THE BOOK IMPERATIVE

Contemporary American humanities professors, many of whom have never met a moral imperative they like, tend to be belligerent fundamentalists about one thing. They display a blind faith in the transubstantiating power of the tenure monograph. It and it alone can change Assistant to Associate.

Under the influence of the book-imperative, the gentle agnosticism of the typical tenured professor of English can, especially at tenure review meetings, become virulent loyalty to the authority of university presses. Brandishing the Pentagon-speak they would revile in any other context, faculty members will announce: "All of our candidates must score a book -- and demonstrate second strike capability!" Even greater publication pressures are coming, Lindsay Waters writes, from "chief academic administrators [who] have begun to demand that candidates for tenure publish two books, not just one, because more is somehow better; they actually don't give a damn which presses churn out all these unreadable, uninspiring volumes. It's my contention that the tyranny of the tenure monograph has contributed to a crisis in the humanities."

Stephen Greenblatt and Lindsay Waters have recently counterattacked the book imperative forces, Greenblatt for superficial, and Waters for profound, reasons. MLA President Greenblatt's much-discussed letter to tenure committees suggesting that senior faculty now retreat from the rigid insistence on a book or two is a desperate move, a Hail Mary pass in the face of a collapsing scholarly book market (for various reasons, publishing companies lately are producing far fewer monographs than they used to). If our junior colleagues can't find presses willing to publish the books imperative for tenure, he argues, our tenure committees must - at least until the market recovers - make the book imperative unimperative. To keep winning the game, we're going to have to suspend the rules.

Greenblatt adds that the profession will eventually need to "collectively ponder and debate" the articles of faith underlying this awkward outcome; but first we'll have to fix "the immediate problem."

Yet if the MLA had pondered and debated earlier, we might have avoided the embarrassment. All tenured professors of literature have seen evidence of the corruptions, distortions, and absurdities of the book imperative system, pre- and post-tenure. When in a recent review of Judith Butler's work, Martha Nussbaum called one of Butler's books "unconscionably bad," she was telling us, among other things, that the book imperative had destroyed Butler's sense of the moral imperative not to publish for the sake of publishing.

We know that the situation is scandalous up and down the line, but we have been unwilling, each of us, to examine our own bookolatry. And because we've continued to pass the book, we now see that the situation is not merely scandalous but suicidal. The book has begun eating its children.

While Greenblatt looks for ways to protect professors from market vagaries, Waters, an influential editor of scholarly books, begs tenured professors to reflect upon their cheapening and self-defeating tenure monograph mania. Can they not begin to perceive, he asks, how the cynical overproduction of feeble, unvisited tomes, the sorts of tomes Edward Casaubon would have produced if he'd been under tenure pressure, undermines all books? Can they not grasp how, in the pointlessly turbulent world of the book imperative, a rising tide sinks all ships?

Waters clearly hopes that the profession will strike out in a new direction, and the direction he has in mind is toward the essay, that much-maligned minor god in the tenure publication pantheon. If a book is the heavy artillery, an essay is the light brigade, the infantry division in a not-yet-battle-ready force. Essays are attendant lords; they will do to swell a scene or two in the early pages of an academic career, but they are little skirmishes, small incursions, notable at best as rumors of all-out war. The broader battle will be fought chapter-to-chapter, in the two-hundred and fifty pages deemed necessary to mount a thorough tenure campaign.

And yet is it not the case, Waters writes, that "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"? Economists, scientists, and political scientists have long known this, and their tenure standards focus upon essays as much as, if not more than, books. Waters describes an economist asking him "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." The economist, Waters concludes, 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... .?"

Such essays could certainly work their ways into - or more probably, unfortunately, puff themselves out into - future books; but it is the discipline of generating intriguing and concisely expressed ideas that we want to encourage in younger humanities scholars. We should want evidence of lively engaged minds at pretty constant work rather than anxious squirrely minds holding their manuscript pages close to their belt while waiting for a press to publish them.

