Tenure, Publication, and the Shape of the Careers of Humanists

Abstract

I am impressed with the report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and appreciate its seriousness and all the very careful work that was done to gather data and present them to the membership of the MLA. I first raised the alarm about the imminent crisis and tried to analyze the situation on the basis of my extensive work in university bookstores, my work teaching at Chicago State University and the University of Minnesota, and my work as an editor at two very differently sized and situated presses, the University of Minnesota Press (1978-84) and Harvard University Press (1984 to the present). I had a number of learned intuitions, but I had not systematically re searched the issues that surround the questions of publication and ten ure. For example, I had visited dozens of universities and attended many conferences, but my on-the-ground research was limited to the six to ten schools I had visited to participate in intensive discussions of matters I had raised in my first essay for PMLA (Modest Proposal) and that I was raising in my writing of Enemies of Promise. I especially regretted my inability to pin down high academic administrators. When I talked to Myles Brand and Nils Hasselmo, former university presidents who had moved on to new pastures, higher up Parnassus, I was told that things were much better than I thought. But David Schulenberger, then head of the Lawrence campus of the University of Kansas, did not agree. He had come to understand the depth of the systemic problem transforming