PHILIP LEWIS I 17

We can readily understand, therefore, why the 2002 report of the MLA

Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing takes the la

mentable state of university presses, most of which are operated by the

major research universities or consolidated public universities, as an occa

sion for looking at the tenure process from the standpoint of the candidate.

The committee quite properly asked whether, in some respects, we have

not?at least in the humanities?allowed the "strengthening" of the re

quirements thrust on assistant professors aiming for tenure to get out of

hand. Given the committee's preoccupation with the state of academic

publishing, it is not surprising that it scrutinized the continued stiffening of

the quantitative standards for research and publication, noting that a fair

number of departments are at the point of saying unequivocally that a first

book is just a revised dissertation and that a second, newly minted mono

graph has to be presented at tenure time. The legitimacy of the publication

requirement is obviously thrown into question by the lack of publishing

opportunities now confronting young scholars.

The MLA committee's report envisages a transition period during which scholarly publication in the humanities will adapt to the retrench ment of university presses and to the advent of various kinds of electronic

platforms for publication. It concludes by addressing a set of entirely rea

sonable recommendations for alleviating the crisis to the relevant institu

tional players (departments, libraries, publishers, administrations). In their

general thrust, both this judicious report and the presentation by the com

mittee's chair, Judith Ryan, in the forum on the publishing and tenure

crises at the 2003 MLA convention prepare the way for the rather more

vigorous proposals subsequently ventured by Cathy Davidson, in a talk at

the 2003 ACLS convention, and by Domna Stanton in the MLA forum

(versions of the presentations by Ryan and Stanton appear in this issue). It

is perhaps useful to differentiate their recourse to multiple remedies from

the strategy advocated by Lindsay Waters in the May 2000 issue of PMLA.

Connecting the problems of university presses to the drive of young schol ars to produce their "tenure books," Waters argued for dropping the schol

arly monograph as a basic tenure standard. He suggested replacing it with a less redoubtable requirement?a reasonable number of articles in schol

arly journals. In a comment requested by Carlos Alonso, the former editor

of PMLA, that appeared in the fall of 2002,1 expressed both my sympathy for Waters's diagnostic intervention?he is an editor actively engaged with the scholarly world pressing us to reckon with the problem?and my reser

vations about the efficacy of addressing the publishing crisis by a simple re

form of the tenure standard. I noted why I thought it was necessary to

consider a broader attack on what is really a systemic problem. From my



18 11 THE PUBLISHING CRISIS AND TENURE CRITERIA

vantage point, then, the MLA committee's work and the approaches force

fully advanced in 2003 by Ryan, Davidson, and Stanton all deserve com

mendation. Their comprehensive accounts allow us to confront the

problem in its density and complexity. By assembling packages of recom

mendations, they take us decisively in the direction of a multifaceted col lective response to the erosion of publishing opportunities for young scholars. They are right, moreover, to underscore the urgency of acting

prompdy?"we are putting far too much effort into analysis of the problem and not enough into change," Davidson asserts (B8)?on all those fronts

where helpful measures can be pursued. The question raised by these relatively capacious and strategic responses

to the situation is of course whether they are commensurable with the prob lem. Combating the anemia of academic publishing with a combination of treatments may cause the sense of crisis to abate yet fall short of meeting the

needs of the scholarly community. Should we aim higher? Concomitandy, we need to ask whether, as Waters's proposal and the MLA committee's re

port suggest, some revision of the profession's thinking about the criteria for tenure should be part of our effort to deal with the publishing crisis. In a

precautionary passage of the version of Davidson's talk published by the

Chronicle of Higher Education, the apposite objection to linking the reevalua

tion of tenure requirements with discussions of the financial difficulties of

university presses is stated insistendy: "Coupling an economic exigency with a philosophical reassessment is to put together the proverbial apples and or

anges?and it will lead to bad business decisions and inequitable profes sional fixes" (B7). Should we then, for the sake of conceptual rigor and in

deference to institutional stability or to fair employment practices, set aside

the committee's injunctions to departments to "alter their expectations with

regard to all levels of scholarly publishing*' and to "work vigorously against the tendency toward increasing expectations with regard to quantity of pub lications" (183)? Similarly, should we leave out of our reckoning the com

mittee's advice to administrations to "review existing criteria for scholarly

publishing and decide if they are appropriate to the institution" (184)? In higher education as we know it in North America, the exercise of

treating tenure standards separately, as Davidson's formulation suggests and

as I recognized implicitly when I commented above on the raising of the

tenure bar over the past two decades, is indeed one that administrations of

colleges and universities as well as academic organizations (the MLA, Amer

ican Historical Association, American Association of University Professors, Association of American Universities, American Council of Learned Socie

ties, Association of Research Libraries, and many others) are likely to treat

piously as a matter of good business and professional practice. Given, on the



PHILIP LEWIS IN 19

one hand, a particular institution's objectives for its faculty and given, on the

other hand, what the competition and the profession at large appear to be

doing, where should the bar be set? If a well-regarded scholarly monograph continues to be the consensus standard, the prevailing logic of academia

does not dictate that the standard be diluted.1 Rather, it imposes on the pro fession and the college and university businesses that are its backbone the

task of enabling academic presses to continue publishing a range and num

ber of scholarly books adequate to the needs of the educational establish ment. Although the market for books in many fields?a market made up of

libraries and individual buyers?has clearly been eroding, the publishability of serious, high-quality work should somehow be sustained.

