R. Stephen Humphreys, Professor of History and King Andul Aziz Al Saud Professor of Islamic Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

When I was serving on the Editorial Committee of the University of California Press a few years ago, I was cajoled into holding a workshop for the graduate students and non-tenured faculty in our department. Apparently people were deluded enough to believe that I had at last penetrated into something like the War Room at the Pentagon, and that I could tell them what was really going on in there. In particular, they wondered why editors were turning down good projects without even sending them out to readers, sometimes with expressions of regret, sometimes with apparent disdain Had a university press forgotten its mandate to publish the research of the faculty? Did the editors no longer care about scholarship? What was it they were looking for? The answer, I responded, was pretty simple. Sales of scholarly monographs, even those of the highest intellectual distinction, were dismal -- consistently less than 700 copies each. "University presses are not publishing scholarly monographs," I said, "because you won't buy them." This did not endear me to my colleagues, and in any case it was only a half-truth -- but even half-truths can be useful if they are examined with care.

So, let us begin by asking about the elements of truth and untruth in my unkind remark. The overt untruth is that university presses no longer publish specialized scholarly monographs. They do of course publish them in considerable numbers. But such monographs make up a shrinking percentage of their lists, and in recent years the shrinkage has been very marked. The covert untruth is that this policy is driven chiefly by shriveling sales to individual buyers. In fact such buyers were never a huge proportion of the market for these books; they at best enhanced a net income margin which was secured by two key factors: university subsidies to their presses and library sales. Other speakers will address these factors in detail, but a brief comment or two from a scholar's perspective may be in order.

For no doubt compelling reasons, university administrators are no longer willing to subsidize money-losing enterprises. Every major entity under their care, whether a college of engineering or a university press, is expected to be able at least to break even, within the rules of university accounting. I will confess that I find university accounting practices to be one of the unsolved mysteries of the universe, like the unified field theory in physics or the nature of the divine in theology -- but that is an issue for another day. The point is that university presses cannot afford many titles that do not at least recoup their direct editorial, production, and marketing costs.

My second comment relates to libraries. It was once widely understood that specialized scholarly monographs would find only a few readers at any one moment, and that few of those who needed to read them (e.g., assistant professors with young families) could afford to buy them. The purpose of college, university, and major public libraries was to ensure that these monographs would be held on permanent reserve, so to speak, so that they could be consulted this year or five or twenty years from now, as the exigencies of scholarship demanded. Again for many reasons, some compelling and some perhaps mattters of changing fashion, libraries are in the midst of redefining their mission. Nowadays, I think, only a couple of hundred even attempt to acquire new research monographs in a comprehensive manner.

Now we come to the elements of truth in my statement. It is simply the case that we seldom buy the works of our colleagues (unless we can scam them into providing us copies at author's discount), and all too often we do not even read them. The reasons for our sad reluctance to purchase are many. The obvious one is the cost. Given very limited budgets, most of us will choose to focus on acquiring medieval Arabic texts (my own vice) and the grammars and dictionaries needed to decipher them rather than the latest studies of metaphor in late Mamluk poetry.

A second issue is time. When I started my graduate training thirty-three years ago, there was not that much of value to read in my field. I could focus on the classic studies, and pick up along the way the two or three monographs of real value that might chance to come out in a good year. I read these things closely, often several times, and took meticulous notes that still stand me in good stead. Nowadays the flood of publications is such that I cannot begin to keep up even with my active research fields, let alone the broad arena of Islamic and Middle Eastern history that I am called on to teach. There are just too many books. So, I scan book reviews and summary articles, skim through books looking for key passages ("diagonal reading," as Bernard Lewis has called this practice), and most of all interrogate friends. Like most of my colleagues, I read very broadly, not just in my narrowly defined research fields. But I read in a fragmented, splintered way. In the end, I have a pretty good idea of what is going on in general, I have scrutinized a few problems very closely, but I am simply not on intimate terms even with my personal library. Among scholarly monographs, I have countless acquaintances but few close friends. It does not seem a desirable state of affairs, especially as I get on in my career, but that is how things are.