There is, writes R. Stephen Humphreys, "ungodly pressure on younger faculty and faculty-in-waiting to publish full-length monographs as early as possible. Sometimes their material is only substantial enough to support an article or two, but their professional lives depend on expanding it to the requisite 220 pages that will make a real book. Hence too many books with too little to say. Their research will be very extensive, but is also likely to be hasty and careless." "Junior faculty scramble to get dissertations published before their time," writes Mark Bauerlein, "and the market is saturated with scholarly ephemera." If we wanted ideas and polemic, we'd want essays and occasional, probably later career, books; we're drowning in books because we want tools of certification.



Yet there are deeper reasons for our enormous resistance to the essay as the dominant standard for early and even mid-career intellectual work in the humanities, and our veneration of the book; and these have to do, I would argue, with morbidity and concealment. After all, why should five well-placed and thoughtful essays, one of them, let us say, generating a good bit of citation and response, be regarded as a pathetic tenure-effort, and a dead-on-arrival book be celebrated? Something in us prefers the dead to the living. For with few exceptions, the tenure monograph in the humanities is that dead thing that lies on the conference table as we talk cluelessly about it (no one has read a page), vainly attempting to excite one another and ourselves toward a belief in its life; while the essay, especially if it appears in good intellectual quarterlies and scholarly journals, is likely to be a closely argued, accessible, and lively piece of work.

If it's particularly good, the essay will generate responses in the pages of the journal; it may have another life in a collection of essays on its subject by a variety of writers; or it may, again, eventually expand its argument into a book. An early career essay is far more likely to have a life span than an early career book. And an essay makes it harder than a book does to hide or obscure your ideas and arguments; it's difficult, in an essay, to bury what you really think under layers of literature-review, guru-worship, plot summary, and footnotes -- there's no time for that. Essays get to the point quickly and hold the point. As Timothy Burke, an historian, writes, "A journal article needs to get in and get out quickly and with intensity. Some kinds of works are peculiarly well-suited to journals: debates between several authors, commentaries, research notes, articles about material which doesn't properly fit into a larger monograph, and so on. Editors need to be more aggressive about making the journal form a distinctive kind of academic writing."

Tenure committees, moreover, are far more likely to be willing to read a couple of significant essays than to read a lengthy unimportant book. Promotion meetings based upon everyone having read one significant essay by a candidate might well turn into serious discussion of the quality of that person's ideas.

And finally, as an ad hoc MLA committee responding to the crisis recently noted, "If peer review is assumed to be the ideal gateway to scholarly communication, we need to consider whether journal publication - arguably determined more directly [than monograph publication] by peer readers - may not only be better in many instances for individuals but also better for the collective advancement of knowledge." John Lyons, the editor of Academe, is less diplomatic: "I've been opposed for a long time to the equation that publication equals scholarship and scholarship equals publication," he remarks in a recent interview. "I understand that a press has to make a commercial decision. But why should the scholarly world turn over control of its personnel to the marketing department of a press?... The presses are caught between the market forces and this absolutely insane inflation of the demand to publish books as a requirement for tenure, which I think is complete hogwash when it comes to the issue of determining scholarly quality." "Judgment has been externalized," Bauerlein concludes, "handed over to university editorial boards."

The increasingly destructive meaninglessness of the tenure manuscript, in short, has made it the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor of the American university literature department. It has turned the profession's president into a sorcerer's apprentice, trying vainly to control the choking effects of its grotesque self-replication; it has turned many promising young thinkers into drones; it has allowed literature departments to dodge the responsibility of taking seriously the intellectual merit of their junior faculty members; and, in its simulacral splendor, the tenure manuscript has done its own small bit to deepen our general sense of living in a virtual, rather than a real world. "When I was growing up out in the sticks of Illinois," Waters remarks, "the university seemed to me to be a shining city on a hill, a place where people actually got paid to read widely, and to have fun with ideas. If it's ceased to be such a place, it's partly because people my age - I was born in 1947 - aren't encouraging younger thinkers to be more daring."



Despite market and other pressures, however, today's promotion committees maintain a fierce grip on the tenure manuscript. They seem to have taken a page out of NRA President Charleton Heston's book: You'll get their tenure manuscripts when you pry them from their cold, dead fingers.

Beyond the reasons I've so far suggested for this icy grip, and for the equally firm resistance to the essay as primary evidence of tenurability, lie two related phobias: fear of conflict, and fear of value distinctions. If the tenure decision can neatly resolve itself into the absence or presence of a book on a table, none of the messy disputatious business of hammering out a sense of a person's true intellectual ability need take place; and if the only value invoked in the tenure transaction is quantitative, then the awful, disheartening forms that scholarly conversation tends to take in politically correct times can likewise be avoided.