At this point the collective pragmatism of our profession, usually sup

portive of the status quo, takes us more or less instinctively toward the

kinds of ad hoc proposals, amalgamating various suggestions for alleviating the crisis, that Ryan, Davidson, and Stanton have put before us. Without

bringing tenure into the picture, these proposals could include start-up

packages or publication subsidies for junior faculty members, library poli cies that privilege the maintenance of book collections for humanists, rein

forced subsidization of university presses by their sponsoring institutions, collective efforts to combat the gouging of libraries by commercial pub lishers of science journals, schemes obliging faculty members to belong (pay dues) to professional associations that support scholarly publishing, a

compact among publishers and professional organizations to channel the initial development of electronic collections into fields endangered by the

shortage of publishing opportunities, and agreements among teachers to

assign more books and cut back on the use of photocopied materials in their courses. By and large, the primary and mainstream response to the

crisis, as it emerges in a sometimes uneasy alliance among the ensconced senior faculty, the administration, and the research and publishing opera tions dependent on them, will inevitably consist in integrating many of these strategies for shoring up academic publishing.2

Might one reasonably be uncomfortable enough with this response or suf

ficiently determined to seek a full-blown solution to the problem to follow the MLA committee's report and insist on including an effort to rationalize the tenure standards among the multiple measures for addressing the publishing crisis? A number of comments are in order here. Suppose that the evolution of the tenure process toward putting young faculty members in an excessively demanding position as they launch their careers is now an issue that we do need to address independently; suppose, as well, that the publishing crisis does intensify the profession's awareness of this need and provoke delibera tions on what institutions should expect of their junior faculty members.



20 III THE PUBLISHING CRISIS AND TENURE CRITERIA

Does this initial linkage of cause (the crisis) to effect (acceleration of a reevalu ation that will occur in due course) preclude an independent review of tenure

standards that is not motivated (and thus potentially compromised) by the de sire to ease the financial pressures on universities and their presses?

A quick and simple response to this question would be unwise. It is clear that the phenomena leading to such a reevaluation do not necessarily and in

theory should not determine its outcome; it is no less clear that in any particu lar college or university in which a redesign of the tenure process is under

taken, financial pressures are sure to be an important factor in the thinking of administrators and will not be absent from the thinking of the faculty. This factor's influence would typically work in favor of a relaxation of the tenure

book requirement rather than an alternative course?more institutional sup port for academic publishing?that would aggravate the institution's

budgetary problem and could drain funds away from faculty salaries. Leaving the reassessment to each college or university would then be a dubious ap

proach, likely to result in a patchwork of arbitrary and locally oriented

changes. To ensure a scrupulously thoughtful review of tenure that could map out a collective, consistent revamping of expectations, professional organiza tions and associations of colleges and universities would have to take the lead. Their aim would be to carry out a broadly based effort to program a princi pled revamping of expectations and the correlative tenure review process.

My own experience as dean of a college of arts and sciences in a re

search university led me to believe, without any consideration of the

shrinking publishing opportunities in the humanities and soft social sci

ences, that we have saddled tenure candidates with unreasonable demands

and that we give them too little time to meet them. The pressure can be

humanly debilitating, and its effects on the conception and execution of

both academic and pedagogical work can victimize not only young faculty members but also students with whom they must work. I therefore wel come the MLA committee's admonitions to departments and administra

tions. In urging us to privilege the quality of a candidate's publications over

their quantity, the committee beckons toward an era in which senior fac

ulty members would have to take their responsibilities toward their

younger colleagues more seriously. Departments would have to elaborate

substantial qualitative judgments that colleagues now hesitate to articulate

in clear, comparative terms; they would have to give junior faculty mem

bers substantive accounts of what they take to be important to their field

and how they regard various categories of scholarship, including editions,

translations, and pedagogical materials; and, I would hope, they would as

sume a heightened responsibility in carrying out the evaluation of scholarly

performance, rather than just leave it to unidentified external reviewers.



