Comments on Unread Monographs, Uninspired Undergrads

• MLA recommendations
• Posted by Rosemary G. Feal , Executive Director at Modern Language Association on March 18, 2009 at 4:30am EDT

• The MLA has examined issues related to scholarly publishing and tenure and promotion in a recent report: http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion

  Two key recommendations in the report:

  --Departments and institutions should calibrate expectations for achieving
  tenure and promotion with institutional values, mission, and practice.
  --The profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly
  essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios.

  The report also addresses the central role of teaching in academic careers.

  Many of the points Mark Bauerlein raises are addressed in other MLA reports as well:

  On teaching foreign languages:
  http://www.mla.org/flreport

  On the structure of the undergraduate major in English and other languages:
  http://www.mla.org/pdf/2008_mla_whitepaper.pdf

• Library purchasing
• Posted by Mark D , Independent scholar on March 18, 2009 at 10:30am EDT

• The article notes that "the number of monographs purchased by research libraries rose just 1 percent between 1986 and 2006." It fails to identify a key reason for this failure to keep pace with scholarly production: the extraordinary explosion in the cost of science journals. These journals (which are published by for-profit companies) often exceed $5,000 for an annual subscription; some cost more than $15,000. At many college and university libraries, subscriptions to a few science journals cost more than the entire annual budget for acquiring books in languages and literature. Research libraries would be acquiring more monographs if their funds were not being devoured by the staggering expense of scientific journals. The scientific establishment ought to be ashamed that it has stood by and done nothing as a few corporations have made enormous profits off the library budgets of institutions of higher learning.

• Not a surprise
• Posted by Jim on March 18, 2009 at 10:45am EDT

• "Scholarly output rises; undergraduates are disengaged." Does this really surprise anyone? I am a faculty at a large research institution and this is one reason I want my kids to go to a small, private college where the primary job of faculty is teaching. You would be hard pressed to find many faculty at large research institutions that describe their primary job as teaching and their secondary responsibilities as research (pubs and grants). I don't fault the faculty so much as I fault the system.

• Academic elitism?
• Posted by Bob on March 18, 2009 at 10:45am EDT

• “I’ll tell you, I think we should have maybe 20 to 25 research institutions in language and literature in this country. I do not think that we should have professors at 500 universities who conceive of themselves primarily as researchers,"

  This is the perfect prescription to perpetuate academic elitism. If research is good for 20 to 25 insitutions, it is good for all institutions.

  As long as the academic community (and the public) place a higher value on scholarly output than on teaching, faculty and students in most non-research institutions are in the unenviable position of being second class citizens. The current caste-like division of institutions on the basis of research is the crux of the problem. Why not eliminate research altogether as a criterion for tenure, promotion, and salary increases?

• It's too simple
• Posted by Edward Beasley , Asoc. Prof. of History at San Diego State Univ. on March 18, 2009 at 10:45am EDT

• I'm an historian but I suspect what true for us goes for literary scholars as well. To geeralize from my own experience:

  --I know that specialized monographs are read because I read them. (And I require my upper-level undergraduates to pick one, too. To judge by how long they go on in their oral reports, they read them, too.)

  It's just that relatively few of these books sell because they are they expensive. Books are expensive because libraries are linked in borrowing consortia and don't all need to buy everything. More important yet: Most of the libraries are hard up becaue of decades of cuts and the exploded cost of science journals. So with libraries buying such a small nuber of copies of so many books, the publishers raise the prices. Individual scholars can't afford to buy what they might have in the 1960s -- so sales decline further, and prices go even higher. We may not be buying all the works in our field, but we are reading them out of the library.

  --At least in history, the 107th or 207th book may well be important, because the study of history is never done. It's continually reinterpreted according to truly important new questions, truly important revisions, truly important new sources. Or Herodotus would be the last word on the Persian Wars, tables of skull measurments the last word on world cultures, and tapes of Ari Fliescher the last word on the G.W. Bush administration. The idea that knowledge just builds up and doesn't have to be continually recreated is a bit weak. See Peter Novick's That Noble Dream. It's also what drove John Stuart Mill to his nervous breakdown.

  --Some of us not only enjoy reading the better kind of new book, we also enjoy researching and writing them. We are not (primarily) writing them for tenure. Quite a number of books are written by independent scholars, by people who already have tenure, by people who teach in the Angophone world outside North America (where tenure does not exist), and by non-tenure track faculty in the U.S. patiently working at their scholarship against all odds. I think it's good to have as many kids as possible taught by those who for their own inner reasons have the passion to write, and the knowledge of their subject that comes from working in it. I reject the perhaps comforting idea that those who focus entirely on teaching -- or who bypass research and become community college professors with an M.A. -- are automatically better teachers than those who have as much teaching experience and keep researching and writing on top of it.

