Call the ambulance, the patient is dying! That urgent appeal needs to go out -- and quickly -- to two groups: college administrators and scholars in the humanities. I make the appeal as a publisher, a reader, and a humanist. I hold books sacred and hate to see them losing their value, which is exactly what they are doing today, rapidly. The currency of books is becoming deflated in a way that is reminiscent of the decline of the German deutsche mark in the early 1920’s, and the culprit is the same: hyperinflation. Our system of book publishing, which rests on the premise that we promote people who publish, is spiraling out of control. Indeed, the whole system needs to be changed.
The problem is that university presses are publishing books that they should be turning down. It is not that the books are unworthy; just that they do not justify the expenditure of time and money that goes into them. So my question to administrators and humanists is the same: Why do any of you -- I mean us -- want this system to go on?
The system produces many excellent scholars, but it does so in spite of, not because of, itself. The exaggerated emphasis on the publication of books pushes young scholars to go on record earlier and earlier, with less and less to say. That is not good for colleges and universities, and it is not good for scholarship. Furthermore, overproduction conceals an identity crisis in the humanities that has been developing for the past 30 years, but one that we dare not continue to ignore.
I think that the patient is terminally ill. We mislead those in positions of authority, like deans and the heads of tenure committees, who take the books we publish as a stamp of authority, and we delude the young who keep on preparing books to get tenure, if we don’t face the current realities of academic publishing. What we should be doing is thinking about ways to prepare for the death of the tenure monograph in the humanities, and to counsel those who will soon be grieving. That could provide us with a great occasion to redirect the efforts of not just the young but also their elders, if they -- I mean we -- dare to reconsider our situation.
Some defenders of the monograph dismiss talk of its demise. The obituaries are little more than wishful thinking, they say, stemming more from discomfort with new types of scholarship than with reality. I agree that a fair amount of the bellyaching about ever more esoteric monographs with ever fewer readers has come from people who just wish that the likes of deconstruction, feminism, gay studies, and postcolonial studies would go away. But that doesn’t change the fact that we have a crisis.
Yes, we academic publishers increased the number of titles we produced throughout the 1990’s, according to annual figures prepared for the Association of American University Presses. But the increase could well be seen as a desperate effort to keep dollar income up at a time when per-title sales are flat in scholarly publishing. Dollar income has often increased at presses, but that’s because publishers are bringing out more titles at higher prices.
I have experience in publishing books in economics, philosophy, literature, anthropology, and law. In economics, a treatise -- a major effort to synthesize knowledge -- might sell 7,500 copies at $50 a copy; major books in literary studies -- books that others use as tools in the classroom or for their research -- can sell 3,000 to 5,000 copies. But, in my experience, monographic studies in the humanities, and I definitely include history here, whether written to win tenure or later in a career by established giants in the field, now usually sell between 275 and 600 copies, no matter how good they are. (Paradoxically, outside of literary and historical studies, the smaller the field, the higher the sales. Most philosophy books sell, in cloth, a minimum of 1,200 copies; books in classics do even better.) At Harvard, we figure we lose about $10,000 on every book that sells only 500 or so copies. So what do we do? We hedge our bets.
That produces an untenable situation. On one side, we have university presses that can afford to publish monographs -- particularly in the humanities -- only if they can find respectable “trade” books that sell enough copies to subsidize the books that lose money, or if they find subsidies (in some form or another) from their universities to cover their losses. On the other side, we have an academy that is demanding more and more publications from scholars at a younger and younger age.
Today, in most cases, it seems to be a matter of quantity over quality. Quantity is empirical, quality is elusive. The rule -- unspoken at some universities and set out in guidelines at others -- is getting to be two books for tenure. With the decline in tenure-track jobs in many fields, thanks to the use of adjuncts, that has led to frenzied behavior on the part of graduate students now trying to multiply the number of publications on their C.V.'s. (Intimations of a little good news on the job front certainly aren’t enough to change such behavior.)
In a recent essay in an M.L.A. newsletter, Profession, “No Wine Before Its Time: The Panic Over Early Professionalization,” Cary Nelson, a literary critic, reports asking a provost whether the university had any qualms about raising the bar and demanding two books for tenure. “No,” the provost replied. “Increasing expectations for tenure only proves how good a school we are.” But does sheer quantity really offer conclusive proof that the enterprise is “good”?
Above all, the crisis of the monograph is a crisis in leadership. From the desperation of some publishers, madly producing more new books to stay alive, to the increasing use of adjunct professors by universities eager to save money, to the demands of tenure committees, you have a lot of factors -- and a lot of people who should know better -- making a tough situation increasingly intolerable.