A third reason for our reluctance to support our colleagues' efforts is more elusive and more controversial, I am afraid. Books are expensive, time is precious, and it is terribly obvious that only a small number of the monographs that appear each year are going to have any real staying power. Most will provide useful increments of concrete knowledge, or they may advance current debates, but in five years they will be passé. Their once-new data will have been absorbed into more recent monographs or syntheses, their interpretive apparatus will have been consigned to the dustbin of history.

To some degree this is inevitable in the collective enterprise that is contemporary scholarship. To some degree, however, it reveals problem areas in our current intellectual life. First, there is the 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. The pressure to get the thing done and out drives them to be content with conventional or currently fashionable analyses of their subject, rather than investing the time needed to think anew, critically and systematically. Hence a kind of staleness and repetitiousness that afflicts even well-researched, well-written studies on clearly significant problems.

A second problem -- one which afflicts some fields more than others -- is the kind of faddishness that privileges theory and interpretation over solid empirical research. In saying this, I do not mean that empirical findings speak for themselves or can even exist without being imbedded in interpretive structures. Nor do I mean that currently favored bodies of theory and interpretation are just passing whims, the second-hand smoke from a Left Bank bistro in Paris or a Frankfurt Bierstube. What I do mean is that the capacity to deploy theory in clever ways seems to be favored over the capacity to discover the substance which theory is supposed to explain. We would rather have people write about constructions of reality than reality itself. But there are at any given moment only a few new ideas; most of us, most of the time, must be content to wear borrowed clothing.

Simply because this is a particularly unsettled moment in philosophy and social thought, theories come and go very rapidly. It is hard to know which ones will endure, which will possess the power to engage first-rate (or even second-rate) minds over a period of many years or decades. What this means for the scholarly monograph, of course, is that books whose main contribution is their sophisticated application of theory must be read promptly, before the theory which they exemplify has dropped out of favor and out of sight. These things tend to discourage purchase -- who wants to have a shelfful of dead ideas? To some degree they discourage reading as well, since most theory is difficult if not opaque, and no one wants to take the time to master this material only to learn that no one pays any attention to that anymore. If one does want to master a given body of theory, he or she will normally prefer the writers who developed it in the first place to those who have tried to apply it to specific cases.

For the excessive pressure to publish and its attendant problems, it is customary and of course very appealing to blame deans and provosts. But in truth the fault lies largely with the ordinary tenured teaching faculty. They -- we -- are the people who define the areas in which they want to hire new colleagues, who conduct the searches, who decide which candidates look especially promising and productive, who keep ratcheting up the standards for initial hires as for tenure.

I hope that this brief discussion does something to bring out the truth hidden in the half-truth. To put it briefly, the crisis of the specialized scholarly monograph is in reality the crisis of the academic profession. No one desired that crisis; it was not consciously willed into being. And yet it is of course in substantial part our own creation -- the ironic result of our success in making the Ph.D. an essential credential even for teaching positions in undergraduate institutions, in creating an oversupply of very able Ph.D.'s, in striving for greater scholarly productivity among our colleagues, in demanding higher levels of theoretical sophistication, and in a thousand other ways. The unmanageable flow of specialized monographs is the inevitable result of these trends, as is the increasing inability of scholars to find publishers for their monographs.