  --Some new books are bad. But many of them are by tenured people. We should just hold the line against slopply writing and faddish terminology, at the tyring-for-tenure level and at every other. Specialized scholarship will build up in the libraries for those who are interested. People will write books. Knowledge is performative, and it needs to be reenacted and recreated.

• concerned
• Posted by Theron on March 18, 2009 at 10:45am EDT

• Although the report as noted outlines a crucial problem, I find it interesting that the report targets literature professors. Interesting too that it implies writing about literature has no connection to the real purpose of teaching literature...eg. no connection to the real world. I was waiting for the tag line that those who can't, teach. That is, we've heard this before.

  On the other hand, perhaps inadvertantly, this story points to two real problems. First, look at the institution. Publish or perish really IS counterproductive to teaching the excitement of literature or of any discipline; why not give tenure-credit to faculty who establish new courses, especially first-year courses, that connect such love of the material to the students and to the research being done?

  Look, too, at what the institution emphasizes or encourages through indirect means. How is space allocated: In mainly commuter schools, are there departmental lounges so students (especially majors)can meet professors outside of class? What gets sold in college bookstores? What people are invited as guest speakers and on what subjects? Where are the various departments located...and which departments are allowed to hire during these budget times?

  Secondly, lack of engagement is taught...in high schools and in boiler-plate college courses. In my advising world, students seem surprised that they can seek answers to their own questions in art and literature and music..or in psychology, accounting or any other discipline. They even seem surprised that they can..and should.. ask their own questions. As a group, they pass through their educational lives disconnected from the process. This, however, is not new; In 1978 I heard a rhetoric professor claim that literacy was "no longer a self evident value" and that this presented the greatest challege to teaching composition.

  However, To blame literature teachers is disingenuous, especially coming from the American Enterprise Institute. The current disengagement and increasingly poor literacy is not occurring in a vacuum. The business-model educational mantra has always equated education with data collection and test taking. "Education" is to be valued only insofar as it contributes to the world of work and wealth. Now, they ask why students are disengaged?

   

• Publish and Perish
• Posted by Rumpol on March 18, 2009 at 10:45am EDT

• Who needs/reads monographs?
  The vast number of new monographs in the humanities (let alone other disciplines) appearing every year runs counter to the MLA recommendations--and will do so for a long time to come. We all know that department heads, deans, and university administrators are pressured into measuring productivity in the only way that is verifiable: the power of numbers. How else can university administrators justify budget requests (and raises) to state officialdom than in the only language small-time business owners elected to political office can understand? I'm afraid that nothing will change until monographs in the humanities (and related disciplines) price themselves out of existence.

• Research
• Posted by Guido Stempel , distinguished professor emeritus, school of Journalism at Ohio University on March 18, 2009 at 10:45am EDT

• Published research offers a teacher the opportunity to find more current and in many cases better material than is found in textbooks. It is journal articles, not textbooks, that are on the cutting edge of knowledge. Good teaching demands that faclty members be aware of what's published. Textbooks are to some extent out of date when they appear because the process is so slow. Furthermore, textbooks have become much too expensive. It takes time for a teacher to utilize articles and monographs and time to separate the wheat from the chaff.

• Unread Monographs, Uninspired Undergrads
• Posted by Paul Jay , Professor, Department of English at Loyola University Chicago on March 18, 2009 at 10:45am EDT

•  

  Bauerlein is no doubt correct that there is a glut of published scholarship in the humanities that is very difficult to keep up with, and that freshman benefit from being taught by full-time tenured and tenure track professors. However, I question the central cause and effect argument he makes, i.e. that lack of student engagement with professors outside of their courses is directly related to the time their professors devote to research. I don’t see any convincing empirical evidence cited in the article for this argument, and it doesn’t make sense in terms of my own 25 years of experience teaching literature at a research intensive university. Bauerlein cites a study that apparently shows 38 percent of first-year students “never” discuss ideas from readings with their instructors outside of class, while 39 percent do "sometimes,” but this can hardly be attributed to the fact their professors do research, unless they are canceling their office hours to do the research. Non-majors do not hang out with their professors during office hours to talk about their “ideas” and their “summer reading” because they are too busy, not because their professors are out of the office doing research.