It was 10 years ago that another literary critic took me up short by coming by our Harvard press booth at a Modern Language Association convention and saying, “Lindsay, you must be a desperate man.” Why? Because, he said, it was clear that anything could, by then, be published, and he was wandering the aisles in boredom. Another scholar put it to me more gently. Some five years ago, I asked an anthropologist if his colleagues were reading a book that he had read in manuscript and recommended glowingly several years before. “Oh, Lindsay,” he said, “don’t you know? No one automatically pays attention to books anymore.” Why? Because potential readers no longer assume that, if a publisher went to all the expense of bringing out a book, it had to be worth at least poking into. Once bored, twice shy.
The final blow was administered recently by a scholar who said out loud what I was beginning to fear. The refereeing system, this scholar told me, had become a joke. There are many people who take refereeing extremely seriously -- and, from the bottom of my heart, I thank those selfless referees I have had the privilege to work with -- but there are also many who use the opportunity to review a manuscript for a publisher as a chance to promote like-minded individuals and friends; and there are some publishers who choose readers because they can be counted on to provide positive reviews of particular projects. That adds up to a general crisis of judgment: Too many of us seem to subscribe to the sentiment promoted by the Lake Wobegon Chamber of Commerce, assuming that we are all above average and, therefore, that severe criticism of one another is never in order. But as Lester Bangs might have instructed Cameron Crowe well before he was “almost famous,” you gotta be ruthless to be a good critic.
When things come to such a pass -- all of my sources were at the top of their fields, not one a slouch or a disgruntled malcontent, and I have heard similar complaints from scholars in history and art history -- I think some speculation is indicated, as well as some changes in practice. The crucial point here is that the overproduction of the most endangered species in the preserve, the monograph, is a symptom of bigger problems in the humanities wing of the university. If you will allow me to lapse into the cadence of a preacher: Anxieties about authorship and authority have led to the present profligacy, in a desperate attempt to win back lost legitimacy. But I say unto ye, It is never going to be won this way! The problem of the humanities monograph is, mutatis mutandis, the problem of the university and what counts for knowledge there. Is the university a place where intelligence is made manifest? It is, and always has been, a place where careerism makes itself manifest. But what about intelligence?
Just a few years ago, Stanley Fish, then head of the Duke press, challenged humanists to buck up and stand tall. Why should they be second-class citizens, wearing tweed like sackcloth, he asked in an essay on “The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos”? But chutzpah won’t be enough to save us now. In a university increasingly committed to business values, the humanities have grown to be beside the point. The free fall of the monograph in the humanities is a symptom of the loss of stature of the humanists who write the books. Technology transfer, licensing the fruits of university research -- that’s the game being played now. More and more, the only interesting unit of knowledge is the patent.
To many of the people who run universities and to many faculty members, the humanities are at best a source of confusion, and at worst an embarrassment. Can you believe, the woman on the street is justifiably asking herself, there are professors of literature at major universities now writing books for reputable university presses defending sexual harassment of their own students? It is as if Bill Clinton were demented enough to write an essay for The Atlantic Monthly defending his activities with Monica Lewinsky. Scientists, by contrast, are turning their departments into “profit centers.” He who cannot cash in has no cachet, and humanists seldom can.
The first step we need to take out of this crisis is to recognize that the assumption that a humanist needs a book (or, more likely, two) is based on a bad analogy. That analogy has a history, and we are its prisoners. For more than a century, we humanists have been trying to model our behavior on that of our scientific colleagues. Anglo-American philosophers, for example, have been trying to make their discipline look like mathematical logic and scientific argumentation. By contrast with the misdirection and moral confusion that is spreading self-doubt in the humanities, scientists like Steven Weinberg and E. O. Wilson have a strong sense of agenda. Wilson’s line, which goes by the sweet title of “consilience,” is that science is the queen of modern thought, and he says that those who live in the university must choose between one of two and only two roads: scientific empiricism -- the road of reason -- or religious transcendentalism, which is no road at all, but a maze where passion is the only compass. The choice is obvious and inevitable. Thus is the social Darwinism of the marketplace received with welcome arms into the university.
The monograph fetish is a prime example of the desire of humanists to fit in and be scientists, just like all the rest of the Big Men on Campus. That scientists themselves no longer cling to the fetish seems to matter not a whit. (As any university publisher can tell you, trying to get a book out of a scientist has been impossible for decades.) When the modern research university took hold in the United States toward the end of the 19th century, scientists were writing monographs. Why should not humanists do the same? Well, as the crisis of the monograph makes it absolutely apparent, because the strategy won’t work -- and was dangerous all along.