PHILIP LEWIS II 21

Implementation of the committee's recommendations would make ten

ure dossiers less bulky, more thoughtful, and decidedly more analytic than

they are now; the common quantitative threshold for a tenure candidate's

scholarship would be stated more flexibly, allowing for a modest number of

essays to be taken as the equivalent of a book in some cases; and whether or

not the scholarship has actually appeared as a publication would matter

less, while the evaluations by colleagues and referees during the tenure

process itself would presumably be more serious and more telling. It is at

least conceivable that junior faculty members would be given more time to

develop as scholars and teachers before facing judgment. Such a rationali

zation?a humanization?of the tenure deliberation is clearly desirable, and the limited contribution it might eventually make to the profession's efforts to deal with the publishing crisis would surely be unobjectionable. But in the research university, is this going to happen?

This question calls for three remarks that I offer in conclusion.

My first response is one of concerned skepticism. It derives from the ad

ministrative dynamics we encounter inside most research universities.

These institutions are caught up in the socioeconomic juggernaut of free

market neoliberalism in a way and to a degree that, as faculty members in

the humanities, we rarely deign to recognize. The message their trustees in

sist on hearing from their presidents and provosts is that individual faculty members in every discipline are producing more, drawing students at all lev

els into engagement with state-of-the-art research, and providing those stu

dents with the skills and values they need to function effectively in the world at large. This world is, moreover, that of the globalized environment in which the university itself does its business and which most parts of the cor

poratized university treat as its dominant context of operation. Any move to

relax standards or to make the young faculty member's initiation into this

big, vitally important business more reasonable and humane will meet stren uous objections if the rationale for it is the shrinking market for scholarly books in all but a few niches. The retort will be that markets and producers

adapt to changes and that the top scholars whom the successful research universities want to recruit and retain will be clever academic entrepreneurs,

capable of developing means of conveying their wares to audiences they will

either find or create. It won't do, at that point, to attack the inanity, insensi

tivity, or irrealism of the established managerial view. Rather it will be nec

essary to counterargue that the move to redesign the tenure process in the humanities and the arts by restructuring the prescribed tenure dossier has to be undertaken to keep up with the competing research universities that are doing it for reasons vital to their mission. To attract the best talent that a competing research university also seeks, we are obliged to make the



22 HI THE PUBLISHING CRISIS AND TENURE CRITERIA

change. If, as I believe, better research support for young humanities faculty members is now emerging in the research-university universe, it is because

the practice of providing it is imposed by the academic marketplace. This leads into my second point, which stems from the fact that any re

search university, while eager to lead the pack in opening a promising field

of inquiry, will hesitate to respond to the MLA committee's recommenda

tions by being the first to initiate a change in a professional practice or

structure as important as the granting of tenure. An illustration of this con

servative instinct can be seen in the Ivy League's more than twenty years of

hand-wringing discussions about grade inflation: no one dares to get tough unless everyone does it together, yet when the interested representatives of

these institutions meet and discuss the particularities of faculty policies in

their institutions, a serious move to act in concert on something like a

grade-distribution policy turns out to border on the unthinkable. On any

given campus, a university faculty's view of its procedures and criteria on

tenure will have a similar inviolability, and the typical administration will

be loath to intervene in that taboo-infested arena. One might imagine that

the very top institutions are so strong and so secure that they can get away with moves that cut against the dominant trend. Yet I doubt that even Har

vard and Yale, which have long held to exorbitant claims about the singular distinction of their faculty members and to exceedingly exigent postures on

tenure, would venture to take the lead in rationalizing the requirements

imposed on junior faculty members.

How then might we manage to move ahead with a well-reasoned modi

fication of tenure expectations that we believe the research universities

ought to undertake? Here again, just as the independence and integrity of a

reevaluation of tenure criteria and procedures can be guaranteed only

through interinstitutional or profession-wide action, the politically en

abling conditions for developing a revision will require collective action.

The profession, so to speak, will have to serve as a shelter under which the

research universities can safely and honestly engage in the effort. I submit

that, in the humanities, the best chance for dealing with the situation con

structively?expeditiously by design, rather than slowly and painfully by default?lies in the hands of professional organizations like the MLA and

the AHA, the AAUP and the ACLS, which already extend an umbrella of

protection and influence over colleges and universities. They could, I be

lieve, decide fairly soon to move beyond the sensible but ultimately cau

tious recommendations of the Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of

Scholarly Publishing. They could, in particular, urge on the dominant re

search universities?a discrete, fairly homogeneous group3?the adoption of clear and reasonable limits on the still-expanding requirements for ten



PHILIP LEWIS HI 23

ure that we work with now; they could press them all to move toward a

common policy on the same timetable. The MLA committee was not

charged with the task of articulating a common understanding of the way tenure deliberations should be conducted and a generic delineation of the

norms for scholarly production that candidates in a given field should

reach or surpass. However, in its report it did go far enough down that

path to prompt me to think that the task is a feasible one and that pursuing it forthrightly, prescriptively, would afford the organization a powerful

means of influencing the higher-education establishment in a positive way.