   

  Bauerlein also underplays the value of research, both in his anecdotal remark about scholarship on a novel like Moby Dick, and in his inattention (at least as reflected in the article) to the reciprocal relationship between research and teaching. The article quotes him as saying the following: “The fifth and sixth and seventh book on Moby Dick matter. The 105th and the 106th, the 107th, they just get lost, even if they’re brilliant. How can you really take them into account when you’ve already got 105 out there?” The idea that the first few books written on Melville’s novel “matter” but that contemporary ones, even if they’re brilliant, can’t be taken into account because there are 105 others out there is an irresponsible idea. It is not that difficult to become acquainted with the critical history of Moby Dick, and specialists are responsible for keeping up with new knowledge in their fields. New, brilliant books on Moby Dick do matter, and the work they do ought to be incorporated in the undergraduate classroom.

   

  And here is where the reciprocal relationship between research and teaching comes in. That new knowledge needs to be communicated to students, and unless professors are producing that knowledge it’s not going to find it’s way to students. The reason my university, and many others, are requiring professors like me to teach more freshman and core courses (I’m teaching two of them this semester) is because students deserve to be able to spend some of their tuition money studying with research active faculty. To argue, as Baurlein seems to be doing, that full time tenure and tenure-track faculty ought to be spending less time doing research serves to undercut the effort to get freshman and sophomore students into classes with research active faculty. Research and publication enhance undergraduate education. They don’t undercut it.

   

• why limit the idea to the humanities?
• Posted by KEL on March 18, 2009 at 10:45am EDT

• If engaging students rather than requiring faculty to create arcane research projects that few will read is desirable, why limit the discussion to the humanities? The concept noted in the previous comment that research expectations should be calibrated to the mission of the institution is sound. How many faculty at "teaching" institutions have seen searches swing on the number of publications or papers a candidate has given rather than evidence of their teaching and curriculum development skills? The profession needs to consider a different model. In the same vein does all research need to end up in the covers of a book to be considered worthwhile? The net exists as the primary source of information, yet few in the profession seem willing to grapple with how their discipline or school should factor that phenomena into hiring and tenure.

  Let's broaden the discussion if we are going to have it.

• Good teaching can inform research
• Posted by Donald E. Hall , Chair of English at West Virgnia U on March 18, 2009 at 11:15am EDT

• Another issue addressed in the MLA Task Force Report on Evaluating Scholarship (mentioned by Rosemary Feal above) is that universities should recognize how valuable pedagogically engaged scholarship can be and reward it appropriately. It is a false dichotomy to see scholarship as somehow opposed to teaching. Ideally the two are deeply inter-connected. Department chairs and other administrators should step up and make the case to deans and provosts that simple quantity of published pages should never be the main issue in t&p decisions. Yes, a vibrant intellectual and research life is a requirement in hiring and evaluation processes, but quality is far more important that quantity--and that quality can be demonstrated and disseminated in a myriad of ways besides traditional monographs and articles. We need to open up significantly what we value as tenure-worthy intellectual work.

• Synthesis vs. Invention
• Posted by Ken D. on March 18, 2009 at 12:15pm EDT

• Humanities research in the modern university has been distorted by economics and ego.

  The system is failing because it is built up upon a central fallacy, i.e. that what matters is for any individual to invent some new "knowledge" in order to pass through the gates of the elite. New "knowledge" when published confers status, both to the author and the institution. It matters not a wit how trivial, contrived or derivative the proffered new "knowledge" may be. And, as William James predicted, the new findings coming each year off the humanities research assembly line can be nothing but trivial and contrived, since in reality it is beyond the ken of any individual to meaningfully advance our collective knowledge in the humanities.

  Conversely, at our modern research university, prior scholarship in the humanities is devalued and disregarded, and along with it the ability to understand and synthesize what has gone before.

  It would be better, one suspects, if Ph.D.s and tenure could be got for understanding and synthesizing the first 105 books on Moby Dick, rather than for cranking out the next unread volume.

• Digitalizing Academic Publishing
• Posted by Paul Jay , Professor, Department of English at Loyola University Chicago on March 18, 2009 at 12:15pm EDT

• Edward Beasely makes a very good point, above. Much of the problem with academic publishing and access to it, keeping up with it, etc., has to do with the outmoded distribution system we're saddled with. Once all scholarly articles and research monographs are available digitalized and hyperlinked online the costs will go way down and books will be accessible by chapter. It doesn't make sense to impugn the quality of new scholarship when it's the distribution system that is largely the problem. We need to right-size the balance between teaching and research, keeping in mind that active research drives excellent teaching, and move as rapidly as possible toward an open source, digitalized system of distribution for our research.