No one is ever going to mistake us for junior scientists -- not even if we take to wearing pen protectors in our shirt pockets. Yes, we still consider the book valuable, but too often not because it is well done. Edward Said was right when, in one of his 1999 presidential columns for the M.L.A., he chastised humanists for being so hard to understand. No, in our profit-driven university, the book is valuable because a universitywide committee can understand that it costs a lot of money to produce. Even if committee members can glean nothing about the book’s content, they know that it cost somebody a lot of money to publish and, therefore, somebody else a lot of effort to mobilize support to get it published. All that’s true. Books also have the distinction of thumping when you drop them on a table, and they stand up in a display case, the way an offprint cannot.
Humanists can do better than this. I am afraid we M.L.A. types are a bit like the railwaymen who thought that their job was building and maintaining track, train, and station, and not moving goods and people. They did not keep their eyes on the prize. But just like them, our job in the humanities is moving people and understanding what moves them. Why do we want people to write? Why do we want to see their writing? Because we want authors and readers, alike, to be humanists. An old-fashioned word, “humanist,” but not outmoded. A humanism that dares speak its name speaks in a way that is persuasive to humankind.
Of course, although we in the United States do have a particular penchant for the fetishization of the narrow and passionless monograph, we have glorious precedent in Europe: I remember the shock I felt when I saw the first German edition of Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama. It was in an antiquarian shop in Vienna. I don’t know why I expected it to look like that surrealist publication of his, One-Way Street, but it looked just like a scientific monograph meant for 275 research libraries.
In recent years, some people have tried to resuscitate the rhetoricians under the new name of “public intellectual.” That is a welcome development, but we should remember that it sounds new and feels urgent only because, for some years now, we have subscribed to the very different ideal for the practice of intelligence that we know and respect under the name “science.” Trying to shove our round pegs into science’s square holes just doesn’t work.
We need to highlight the differences between the humanities and the sciences, and we need to get over the vulgar phobia about science that hobbles so much humanistic discourse. We have to insist on the thing we do -- which is not finding a place for ourselves as evolutionary eager beavers in E. O. Wilson’s flow chart, and which is not just serving the almighty green-back. Quite simply, unless we recover our sense of overall orientation, we are not going to be able to encourage the young to get Ph.D.'s in the humanities. And the world will be the poorer for that.
The reason so many of the book proposals I see from the young today fail is because all of the frameworks that would justify writing a book seem to have collapsed. People pay lip service to interdisciplinary study, but that’s about it. (Why else do we need all those interdisciplinary humanities centers?) Professionalism rejects the notion that it is worthwhile to have real expertise in a field of knowledge other than one’s own. Stanley Cavell tells me that he is certain that the young man he was some 50 years ago, when he wanted to switch from music (he was being trained as a composer) and was admitted to the University of California at Los Angeles to study philosophy, would now be rejected by his own Harvard philosophy department as too high a risk.
I find myself spending an increasing amount of time trying to persuade the talented that it is worth writing a humanities book filled with gusto. I feel bad that some of the really interesting young intellectuals -- like those who edit and write for the journal Hermenaut, kids passionately interested in philosophy, rock ‘n’ roll, and zine culture -- prefer to drive cabs, think, write, and have zilch to do with the university. I don’t share Bob Dylan’s dismissive attitude about “the old folks home at the college,” because I love the university and think a thousand flowers might grow in its fields.
Sales of individual titles are down for university-press publishers not because we are so good and society is so bad, but because we can’t convince even ourselves that what we are doing makes a difference. Humanists buy books because books excite them, not out of duty. Our publications need to be more like those of Swift and Voltaire -- proper humanistic emanations that offer persuasive accounts of the world, no matter how much they flaunt their improprieties, rather than empty exercises of scientific competence designed to please two men in New Haven and no one else in this world.
The second step we need to take to get out of the crisis of the tenure monograph is to consider what should -- and should not -- be a monograph. Write we must, but why must it be books and not essays? Jerry Green, Harvard’s provost in the early 1990’s and an economist, recently asked me why the people in many of the disciplines in which I publish want to waste so much of the time of young people in the prime of their lives with such a lot of make-work. In economics, he said, they want to keep the kids working hard to generate new ideas that the rest of the profession can feed off of, because youth is the leading edge. We need to remember that the humanist ideal of publication that flourished for years took the form of books and articles. It was embodied in books like Thomas More’s Utopia, Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, Erasmus’s Adagia, Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction; and in essays like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Think of the people whose best work appeared in essay form: Barbara Johnson, Nina Baym, W. K. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, T. S. Eliot, Kenneth Burke, William Empson, John Freccero, Erich Auerbach, E. R. Curtius, Georg Lukács, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul de Man, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Gianfranco Contini, Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg. I could go on, but won’t. You can.
