The Future of Humanities Labor

Let’s change the standards for tenure in the humanities before it’s too late.

By Mark Bauerlein

“Publish or perish” has long been the formula of academic labor at research universities, but for many humanities professors that imperative has decayed into a simple rule of production. The publish-or-perish model assumed a peer-review process that maintained quality, but more and more it is the bare volume of printed words that counts. When humanities departments and committees and chairpersons examine a professor’s record, all too often they measure the output, not the excellence. And the other duties of mentoring and service slip into secondary requirements. Middling teaching does not much hurt, and great teaching does not help. Administrative work pleases colleagues, but it does not lead to promotions from within or offers from without. Research is all, or rather, research mass eclipses everything else. We have witnessed a steady slide into quantification, evaluation by lines of the vitae containing words in italics.

A friend who teaches at a large midwestern school says that salary increases correlate with book and article publication to the dollar, and he hopes that his next book comes out before year-end recommendations are due. “What if your book isn’t any good?” I ask with a half-smile. “Doesn’t matter,” he replies. When I returned to my own institution after two and a half years of government work and wondered how much credit I would get for pieces appearing during my time away, a dean skipped the quality question and replied, “Well, you have lots of titles, but how many pages do they amount to?”

Cynics might chalk up such responses to laziness. Who has the time and energy to read the 350-page manuscript of a junior colleague up for tenure? If a decent press has accepted it, we may rubber-stamp the promotion with confidence and get back to work. Traditionalists might find another reason for the decline, an epistemological one. What did people expect would happen when poststructuralists and postmodernists undercut objectivity, disciplinary standards, and other grounds for judgment? A more rigorous review process?

Whatever the causes, they do not matter to rising humanists and tenured professors. Job security and time do, and so people act on the reigning incentives. We cannot blame graduate students and young scholars for rushing manuscripts into submission and cutting corners on research when the hustle for jobs and tenure urges them, “Produce, produce!” And we cannot blame senior professors who recognize that invoking old-school quality controls too diligently earns them only resentment from colleagues who regard criteria such as handling of evidence, validity of inference, and clarity of prose as constricting—or who are just plain uncomfortable with judgment. Besides, everybody is too focused on their own productivity to question that of others.

Overproduction

For academic fields at large, the production line signals not one person’s path to success, but an explosion of writings, theories, theses, readings, and critiques— and a headlong descent into inconsequence. When humanities productivity soared, the age-old law of overproduction applied. In a word, scholars, editors, newsletters, quarterlies, proceedings, and presses overproduced and devalued the goods. They printed too much currency and sank its buying power. When literary critic Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry came out in 1947, it altered Romantic criticism forever, not to mention William Blake studies. By 1987, a book on William Blake, however perceptive and eloquent, was just that, another book on William Blake. Too many readings had circulated, too many interpretations and reinterpretations and meta-interpretations.

Consider some numbers from the Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography. In 1956, the annual contained 10,056 entries for books, articles, notes, and the like, in all the language and literature fields. In 1970, the number jumped to 36,158. A decade later, in 1980, we had 58,261. In some twenty years, then, scholarly output increased nearly sixfold in one area of the humanities. Can we really say that from the 1950s through the 1970s the realm of literature and language required six times more pieces of scholarship to be written?

Ponder that question from the perspective of young people entering the field in 1990. According to the Modern Language Association, from 1979 to 1988, fully 1,065 books, chapters, and articles appeared on Henry James. What more could a graduate student who loves The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove say about them? How learned could graduate students become in the primary texts of literature, history, philosophy, and civics when they had so much secondary material to study?

Junior scholars responded in predictable ways. They approached tenure scrambling to argue something new, pitching book proposals before they were ready and pushing esoteric approaches. Lacking the generalist learning that all humanities PhDs should have, they claimed ever-moreminute specializations, keying their teaching to theses and readings that fostered their expertise but corresponded little to the intellectual needs of college sophomores. They fixated on their professional future, which rested on printed pages, and neglected their obligation to the literary past, to maintaining cultural knowledge and understanding from one generation to the next.