• Posted by Mark Bauerlein on March 18, 2009 at 12:15pm EDT

• I hope the commenters and others read the report to which the story links (as well as the reports Rosemary Feal provided in the first comment). It does consider some of the objections raised here, for instance, Mark D.'s citation of the high price of journals as a reason for meager monograph sales increases.

  Bob judges my point about needing only 25 or so research programs in the humanities as elitism, but the report recommends that teaching profiles be granted as much prestige and salaries as research profiles. We do, indeed, need to honor classroom instruction as the first duty of humanities professors.

  Edward Beasley says that monographs may not be purchased, but they are read. He should ask library circulation folks what the odds are that a monograph in literary studies will not be checked out once in the decade after its acquisition.

  I'm not sure why Theron believes that the American Enterprise Institute is against liberal education and literary instruction. The people in education policy there believe the opposite.

  Paul Jay believes that humanities research does, indeed, enhance classroom instruction. But in how many classrooms across the United States can teachers find any plausible way of connecting articles in Critical Inquiry with the intellectual needs and deficiencies of the 19-year-olds in the seats. In other words, humanities research has become so arcane and "disciplined" (that is, a hyper-specialized conversation among practitioners) that it has lost touch with general education exigencies.

  Don Hall's point about quality and quantity is right on target.

   

   

   

• Edward Beasley, meet Econ 101
• Posted on March 18, 2009 at 12:30pm EDT

• Prof. Beasley, you might want to rethink that argument about the rising prices of books. Rising prices cause decreased demand, not the other way around. Put another way, decreases in demand (with the supply at least held constant, and the article seems to suggest it's actually increasing) result in lower prices, not higher ones.

• Posted by S on March 18, 2009 at 12:45pm EDT

• Hear, hear. Too much drivel being published.

• Teaching Critical Essays
• Posted by Paul Jay , Professor, Department of English at Loyola University Chicago on March 18, 2009 at 1:00pm EDT

• Mark Bauerlein writes "Paul Jay believes that humanities research does, indeed, enhance classroom instruction. But in how many classrooms across the United States can teachers find any plausible way of connecting articles in Critical Inquiry with the intellectual needs and deficiencies of the 19-year-olds in the seats. In other words, humanities research has become so arcane and "disciplined" (that is, a hyper-specialized conversation among practitioners) that it has lost touch with general education exigencies."

  I assign critical articles and book chapters from major journals and university presses in my lower and upper division undergraduate courses all the time, as do may of my colleagues here at Loyola and around the country. They don't run against the grain of my students' needs and deficiencies at all. They enhance the classroom experience for my students, exposing them to accessible disciplinary discussions that illustrate critical discussion and debate in my discipline (and by the way, my students don't trash me for doing this -- I get some of the best teacher course evals in the department). In my Introduction to Fiction courses, for example, my students read theoretical essays on narratology, and they learn a lot from them. In my courses on contemporary fiction, to take another example, I have my students read a range of critical essays on globalization and multiculturalism. They thrive on this material, which helps make their engagement with the literature more sophisticated, and connects with the world they are growing up to inherit in crucial ways.

• Posted on March 18, 2009 at 1:15pm EDT

• Why restrict such a study to the humanities?

  Isn't this just as likely true in the sciences? Many R1s are littered with senior professors---some of whom are highly regarded experts in their field---who NEVER teach. They don't even teach graduate courses. How exactly can this practice be reconciled with a university's primary mission?

• Posted by Piss Poor Prof at www.burntoutadjunct.wordpress.com on March 18, 2009 at 1:30pm EDT

• I am absolutely convinced of Bauerlein's position. Not only does the requirement to publish a monograph dilute effective teaching/increase unread scholarship, it also diminishes what is, my opinion, the central role of a university--to disseminate and encourage knowledge.

  Try this supply-demand thought experiment (in the spirit of research): increase the output of monographs past the point of possible consumption (assuming an eager audience). What is the result? Unread scholarship, wasted effort and diminished interaction time (with students, family, colleagues, etc.). But, what is that line? Bauerlein doesn't really, according to the article, indicate what is the appropriate point at which scholarship advances (which is importan) and teaching is improved. 90 pages of scholarship for tenure? Perhaps.

  How about scholarship that encourages effective teaching? A seriously engaging BlackBoard insert that engages students in grammar and style? Would that be tenure-worthy? How about a means to explicate Emily Dickinson that is not an article, presentation or book, but students love?