Sometimes, to make a group of scholars turn on a dime, we need a publication not as thick as a brick, but as thin as a dime. Something like Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Wimsatt’s “The Intentional Fallacy,” Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” John Van Engen’s “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem.”
The third step we need to take is to recognize just whom and what the current system of publishing serves. The benefit of the system is that it allows universities to outsource tenure decisions to university presses. That looks like a win-win situation: Institutions can count on a decentralized decision-making system to legitimate the credentials of their employees, and the people who love books so much that they want to be part of the making of them can get their money for doing what delights them, and can get their books free. But there are hidden costs here that we have not considered, and the bill is coming due.
My personal concern is this, and it is very personal and may seem sentimental: I love books, and I love the humanities, and I see anything that undermines their value as a threat. We all worry about electronic publications’ putting books out of existence, but I fear that the overreliance on books by bookish people is an equal threat. The sacredness of books is not something that needs to be inflated, least of all by the people of the book. The idea that you can cook up a book fast, the way we used to cook up burgers when I worked at McDonald’s as a kid, deeply disturbs me. Books should take years to write (although, even then, deadlines can help). “You can’t hurry love,” sang the Supremes years ago. Well, you can’t hurry scholarship, either. Pushing young scholars to publish books doesn’t lead to more better books. It leads to more books -- that is, until the system collapses.
W. H. Auden wrote that the sign of promise in a young poet is technical competence, not originality or emotion. The same is true, probably, for young scholars. Their work does not need to be published with the full fanfare of the book of a mature scholar, and there ought to be -- and no doubt are at many institutions -- ways of granting tenure to the young person who reveals such competence. But the imperative given by universities to the untenured to publish promising juvenilia as midlist books, and the proliferation of such publications, has triggered Gresham’s Law, creating a situation in which even the best books come to be taken as mere exercises, overproduced term papers, just as bad money drives out good.
My economist friend Jerry Green is right: Why should we encourage young humanists to do a lot of Mickey Mouse work, to go through the motions, when what they should be trying to write are moving essays and -- maybe later than sooner -- passionate books like Empson’s Milton’s God?
The scholarly book has become an endangered species, I contend, but not for the reasons most people think of. We have put the cart before the horse. People should not be given tenure because they have written books; people should be given tenure so they have the leisure to develop big projects that make good books. In any case, what a university really needs to know about a young scholar is whether his or her writing is competent and shows promise that the candidate will develop into a person who really has something to say. Seen from that perspective, the turning of a large percentage of academic jobs into adjunct positions is hastening a waning of scholarship that is already taking place.
Lastly, we need to rethink who should be evaluating scholars and scholarship. Why leave it to book publishers? Maybe we should consider independent bureaus, financed by the leading professional organization in each discipline, to do the work of judging. Alternatively, and probably preferably, we might actually bring evaluation back into the department. If the system has so evolved -- as I think it has -- that departments can avoid direct appraisal and criticism of a colleague’s work by farming out that labor, is that good? If things were to change, scholars might have to learn to be directly critical of a candidate’s ideas; the candidate might have to rebut criticism, publicly if possible. (Many departments do ask candidates to give a public lecture, but real discussion there is scarce.) That might lead to a system closer to the one that prevailed in the medieval university, with disputations among scholars; and that, in turn, might have the big payoff of making scholarship more public and evaluation less something that goes on somewhere else -- at the faculty board of a distant university press, or behind closed doors at home. Students might even love it.
What I am urging is that publishers get more selective, and also that they help scholars figure out how to write books that will appeal to a broader audience than at present. Surely, scholars ought to at least be able to explain what they are doing in general-enough terms in their introductions that people outside their fields can see what is at stake. I don’t tout massive shrinking of lists, but I do long for better books. During the years that we could publish monographs with impunity (and please bear in mind, that was not yesterday), we all became too complacent.
If we can salvage anything from the present crisis of the monograph in the humanities, let it be that we humanists see that our lot is with rhetoric and not science; that ideas -- and young people -- need nurturing. If we can do that, we would have much to be grateful for.
Lindsay Waters is executive editor for the humanities at the Harvard University Press. His book Against Authoritarian Aesthetics: Towards a Politics of Experience has just been published in Putong Hua by Peking University Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7