Higher Education Boom

The leaders and stewards of the humanities might have seen what overproduction would create, but for several years one thing obscured the consequences. In the 1960s and 1970s, higher education in the United States expanded like never before. In 1959, 3.6 million people were enrolled in degree-granting institutions. Ten years later, the number had more than doubled to eight million, and in 1980, we reached 12.1 million students, making for a twenty year growth rate of well above 300 percent. Student demand led to the expansion of campuses and the creation of more schools—521 new degree-granting institutions were created during the 1960s alone. Some of those institutions quickly became hotbeds of humanities research, ambitious newcomers realizing that the way to prestige lay in faculty “visibility.” The University of California, Irvine, opened in 1965 with 1,589 students, and by 1975 it had 9,547 students. The following year it hosted the School of Criticism and Theory, the most prestigious summer program of the day. The University of Buffalo merged with the State University of New York system in 1962, and in the next two years its enrollment jumped from seven thousand to more than ten thousand. At the same time, it collected a legendary humanities faculty that included René Girard, Leslie Fiedler, Michel Foucault, John Barth, Norman Holland, Angus Fletcher, and a host of junior professors soon to make their names.

Increased public funding through legislation such as the Higher Education Act of 1965 helped baby boomers head to college, and the humanities enjoyed the proceeds. Research opportunities were everywhere—for example, in the many new journals that were launched in the 1960s and 1970s, which included New Literary History (1969), boundary 2 (1972), Critical Inquiry (1974), and Signs (1975), to name just a few.

It seemed that this growth might go on forever, but after the boomers passed through the rate slowed down. Since 1980, the rate of growth has dropped considerably, with 2005 showing 17.5 million enrollees (a growth rate of 44 percent in the twenty-five years since 1980). Nonetheless, research production proceeded to climb, as did the productivity requirement. High-cachet book series commenced, such as the University of Minnesota Press’s Theory and History of Literature (1981), the Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (1981), and the New Americanist series at Duke University (1993). At the same time, departments raised the bar of productivity for tenure. Once a few junior professors came up for promotion with a book and four articles in hand, everyone else had to follow suit. You could not devote two years of archival work to one scholarly article anymore. Once you were appointed, tenure review was only five years away, and the prospect of failure (and a tight job market) would inevitably override intellectual scruples accompanying your ideal vision of scholarship.

New Standards

Two factors, lesser institutional growth and greater output requirements, thus conspired to make humanities research a desultory activity pursued for job protection. This perverse system, in turn, has made humanities fields interesting only to people within them. The humanities were never meant to work this way. With slowing growth in faculty and student bodies, the only justification for increased output is the discovery of new things and the development of new ideas. And, indeed, we hear lots of talk about “new knowledge” and new approaches and new theories, innovative methods and the Next Big Thing. But let’s not get carried away. In truth, the fields that make up the humanities are not primarily “new knowledge” fields. People in humanities fields, unlike scientists, do not conduct inquiries—that is, truth-seeking enterprises that collect the results of specialists and compile them into a growing body of knowledge. Humanistic study operates on values and interpretations, and the genuine conceptions that can shape and reshape them come along at distant intervals. Geniuses who spawn breakthrough thoughts and methods are rare, and it takes time for authentic advances to be distinguished from spurious novelties.

Much of the discourse surrounding humanities research—dust jackets, letters of recommendation, acknowledgments, conference announcements, and so forth—spills over with exaggeration, with the words “brilliant,” “radical,” “revolutionary,” “transformative,” and the like, because advocates for research need to puff up their work to justify it. Humanities research has no audience outside the specialists, and except for a few fields such as film studies, scholarly book sales languish in the low to middle hundreds.

To reinvigorate language and literature departments, we need to recognize that they have a differet relation to knowledge than do the sciences. The primary role of the humanities is to evaluate the past, not invent the future. Professors occupy an “old knowledge” domain, not rejecting the new but taking a hesitant, gradualist stance toward it.

We should spend more time and energy instructing the rising generation in the wisdom and folly, beauty and vulgarity, and good and evil of their precedents. And we should stop asking younger colleagues to produce so much ink, to be so original and dazzling. A new tenure threshold should be erected, one that insists on a lower, not a higher, level of productivity. Tell junior faculty that the department will consider only so many titles and pages for tenure review. Reduce the requirement to only two substantive, high-quality essays—and reward conscientious teaching alongside them. Young people will respond accordingly, spending years ensuring that their fifty pages meet higher standards. Those pages will be better researched, argued, and composed than would be the 350 pages they would otherwise have submitted. I am willing to bet, too, that junior colleagues will thank you. And for everybody else, humanities labor will no longer be flooded with an annual cascade of theories and interpretations that yield few real benefits to thought in the classroom or taste in our society.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. Bauerlein’s books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906. His e-mail address is Mark.Bauerlein@emory.edu.

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Can someone please put Mark Bauerlein in charge.

 Andrew S.

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