Three questions were proposed for this session:
My task is to comment on these questions from the perspective of a liberal arts college. As you know, only a fool would pretend to speak for an entire sector of higher education in America, so let me begin with the usual caveats about the uniqueness of our institutions and the dangers of generalization -- even though I believe, in the case of the major liberal arts colleges, that our similarities of mission and character are more impressive than our differences. I'd also observe that, while the liberal arts colleges have a great deal in common with each other, as a group they are quite unrepresentative of higher education as a whole: these places represent only about 5% of tertiary institutions in the U.S and about 2% of student enrollment. So I'd be especially cautious about generalizing from this particular part to the elephant.
What do we expect of our faculty? Two years ago, the academic deans of 12 Pennsylvania liberal arts colleges wrote an open letter to new Ph.D.s describing their vision of the faculty members they wanted to attract to their institutions. It's a nice document and I recommend it to you. Without quoting at length, I'd note three themes that connect with our topic today.
First and most basically, the deans stressed that faculty members should have a commitment to the advancement of learning reflected in both their teaching and an active program of scholarly research. Whatever may have been true in past decades, the days are long gone when faculty members in the major liberal arts colleges can achieve advancement and recognition based only on a strong teaching record. Excellent teaching is essential. So is excellent scholarship.
A second theme is that faculty research should enrich rather than compete with an individual's teaching. In some disciplines, possibly including some of the humanities and social sciences, enrichment may take the form of student collaboration in research; in all disciplines, a faculty member's scholarship should bring new connections and energy to teaching.
Finally, the deans emphasized that faculty members should have interests that extend "beyond working in their disciplines" and that they should be able to place their work in broad, and occasionally in interdisciplinary, contexts. Faculty members should be able to show their non-specialist undergraduate students why their scholarship matters.
All of this is very qualitative, and you will wonder how it reifies in concrete expectations for publication. How much is a tenure candidate expected to publish? And where?
I've had occasion to explore this question in some depth with colleagues at our peer colleges, so I feel I can be slightly more than anecdotal. Possibly in contrast to the situation of some of the research universities, none of these institutions has a specific minimum publication standard for tenure -- no college, for example, has such a thing as a "one book rule." On the other hand, all of these colleges expect tenure candidates to bring forward a record of scholarship whose quality is recognized by authorities in their disciplines.
In practice, in most of the humanities and social science disciplines other than economics, at least one monograph, either published or accepted for publication, is typically part of a successful candidacy; where there is really exceptional teaching, several articles might suffice if they are well reviewed and appear in top journals. There is no question that quality is more important than quantity: tenure committees are more likely to be influenced by strong peer reviews of a person's work than by the number and bulk of the publications. By inference, I think, the place of publication might be more important than the genre: several articles in top-of-the-line, peer-reviewed journals might well be more impressive to a tenure committee than a more substantial monograph published by a press some distance down the food chain.
I'd add one further observation before turning to the other questions on our agenda. As the Pennsylvania deans emphasized, beyond the question of quality there are questions of the intellectual significance of the work and its capacity to enrich a candidate's teaching. It isn't unheard of for a department or a tenure committee to reject a candidate whose published work was well reviewed in the profession but which was not visibly connected with themes of recognizable intellectual significance. Or for a tenure committee to reject someone whose work seems unlikely to enhance or enliven their teaching (though I suspect this happens mostly in the sciences). In both ways, tenure practices at liberal arts colleges reflect aspects of their missions which may not be replicated at other kinds of institutions.
Our second question is whether expectations for faculty scholarship have changed, and particularly, whether we expect more publication now than previously. Briefly, I believe the answer is that the big changes in expectations for faculty in liberal arts colleges date to the 1960s and 1970s. This was when college faculties and the ranks of new Ph. D.s were both growing, and the generational shift in the composition of faculties more-or-less quickly brought about changes in the ways faculties conceived of their professional identities. The use of phrases like "teacher/scholar" to describe our faculty members and "research college" to describe our institutions became common in this period.
I don't mean to be too simple-minded about this. Expectations for faculty scholarship increased more in some institutions than others because they began from different baselines. And the pace of change varied considerably -- in some colleges, it was not until the 1980s that new standards for scholarly productivity had become embedded in institutional practice. But these facts don't alter the basic point, which is that the broad increase in expectations for faculty scholarship happened a generation or more ago.
On the other hand, there is not much evidence that expectations have gone up in the last 10 years or so. With this conference in mind, I carried out an informal survey by e-mail of a dozen academic deans to see whether anyone observed a stiffening of tenure standards. With the exception of one institution where there was a determined effort to ratchet up the quality of the faculty, nobody thought that standards of research productivity were rising from their levels a decade ago. This impression seems to be borne out by the record of tenure decisions. If research standards were going up, then presumably we would be seeing declining percentages of favorable tenure decisions; but in fact tenure rates have been stable, and may even have been creeping up.
Finally, there is the question about whether there are enough opportunities for scholarly communication to enable junior faculty members to get their work into circulation. My own sense is that the mixture of opportunities may be shifting, but that, overall good people are not having trouble getting good work published. As I think back over tenure cases I've supervised in my 6 years as a dean, I can't think of a single case where there was a finished manuscript that was well reviewed by extramural consultants in the tenure process but that did not find a publisher.
I queried my colleagues at other colleges about this as well. Of the dozen deans who responded to the e-mail survey, not one thought that people, either at the tenure stage or beyond, were having trouble finding places to publish good work. Several mentioned recent examples of monograph publications by faculty members, often in what might seem to be very obscure areas of the humanities and social sciences, as evidence that monographs are alive and well. Several also noted the proliferation of other opportunities to publish, especially in the large number of relatively new and ostensibly peer-reviewed print journals and in electronic venues.
To conclude: The hypothesis underlying this session is that rising expectations for faculty productivity are on a collision course with the declining capacity of university presses to publish scholarly work. These observations from the world of liberal arts colleges provide reason to doubt that either part of this hypothesis is true -- that institutional expectations are rising, or that decreasing opportunities to publish are damaging otherwise promising academic careers.
Of course, our contrarian experience may simply reflect the unusual circumstances of the national liberal arts colleges: most importantly, that we are hiring first-rate people whose work would be recognized in any publishing environment, but also that quantitative expectations for scholarly productivity have not got out-of-hand in these institutions. But another explanation is possible as well: that the crisis of the monograph, at least in the aggregate, has been overstated. It's hard to regard reflections from one or another part of the scholarly community as capable of disposing of this question either way, and I'd end with the suggestion that we work toward a more systematic view, illuminated by historical data that would permit a comparison of the change in the rate of monograph publication with the change in the size of humanities and social science faculties in our institutions. This would put us in a much better position to decide whether the monograph is really an endangered species.