  Once the definitions of scholarship move away from the write/cite model will Bauerlein's suggestions really take traction.

• Unread Monographs, Uninspired Undergrads
• Posted by George Patsourakos , Retired Administrator at Harvard University on March 18, 2009 at 1:45pm EDT

• I believe that college professors should be required to spend at least three-fourths of their working time teaching, and no more than one-fourth of their time allotted for research. Perhaps the American Association of University Professors -- and, in the case of English professors, the Modern Language Association of America -- can give some "clout" to this ratio by endorsing such a policy. Otherwise, I see no change on the horizon, so research will continue to prevail, because its results are more tangible than teaching!

• Humanities Research is not Dispensible
• Posted by Ginny Lewis , Assistant Professor of German at Northern State University on March 18, 2009 at 4:30pm EDT

• It's hard not to read into this article a suggestion that research in the humanities is unworthy and should be discounted relative to research in other fields (science, anyone?). This suggestion is regrettable. It's in the humanities that we think about the purpose of the human journey and can best grasp the role of science, technology, business, and government in supporting human striving and self-realization. If students are not being exposed to the research humanities scholars are producing, then this is where the problem lies. Paul Jay has it right - students need to access the scholarship the experts who are presumably teaching them are producing. Any scholarship that has merit is a fit object of college study, and the many articles and books in the humanities that I read and assign to my students demonstrate this.

  Students need models for critical thinking and engagement with the burning questions that plague humanity today, and scholar-teachers who engage in research and publish their results as a means of promoting debate and advancing humanistic knowledge are exactly what students need more of - not less of - in the classroom. Of course there is good and bad scholarship, just as there are good and bad teachers. But to condemn humanities scholarship collectively for this is counterproductive, and that's putting it nicely. Of course we must constantly reexamine the scholarship we are producing and the role it can and should play in the intellectual lives of our students - this always has been and always will be the case. Nevertheless research remains just as essential to the humanities as to any other discipline.

  Scholars like Val Plumwood and Martha Nussbaum, among many others, show what humanities scholarship has to contribute. Why is it that we humans struggle so to erect just economic and government systems that promote the good life across the globe rather than for a privileged few? This is one of many essential questions that humanities scholars are called upon to help answer. Such work is not secondary or irrelevant, it is central to the betterment of life on earth, and it is never done. It would be refreshing to see Inside Higher Ed write a good article that promotes the crucial importance of humanities research for human welfare. And for the record, the most engaging classes I took in college were taught by extremely productive humanities scholars, while the least engaging and pedagogically the poorest were in the sciences.

• Posted by Research-oriented on March 18, 2009 at 4:30pm EDT

• Professor Beasley's arguments best explain why "interest" in academic books has declined over the past decades. He also gives the best reasons for expecting faculty at research institutions to continue to do research. I agree that colleges that are not research intensive should not demand a book for tenure from their faculty. But if these same faculty did not have access to books with exciting new approaches and ideas, what would they teach their students? The first seven books published on an author? Where would the various fields be without books by feminists or postcolonialists? (Journal articles, as good as some are, typically do not cover the broad base needed to explain and apply a theoretical model.) Although some faculty reading my comments may reject these approaches, there's no denying that they have changed the ways literature and culture are now understood and taught.

  Faculty who do not wish to publish research as part of their academic responsibillities might look for positions at colleges and universities that still do not require much publishing for tenure. They will be gratified to note that their teaching opportunities are much less restrictive than the limited 2/2 teaching usually imposed at research institutions. Such a choice will allow faculty who do wish to publish books more opportunities to be hired by research institutions. And these institutions will not have to worry so much about those tenured faculty who never publish another book after tenure.

• Mission statements
• Posted by Postdoc at University of Michigan on March 18, 2009 at 4:30pm EDT

• "How exactly can this practice be reconciled with a university's primary mission?"

  What do you take to be the mission of a university?

  According to the website of my institution, "The mission of the University of Michigan is to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future."

  The first goal among equals there is the creation of knowledge.

  Here are a few more mission statements:

  "Emory University's mission is to create, preserve, teach, and apply knowledge in the service of humanity."

  "The mission of Brown University is to serve the community, the nation, and the world by discovering, communicating, and preserving knowledge and understanding in a spirit of free inquiry, and by educating and preparing students to discharge the offices of life with usefulness and reputation."

  "In brief: Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities."

  Note that all of these list research first.