When all is said and done, however, it is hard to think of anything that really replaces the scholarly monograph. For a scholar there is really nothing physically, professionally, and intellectually so satisfying as a well-produced monograph in the palm of your hand, especially when it has your name on the cover. It has qualities that make it far more desirable than the obvious substitutes, such as a series of articles or inclusion in a numbered series (e.g., The University of California Publications in Semitic Philology). First of all, it is far more visible as an entity in its own right. It is advertised in publishers' catalogs and displayed at professional meetings when it first comes out. It can be directly accessed through a library catalog, or serendipitously be found on the shelves, in a way that serial publications never can. It will be reviewed in scholarly journals (perhaps even the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement) and thus may become a focus of serious scholarly debate. (Reviews can also sink your reputation for good, of course, but we all run risks in life.) It makes a satisfying thunk when you drop it on your chairman's desk. In a few tantalizing cases, it can give you the kind of professional visibility and stature that allows you to leave an unsatisfactory position for a better one.

Monographs also meet the needs of scholars in a remarkably effective way. As a practical matter, they are highly portable and quite durable. On a deeper level, they bring together a comprehensive body of research and allow it to be seen as a whole. They allow problems to be explored and elaborated in a manner not possible within the tight constraints of a journal article. They can at their best give both writers and readers the sense that a topic has been thoroughly worked through, and thereby some far broader issues have been illuminated from the inside. Finally, the research monograph is the genre most likely to open up new arenas of knowledge, and hence to provide a serious basis for the constant work of reinterpretation and synthesis. In the end, the specialized research monograph may not be the most important form of scholarship, but it is, I think, the purest. It is the place where you can get lost in your subject and pursue it as far as your energey will take you. None of these things is trivial. They all go to the heart of the scholarly vocation as well as the building of academic careers.

It is clear that the printed monograph represents an old technology -- five centuries old in essence -- and it is fair to ask whether the electronic revolution may displace it through such things as CDs, on-line access, etc. Such new modes of production and distribution might allow us to retain the virtues of the print monograph while overcoming some (though hardly all) of its shortcomings. In this regard, I think particularly of the extremely slow and cumbersome business of transforming a manuscript into a printed volume. All these good things may eventually happen, but I think it is fair to say that the electronic revolution is still a miracle in process. We simply do not know how issues of copyright, distribution, peer review, and rapidly changing and incompatible technologies are going to be sorted out. In any event, electronic publication is bound to require a formidable hardware and software infrastructure, and not everyone is going to have adequate access to that infrastructure.

The specialized research monograph as it now exists is a very imperfect beast, and it reflects a very imperfect world. But for the time being there is nothing to replace it. It is incumbent on all involved -- administrators, librarians, publishers, most of all scholars themselves -- to find ways to maintain it even as we search for possible alternatives. University administrators need to re-examine their budgets and ask how they can make it possible for the presses under their aegis to publish specialized, limited-market work of real quality. They might also give some serious thought to how they subsidize the research of their faculty. As things are, research is quite generously supported, but the publication of that research is left to fend for itself -- in some sense, the market -- a very small market -- is supposed to take care of that side of things. The university presses and libraries need to ask similar kinds of questions, though I think these will be explored by other participants here.

It is, as I have intimated above, the scholars who may have to subject themselves to the severest self-scrutiny. Are we doing all we can to create an intellectual and professional environment in which the research monograph can flourish? No honest man or woman can really claim that we are. Three will be many ideas here about how to work towards such an environment. My own thinking is that we need to begin by recognizing that different research subjects and approaches need to be published in different ways. It is wronjg to force every young scholar's work into the Procrustean bed of the scholarly monograph. In a great many cases, articles and serial publications are the sensible way to go -- the most honest and effextive way of presenting a corpus of work. A policy of encouraging alternative publication would have the salutory effect of thinning the number of monographs and perhaps helping the publication chances of those that remain. It would, of course, do nothing to stem the tide of publication overall.

In any case, no such policy can be adopted in good conscience unless we are willing to assess non-monograph genres at full value. We cannot encourage a new assistant professor to publish her disertatoin as a set of articles and then sack her because she did not write a real book. In all this, there are many problems of policy, some elusive and difficult, but at bottom, it is a matter of academic culture and values. It is in that ghostly realm that our reconsideration of the scholarly monograph needs to begin.