No More Books to Get Tenure?

Attention Academics in the Humanities

Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed has written two articles about calls at the Mondern Language Association to change general requirements for tenure.

The first piece describes the proposed changes and the second elaborates on the proposed shifts and gives more details about people's reactions.

The most dramatic of the proposed changes would be allowing other venues of publication besides "the monograph" to count for tenure.  In layman's terms, you wouldn't have to turn your dissertation into the damned book to get tenure. This change might even include considering on-line, peer-reviewed publications to be legitimate. Gasp!

Other calls for change include:

• limiting the number of outside reviewers who write letters for the tenure seeker to six big whigs -- some universities require 12.
• requesting tenure letters from universities of comparable status (ie. Podunk U would stop asking for letters from big whigs at Ivies.)
• not asking letter writers questions that are unfair to candidates, such as "would you recommend this scholar for tenure at your university" (as though a Podunk U prof should be able to get tenure at HarvPrinceYale.)
• providing better systems of senior faculty mentoring for junior faculty.
• and creating "Memorandums of Understanding" with new faculty that will spell out what will be expected of them come tenure time.

I think that this last item is especially important.  Scott emailed me for a comment on the proposal and then quoted this portion of my response:

“Among the junior faculty I coach, the most upsetting problems arise when the criteria for tenure are unclear or raised capriciously,” said Mary McKinney, a psychologist and the founder of Successful Academic Coaching, who helps junior faculty members navigate the tenure process. “It’s tough to jump over a bar that you can’t see. And even harder to clear a bar that is being lifted as you leap.”

I had some other thoughts about the possible tenure overhaul that were not included in Scott's article. 

As for the idea of creating formal mentor systems within departments: It is unrealistic to expect that you can institutionalize true mentoring relationships - especially in the humanities where it is atypical for people to collaborate on papers.  In my experience, only a minority of junior faculty members find a senior colleague in their department who has the time, interest and generosity to provide consistent, honest guidance. You can't dictate mentorship.  Like it or not, I think that the onus is on junior faculty to ask many smart questions of a wide range of people, and to sniff out the political quagmires on their own.

As for the idea of getting rid of books as a necessity for tenure -- I think that it is likely to happen because financial pressures on academic publishing houses mean fewer books.

After Scott's first article, there was a great comment by Sandy Hatcher, the Director of the Penn State U. Press:

She (or he) wrote the following:

"From dissertation to book

"The MLA panel is to be applauded for making the kinds of recommendations it has. We in the scholarly publishing business agree that “it’s about time” that such changes were initiated; we have been calling for them for nearly two decades. Another reason for placing less emphasis on monograph publication as the “gold standard” for tenure is that, with academic libraries generally having access to dissertations in electronic form through ProQuest (which has just instituted an “open access” option as well), there is little motivation for libraries to order books based on dissertations unless very substantial revisions have been unertaken, and hence sales of books identifiable as having originiated in dissertations are even lower than the already low sales on monographs in literary criticism, which make them very difficult for university presses to publish. Yet tenure committees have continued to insist on junior faculty publishing monographs, which they can hardly verry easily do in the limited time they have unless they start with their revised dissertation as their first book. The conflict between library practices and tenure committee requirements is one more instance of the failure of universities to examine the logic of their institutional systems—puzzling in view of the university’s self-image as the bastion of rationality!

For now, however, if you are in English, or most fields in the humanities, and you're at a respectible university, you need to publish a book for tenure.  If this is the case, THINK ABOUT THE ECONOMICS OF YOUR BOOK.  FROM THE PUBLISHERS POINT OF VIEW.

Even at the time of their dissertation defense, no graduate student I've worked with has known the elements of a successful book proposal.  Many junior faculty preparing manuscripts are clueless about the financial pressures on academic presses, or how marketing prospects affect editorial decisions.  Ideally, all doctoral training would cover practical information about career planning and tenure requirements, including the basics of academic book publishing.  For example, it would be helpful if professors revealed the practical importance of choosing a marketable topic when their students are developing dissertation proposals.  While generating ideas for the dissertation, few students are asked "Who would want to read this, and why?"

How's this for an "earnest exhortation" as promised in my blog's byline?

Comments

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A year or two ago the major conference in my discipline held a panel for grad students and junior faculty on book publishing, with advice from university press acquisitions editors, "veteran" book authors, and a couple of young professors who had recently negotiated book contracts. I've been meaning to get around to typing up the notes I took there - if you think it would be helpful for your clients/readers, I can (finally) do it in the next week or two and send them to you.

[sm]

I don't think asking whether the candidate would get tenure or promotion at your institution is an unfair question -- if referees are chosen from appropriate institutions.

Of course, this assumes that committees and institutions aren't so into CYA or not so self-deluded that they have a reasonable idea of what should get tenure or promotion at their place.

I work at a very small university and when I applied for promotion to professor, I included with my dossier a letter explaining to the outside referees and the committee itself why I had followed the career I had followed, and what conditions I had worked under. I'd made some unorthodox changes in field, put a fair amount of energy into web sites rather than articles, and had consistently heavy teaching loads. So I told them straight out why I thought, in the context of my institution, that I had fulfilled my role as researcher and teacher.

You could destroy yourself with a bad letter of this sort but it worked for me. I really had nothing to lose; I had plenty on my CV but it would have confused the heck out of any but the most dedicated reader.

At my institution the tenure guidelines expect you to make the best case you can. I don't think such letters have been normal (I used to run the tenure process and have been on many assessment committees) but they are worth considering.