• Posted by Mark Bauerlein on March 18, 2009 at 4:30pm EDT

• Paul Jay's vision of freshmen and sophomores reading literary criticism and theory doesn't quite square with any broad assessment that I know of. For instance, on the 2005 NAEP reading exam, only 35 percent of high school seniors reached "proficiency."

• assumptions
• Posted by Patrick O'Donnell , English at Michigan State University on March 18, 2009 at 4:30pm EDT

• Let's look at some of the (false) assumptions operating in this discussion:

  1) teaching and research are two separable activities (false: in fact; when I teach I am also coming to understand, as I go better ways of engaging my students, and what things I need to learn, consider, research, and write about to expand the reach of my classes; when I research and write, I am teaching, first to the audience who reads what I write, however small it may be; secondly, to the students the classroom, where some of my ideas, new and old, engage with some of theirs.)

  2) students are clients; they are paying to be taught; they are not paying for research (false: in fact, at the public institutions where I have spent a career of thirty years--those that would, for the most part, not be part of the elite cadre of 25, the mission of the institution is the dissemination of knowledge, in manifold ways, to the public in the broadest conceivable sense--this includes teaching students, publishing research, and engaging in public outreach; each of these involves different audiences, and together, they constitute the multiple publics a university such as mine serves.

  3) lack of student engagement is directly related to faculty spending too much time on research (false: as Paul Jay has already indicated, lack of student engagement--which is a real problem-- is attributable to an array of complex cultural and social issues that can hardly be parsed through the narrow lens of trading research time for class preparation time or time for talking with students. Most of us don't make those kind of tradeoffs anyway; we do both.)

  True, when it comes to scholarship, we need to emphasize quality over quantity; when it comes to the symbiotic relation between teaching and research, we need to find more effective ways to engage students in that symbiosis. But nothing in Mr. Bauerlein's approach convinces me that these good ends would be met by creating an elitist core of 25 research institutions which would bifurcate even more an enterprise that should be conjoined, or lead to more engaged students and more effective teaching, or lead to better scholarship. It would just lead to an intensification of the elitism and class system that is already in place in the academy, and it would marginalize many who in theory and practice value the relationship between teaching and research, and value the opportunity, day in and day out, to teach the broadest range of students, from freshman to graduate students--all opportunities that lead to better teaching and the potential for better engagement, in my book.

• Research?
• Posted by David Eggenschwiler , professor emeritus of Englishj at Univ. of Southern Calif. on March 18, 2009 at 6:45pm EDT

• During my first decade or two I read extensively the criticism on texts that I was teaching, and so I learned early how depressingly dull and useless most of it was. Out of pride and institutional demands, professors wrote much that should not have been, and to increase their prestige universities founded journals that should not have been either.

  The term "research" in the humanities is often a misnomer because much of the writing about literature does not involve the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge, as it does in the sciences. Often it is the application of current academic platitudes and jargon to more texts and authors; the critic demonstrates that he is in the club and that more literary texts have been conventionally disposed of.

  Fortunately, in my fifth decade I am through with that nonsense and am teaching better than ever. But, oh, the wasted hours writing and reading the wrong stuff.

• I think the recent spate
• Posted by Dan Kline , English at U of Alaska Anchorage on March 18, 2009 at 6:45pm EDT

• of criticism against the humanities buy into an unstated assumption that is currently driving higher education. The assumption is that capitalism is synonymous with democracy. This is, of course, a grave mistake. But it does not surprise me that the American Enterprise Institute would confuse the two or even elevate capitalism in its current disfunctional American expression above democracy.

  What makes literary study essential? Because people live and die every day because of how texts are interpreted (whether a torture memo, a legal passage, a biblical verse, a corporate contract, or a chapter of Moby Dick), and those decisions must always be questioned and the methods refined. Undergraduate students are exactly those who can see a reason for questioning their culture or dealing with conflicting, manipulative public rhetoric. Contrary to the unquestioned declaration that literary studies have nothing to do with the "real world," I demonstrate every day in my classes how reading, studying, and interpreting literary and other kinds of texts is what the real world, in many ways, is all about.

  It would serve many powerful segments of society if universities simply closed their humanities divisions and converted themselves into "workforce development" factories. And why not? Nothing seems to matter in the US these days, in a perversely marxian way, except bottom-line economics, and everyone knows that literature professors don't really do anything anyway.