A canned book, in other words, is better than a can of worms. If we could discuss good and bad ideas, literate and less literate styles of writing, or the relative worth of paying attention to some writers over others, without having to spend a lot of time swatting down charges of elitism, we would do so, I suppose; but because many of us have witnessed or been drawn into the bullying theatrics of contemporary academic discourse, we would just as soon forego the degradation. Too much institutional connerie has made cowards of us all.



Nonetheless, the current crisis in the tenure game does represent an opportunity for us to follow Waters's lead and get serious about the matter. Start by asking yourself what intellectual work has had a real impact upon you. In my own case, the most inspiring and useful source of knowledge about art I've encountered in years was an essay on the meaning of modernism by Michael Fried, and then an essay in response to Fried's by T.J.Clark, and then a very nasty exchange between the two of them, all in the pages of one issue of Critical Inquiry about twenty years ago. I've reread it countless times, and I'm always thrilled and enlightened by the emotional and intellectual intensity of their clash.

A number of other such essays easily come to mind. And yet the "career trajectories" of intellectuals like "Rene Girard, M. H. Abrams, Paul de Man, and Meyer Shapiro are eschewed," Bauerlein points out, "for none of those talents produced enough work early in their professional lives to merit tenure under the present system." Of course books - mature books by seasoned scholars - have been crucial to me. But if I ask myself what's fired me up and sustained me in my thinking over many years, the answer is the sharp, well-written, well-reasoned, polemical essay that astonishes me with a new sensibility and a new point of view. Many of these essays have been anthologized, expanded into books, or incorporated into various edited volumes. Yet when I encounter them in these more refined settings, I'm nostalgic for the rough immediacy, the unbound cerebral energy, of their original environment. They lived; and they live. They represent a sort of ideal to which our junior faculty should aspire.

Let the dissertation go back to being what it was always intended to be: an extended work of scholarship demonstrating to a Ph.D. granting institution one's Ph.D.- worthiness. Having written it, younger scholars should transform parts of it into excellent published or publishable essays that can be shown to hiring committees when job candidates go after their first academic appointment (keep in mind that, contrary to popular belief, studies suggest that hiring committees are not in fact looking for publications at this stage). These essays would represent a distillation of what's best in the dissertation; they would give hiring committees an easily accessible way of determining the intellectual strength and potential of the candidate; and they would push the younger scholar away from the deadly, hyperspecialized model of the tenure monograph for future written work, and toward the lively, interdisciplinary model of the essay.

"I've lived to become that appetizing thing, a 'full professor,'" Vladimir Nabokov commented in an interview with Playboy magazine in 1964, "but at heart I have always remained a lean 'visiting professor.'" Everything about institutional mobility in the humanities in the last few decades has involved, as even the MLA is now beginning to acknowledge, a sort of stupid inflation, a mindless bulking up to an appetizing but unhealthy fullness. Robert Darnton describes what he calls "monographism" as a "disease. It seems to be killing disciplines like literary criticism, where voguishness and arcane jargon have alienated the ordinary educated reader." A book, an academic wit once said, is "an article on steroids," and indeed our profession's action heroes remain the Schwarzeneggers of overproduction, the Stakhanovites of verbosity who started sweating out articles on steroids in their first years as professors and now cannot stop. Must we make these lumbering gladiators our model for junior faculty? A much more attractive model would be the lean, outward-tending, flexible, clear-thinking, public-minded essayist, who puts herself out there and enjoys the give and take of debate in the pages of lively journals. At heart we should remain, as Nabokov did, lean visiting professors, truly open to the world of ideas.

Occasionally, however, authors' interactions with their bloggers prove fruitful. Cass Sunstein read a discussion of one of his articles about conservative judicial radicalism on The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog organized by Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in which Sunstein was invited to respond. "We had an interesting exchange and there were a lot of comments," said Sunstein, who teaches law at the University of Chicago. The discussion even spurred him to make changes to Radicals in Robes, the book he was writing at the time. "There's no question that 'Radicals in Robes' was affected by a kind of pre-publication review on a blog," he said.