About Aaron McCollough
English Literature Librarian, University of Michigan
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This week Inside Higher Ed picked up the story of a report that is likely to aggravate many of the faculty members we serve as English Literature specialists. Does it have any resonance for us as librarians?
Emory University Professor Mark Bauerlein’s paper was produced by the Center for College Affordability and co-hosted by the Cato institute (a Libertarian think tank). Bauerlein is also the author of a book called The Dumbest Generation, about new media’s degrading effects on education, attention span, etc. So, it is fairly safe to suspect some bias underlying his audit of contemporary literary scholarship.
Here’s a short snippet from the Inside Higher Ed piece (citing Bauerlein):
“Many professors enjoy their work, finding it rewarding and helpful to their other professional duties, but if their books and essays do not find readers sufficient to justify the effort, the publication mandate falls short of its rationale, namely, to promote scholarly communication and the advancement of knowledge,” Bauerlein wrote in the report. “To put it bluntly, universities ask English professors to labor upon projects of little value to others, incurring significant opportunity costs.”
Bauerlein is no doubt right that something is not working quite the way it should be in scholarly publishing in the humanities. I’ll be the first to agree that tying academic credentialing to monograph and article publication has gotten out of control. As a librarian, too, I sometimes have to think long and hard about buying monographs that are costly but seem narrowly focused in a way I can’t believe will be useful to others. But none of this seems to be his real focus. He claims to be advocating for more emphasis on teaching, which sounds fine, but is this kind of report really likely to lead administrators to change credentialing criteria or is it likely to help them justify hiring fewer permanent faculty?
Further, as the Inside Higher ed notes, tracking citations proves little about impact when studying the Humanities. After all, Humanism tends to privilege individuality over consensus, persuasion over precedent.
What do you think? Does the kind of efficiency Bauerlein seems to be describing come at a cost that is justifiable or not? Are there other, better ways to address the problem he identifies? Are there problems with academic publishing in the field that he is overlooking (or other dynamics in the profession he should be taking into account)?
A blog entry from an historian about the job market in that field, which is as abysmal as the job market in history: http://northwesthistory.blogspot.com/2011/11/open-letter-to-my-students-no-you.html
What Baurlein does not say is that most people who get tenure-track jobs aren’t asked to publish. They teach four classes a semester, do their service work, and that’s that. The other topic he does not breach is graduate study at the kind of universities he does discuss. Graduate students are a necessity at such universities because someone has to teach bonehead English to the very many students who enter, and leave, such universities, unable to write clearly. Such labor has to be performed inexpensively, and graduate students are at such institutions the least expensive teaching labor around. Tenure-track and tenured professors do such teaching if they have 4/4 jobs, but it will be a long-hard battle to get them into composition classrooms at the places Baurlein surveyed.
When most Ph.D’s finish or do not their degree, they take better paid but still poorly paid jobs as adjuncts and lecturer. I am a well-paid lecturer and that means that, in my eighth year in the job, I teach three classes a semester, and I earn $39,700 a year. The university contributes 10% of my salary towards my pension, which is a topic for another entry, and provides me with health insurance. 3/3 is a low-teaching load, and $39,700, even eight years in, counts as well paid.
I have an M.L.I.S as well as a Ph.D. in English. Had I been hired by a university library eight years ago, my starting salary at most libraries, including the university at which I teach, would have exceeded my current salary, and at some of those libraries, again including the university at which I teach, I would have been given a regular sabbatical. Before I went to graduate school, I worked in the second hand book trade in London, and the money I earned there, in real terms, is at least the equivalent of what I make now. I also estimate that I earned at most $120,000 during the nine years it took me to get two Master’s degrees and a Ph.D. I am the well-paid present of university teaching in the humanities. If Baurlein wants universities to put more emphasis on teaching, he might suggest that universities appropriately reward the people who do much of the teaching: adjuncts and lecturers. He might also, of course, teach more classes himself.
Rhetoric abounds about the value of teaching the humanities, the type of research published, the pressures to publish, and other factors; however, rather than going on and on about these issues, perhaps we would serve our faculty and students better if we put that aside and focused on what we want rather than what we don’t like. Of course, we won’t all agree on what we want, either; however, the discussion might be more positive. At Cal State East Bay, we have an interim president who began his service on July 1 and asked us to comment on our “seven mandates.” In response to this, I decided to sweep those away, too, and recommend that we go back to basics. For English and for literature, my basics are these:
1. I want to educate our students–not train them, not help them get a job, but educate them.
2. I want to help our students improve their writing skills. Our students are not getting hired because they can’t write well enough to get hired. A recent report showed that in four years of college, our students’ writing skills are not improving by much, if at all.
3. I want our students to read–anything would be good, but literature should be a part of that. Why? Literature of all kinds helps us to understand ourselves, to think seriously about our moral compass, and to experience the joy of expression in the written medium.
4. I want our faculty to focus on a suitable combination of educating students and conducting research. In a Research I university, research is the primary mandate, teaching (preferably educating) is the secondary one. In four year comprehensives, teaching (preferably educating) is the primary mandate, research is the secondary one.
What I also want (might as well keep dreaming!) is for both students and faculty to keep these goals in mind. Students understandably seek employment, but this is now so tied to higher education as a business practice that they have lost sight of education. It is our fault for misrepresenting the role of education in our drive to increase our business.
Faculty have also lost sight of the research agenda in non-Research I institutions. While research is a primary mandate in Research I universities, it is not so in others. Faculty, through tenure and promotion processes, put more pressure on themselves than is necessary, demanding more and more publication to achieve tenure and promotion. This is just silly. Workload and the number of hours in the day are finite. Administrators and deans sometimes take advantage of this thrust and make things worse, demanding more grants as well as more publication. All of this drives articles and books that can fit on the head of a pin. Many of our faculty are so worn out with teaching and grading, particularly when many don’t have T.A.s and class numbers are rising, that expecting heavy research and publication is unrealistic and unproductive.
We need to get back to basics, help our students understand the role of education, and help our faculty with a reasonable balance of education and research for the institutions in which they are working.
Perhaps all this is far from the original topic of “Publishing in Literary Studies,” but the larger picture underlies the topic that has been raised and if we don’t address the underlying factors, any discussion of publishing in literary studies becomes moot.