• Posted by Mark Bauerlein on March 18, 2009 at 6:45pm EDT

• All Pat O'Donnell does is replace one set assumptions with a few counter-assertions, his main one being that teaching and research are in a "symbiotic relationship." In fact, humanities scholarship has reached the point of being in a destructive relationship to general education.

  And his statement that "most of us" spend time "talking with students" is not borne out by any of the most reliable annual surveys on student-teacher interaction, those compiled by Indiana U. and UCLA in NSSE, American Freshman Survey, etc.

• Posted by Ryan on March 18, 2009 at 7:30pm EDT

• Does Bauerlein's short-list of 25 research institutions in literary studies sound elitist? Well, maybe. And how many of the tenured professors on hiring committees reading this thread would seriously consider hiring a candidate for a tenure-track literature position who earned a Ph.D. from a second or third-tier doctoral program outside the top 25 programs in his or her field?

• Multiple forms of scholarship
• Posted by Kirsten Silva Gruesz , Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz on March 18, 2009 at 9:45pm EDT

• Not all scholarship in literature can be characterized as "a hyper-specialized conversation among practitioners," as Mark B. states. In the process of writing up new personnel review guidelines for my department (and reviewing those at other institutions, as well as the MLA reports cited earlier), I've been struck by the way the genres and formats of criticism have seemingly expanded since I was in grad school. It's important that review committees give due weight to review essays and commissioned pieces for reference works--some of which, like the Blackwell and Cambridge Companions, are excellent resources for classroom use, introducing even "disengaged" first-year students to the exciting notion that the world of scholarship is not static, but dynamic: an ongoing critical conversation, as the historian posted earlier. And what about the MLA "Approaches to Teaching" series? That's certainly a prestigious venue in which to publish. It's simply unfair to caricature all literary scholarship as jargon-ridden and arcane; this, I believe, is a holdover from the theory backlash of the 1990s. That said, I would defend the right of anyone who wants to publish in Critical Inquiry to use specialized terminology as a shorthand to get to complex ideas quickly; everyone understands that the audience for that kind of essay will be more limited. Those who want to publish in Harper's would use a different kind of language appropriate to a wider audience. This is just as true for literary critics as for particle physicists. It's big tent, folks; the field is always evolving, as is our sense of the genres in which we can describe that evolution.

• C'mon
• Posted by Jack , assoc prof on March 18, 2009 at 10:00pm EDT

• Is anyone going to argue that there hasn't been a shift towards writing books instead of articles in the Humanities? 50 years ago, books were rarer, and mainly dealt with topics that required more space for exposition, often also requiring more research time.

  Now every other dissertation becomes a book...and academic presses are committed to publishing them at exorbitant prices (there's an industry that'll see a reckoning soon). Is there a lot of value added there? No, it's just that we don't seem to like to read dissertations in this country, and since tenure committees ask for a book, we get an overabundance warmed over disses. Similar can - and has been - said about books: lots of re-used articles becoming chapters or being slightly re-written so as to appear new.

  Good riddance.

• student interaction and class size
• Posted by Kirsten Silva Gruesz , Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz on March 19, 2009 at 1:00am EDT

• I've now had the chance to read the report and some of the student engagement surveys referenced in it, and there is much in Mark's piece with which I agree: personnel standards do put too much pressure on publication (though, given the notorious unreliability of measuring the effectiveness of teaching, including and especially student evaluations, I'm at a loss about how departments would hire for teaching skills, as if those existed in a vaccum). But I still think there's some shifty use of evidence here: the surveys were done across a huge spectrum of introductory classes (and class sizes); "arts & humanities" were singled out in one, but not "writing and literature"--so how do we get from a generalized sense of disengagement with college life in general to a conclusion about the lack of commitment to teaching by lit. professors in particular? The assumption that the gold standard for student engagement is "time spent with faculty out of classes and office hours" also seems detached from the realities of the contemporary university, and even from the small liberal arts college I went to as an undergrad. A good number of my students work and/or have families; I encourage and sometimes require individual appointments with me, but often their lives do not fit the fantasy of the total-intellectual-immersion that seems to be operative here. The quality of faculty interaction should matter more than the quantity: an hour of contact time in a small, intensive seminar, in which students are engaged in active dialogue, can be just as effective as this imagined hour "outside" (where? over coffee?). So why is class size not mentioned as a factor here? Or the many other economic and demographic factors that have powerfuly reshaped higher education, as we all know? Finally, about the Moby-Dick example: while it's true that I couldn't and don't want to keep up with every single article, newsletter bit, review, dissertation, and book chapter on Melville, few if any of us are so author-specialized: I'd try to read every new discussion of Melville's sense of the politics of his world and of his use of Spanish and other languages, because these are always pressing and current to my research on other authors and texts as well;,and when I was about to teach his works again I'd poke around and see what new things people were saying. But in general, I am more persuaded by models of connectedness than completeness.