My third and final point harks back to the exceedingly difficult question at which I hinted by asking if we should aim higher. Instead of striving pru

dently for a partial solution to the complex problem with publishing we

now face in the humanities, that is, for an alleviation that allows us to pre serve the main components of the status quo and muddle on with a less

guilty collective conscience, what if we sought to solve the problem, or at

least to grasp what kind of effort would be required to solve it? This heady and presumably unfeasible project has at least one heuristic value that

makes it worthy of discussion. To reflect on the form and extent of the

publishing opportunities the academic world should design and commit it

self to sustain in order to carry out its broad missions of education and

scholarship responsibly is to turn the objection to linking the publishing crisis to tenure criteria on its head. For the humanities, we would in effect

be talking about the architecture of the whole academic enterprise and thus

be obliged to draw on a broad account of the scholarly disciplines and

higher educational institutions, a historical appreciation of the knowledge

they have constituted, a capacious grasp of the work they are doing, a sense

of where they are or should be headed in the future, and a clear under

standing of the role scholarly publication and related modalities of com

munication play in this monumental universe. Were the academic

community to confront this forbidding project with the collective effort it

would require, it would have to grant from the start that agreement on ten

ure criteria logically precedes determining what means or system of schol

arly publication higher education should support. To express this point in a

familiar proposition, it suffices to recall the way the theme of fairness is ar

ticulated in every discussion of the publishing crisis: a system committed to

a lifetime employment guarantee for its senior faculty members can be

self-legitimating only if it makes it possible for young scholars to meet its

requirements for achieving that privileged status. Viable tenure criteria

should, in sum, be a design constraint as we seek to manage, in the years

ahead, the renewal?a reengineering, the planning consultants would



24 II THE PUBLISHING CRISIS AND TENURE CRITERIA

say?of the apparatus for scholarly publication and communication that in

formation technology has made inevitable.

NOTES =

ll have noted briefly the case for maintaining the book standard in research universities

and for having elsewhere standards specific to the type of institution (1224). This point was elaborated much more fully by Ken Wissoker, the director of Duke University Press.

2 In her presentation at the MLA forum The Publishing and Tenure Crises (see her arti cle in this issue), Jennifer Crewe, a veteran editor at Columbia University Press, proposed a new model of academic publishing. In this model the cost of publishing specialized schol

arly books that are not financially viable under the present operating conditions would be

borne largely by a consortium of institutions that expect their faculties to produce such

work. Crewe's scheme, as I understand it, would be compatible with what I've represented here as the mainstream approach, although it would necessarily come at a later stage than

other measures since it would require years of planning and transition. While assuming a

dramatic evolution of the scholarly publishing apparatus in American higher education, Crewe's innovative strategy would preserve the core of the larger market model that now

prevails and could facilitate the preservation of the tenure system that is now in place. 3The Association of American Universities, a group of sixty-two research universi

ties, would be an obvious group to approach for leadership here. However, the universe

of universities in which the tenure-book requirement is firmly established is larger. See,

for example, the lists of "Doctoral/Research Universities" in the 2000 Carnegie Classifi cation (at www.carnegiefoundation.org/Classification).

WORKS CITED

Crewe, Jennifer. "Scholarly Publishing: Why Our Business Is Your Business Too." The

Publishing and Tenure Crises. Forum. MLA convention. San Diego Convention

Center. 28 Dec. 2003.

Davidson, Cathy N. "Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly Publishing." Chronicle of Higher Education 3 Oct. 2003: B7+.

Lewis, Philip. "Is Monographic Tyranny the Problem?" PMLA 117 (2002): 1222-24. MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing. "The Future of Schol

arly Publishing." Profession 2002. New York: MLA, 2002. 172-86. <http://www.mla .org/pdf/schlrlypblshng.pdf>.

Ryan, Judith L. "Publishing and Purchasing: The Great Paradigm Shift." The Publishing and Tenure Crises. Forum. MLA convention. San Diego Convention Center. 28 Dec. 2003.

Stanton, Domna C. *

Working through the Crises: Future Possibilities." The Publishing and

Tenure Crises. Forum. MLA convention. San Diego Convention Center. 28 Dec. 2003.

Waters, Lindsay. "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Books of the Members of the

MLA from Being a Burden to Their Authors, Publishers, or Audiences." PMLA 115

(2000): 315-17.

Wissoker, Ken. "In Defense of the Monograph: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Ac

quisitions." Modes of Scholarly Communication. Workshop. MLA convention. San

Diego Convention Center. 28 Dec. 2003.



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