• Humanities books go unread ...
• Posted by Matt Marsteller , Head, Science Libraries at Carnegie Mellon on March 19, 2009 at 7:00am EDT

• From what I gathered from the author, few humanities books are being utilized. That is certainly echoed by circulation statistics at our university. "Mark D" mentions that somehow this is the fault of spending so much money on science journals. So, what you're saying is that we should spend even more money on unused humanities books and less money on heavily used science journals ... why? ... so that humanities students can become EVEN MORE disengaged? If you're trying to make a point, the logic would appear to be hard to follow. We've been gutting science journal collections all over the country while humanities librarians have trouble spending out their book funds. We can blame high science journal prices for a lot of things - this just isn't one of them. Also, I should point out that there are a number of science journals put out by non-profit learned societies (again often heavily used) - it is not accurate to be utilizing absolute statements such as "These journals (which are published by for-profit companies)..." In addition, organizations such as SCOAP3 and PLoS would appear to be admirable efforts to reign in science journal costs. They're certainly proof that the sciences are trying to do something about the situation and are not resorting to blaming others.

• Maybe it's not the books but the students...
• Posted by Waiting for that conversation , Prof./Modern Languages at ULL on March 20, 2009 at 5:00am EDT

• Here I sit in my office, during my office hours, NOT doing the research that I relegate to my summers and a few frantic weekends during the academic year when ILL blocks my account for keeping those borrowed monographs out too long, waiting, just waiting for even one of those first year students who write glowing evaluations, greet me out in public with tales of how I'm their favorite professor, and send me e-mails telling me how gratifying the course I just taught them was, to come by and really talk to me about something other than how their cat was behaving last night.

  According to all discernible measures, I do everything right in the classroom, bringing enthusiasm and knowledge, making students want to major in French.

  Never, in all my years of university teaching at four different institutions, has a freshman come in just to chat about a book. They come in wanting help. They come in wanting counsel. They come in to divulge more than I ever wanted to know about their personal lives. Talk about a book, just for the pure pleasure of it? Never happened. I don't expect it ever will. Would that I were proved wrong!

  However, my advanced students come in regularly, and my graduate students, often. These are the students for whom I scout those "horrible" and "unnecessary" humanities monographs. They ask for it. They need it to do their best work. They need other scholars' interpretations of the works of literature that we discuss in and out of class. They can't get enough of it. It is my job to provide them the best advice I can about which monographs and articles will most help them. It is my pleasure and an honor to do so.

  And, sometimes, it is my job to add to that discourse. So, instead of lounging on the beach in Tahiti for the summer or making a gastronomical tour of France, I spend my "time off" in my home office, ruining my eyesight, advancing my wrist toward carpel tunnel at the keyboard, and pulling my hair out over just how to put into words those great ideas I came across the last time I taught Marie de France's "Lanval." It matters how I write: I strive for clarity, not some jargon-laden meta-crap. I want my students to read my books and articles. And, sometimes they do. Maybe even some of those freshmen who are too shy to come talk to me.

  I don't teach at some hot-shot Top-Tier, Research 1Institution (wow, that might have started to sound like some jargon, there!), but at a mid-sized State institution that is not the Flagship. I love it here. I love teaching. But, I love to do research and contribute to the on-going creation of knowledge. I am happy that my institution requires it, because that means that my administration values it. I would do it (and have) at a less research-friendly "teaching" institution (yeah, "teaching" institution typically, out here in the real world, means 4-4 load), but I was unhappy there simply because I did my research essentially on my own time, while my teaching load required so much out of me that I had no time for my students.

  We need both teaching and research. They are not mutually exclusive. My teaching does not detract for my research, and my research does not detract from my teaching. I am a better researcher because I teach and a better teacher because I research. Perhaps that is not the case for all professors, but it is mine.

  I have noticed a pretty strong correlation between professors and instructors who do not research, who do not like it, and those who do not appreciate their institutions' research demands.

  I think freshmen are simply reluctant to be seen talking at length with a professor about something real, or they're scared to do so, or perhaps they're pretty busy with all that homework and part-time jobs.

  My door is open to them, though. I've set aside the time. I'm waiting.

  Still waiting...

  Now, if we could figure out an argument to reduce service, I'd be game for that.