Stanley Chodorow, Provost, University of Pennsylvania
We are gathered here around the comatose body of the monograph. [1] The vital signs are not good. If we see each other again at the funeral, we'll remark that the monograph had a short, glorious life, not much longer than 100 years. Some will wring their hands and say that we should have taken heroic measures to prolong its life. Others will shrug; for them, if they notice it at all, the death of the monograph is just a result of nature taking its course.
So, what are the forces of nature that have been taking their course and that have brought the monograph to this low state? The impersonal mechanics of the economy have been among them. Those mechanisms have raised prices, squeezing out the least efficient products of scholarship. Monographs are economically inefficient, because they are large, specialized, expensive works with small audiences.
The tax policy of the U.S. government has not helped. During the tax reform movement of the 1980s, Congress decided to tax the inventories of publishers, and it was no longer possible to keep slow moving monographs in stock. Over time, the audience for a monograph might be large enough to justify its publication; the time for monographs has been cut short by the tax man.
Academic personnel committees, deans, and provosts have also been exerting ecological pressure on the monograph. They have raised the bar for promotion in the academic ranks, so that now they expect scholars in their twenties and early thirties to produce books, not mere monographs.
The sum of this list is that the monograph has become too specialized in every sense. Its evolutionary track is at an end. It is heading for extinction.
You have not come here to analyze, draw a conclusion, and go home. You want to talk about the monograph because you think it is a valuable medium of scholarly discourse. As a mixed audience of scholars, librarians, and publishers, you contain different views of what has happened and what might be done. Some of you would say that it has not been the publishers or tax policy that have brought the monograph to this pass, but the way libraries allocate their acquisition budgets. Some would say that journal prices have squeezed monographs out of library budgets. Some would say that if provosts still recognized the scholarly value of monographs, librarians would buy them. Of course, if provosts gave larger subsidies to university presses or larger budgets to university libraries, or if they put more weight on monographs in deciding tenure cases, then the monograph would rise like Lazarus. One way or another, all of you should be able to find a way to blame the provosts.
You will understand that I prefer to speak of causes rather than of blame. The view from the provost's aerie reveals, in fact, that most of our colleagues in the academy have no interest in or regrets for the monograph. The forces or mechanisms that are driving this form of academic literature to extinction are real and largely beyond our control. Those forces and mechanisms cannot be wished away or neutralized by a shift in the values of provosts or the other gods of the budget.
To construct a strategy to save the monograph, we have to accommodate to the forces of nature. Speaking as a humanist, we also have to understand the causes at work within our own intellectual tradition. But perhaps we should first define the thing itself.
The monograph is a large, specialized work of scholarship that treats a narrow topic in great detail.[2] Size is a critical characteristic, because it distinguishes the monograph from the article, which has the same purpose but is small. The monograph is the product of a large project usually carried out by an individual scholar. It presents what the scholar has concluded is the truth about some set of historical events, the characteristics of some work of art or literature, or the biography of a historical figure, an artist, or a writer. This list does not exhaust the categories of possible topics of monographs, but it makes the general point that monographs are principally about establishing facts or narrative in a set of fields in which facts and narratives are often hard to establish. Together with critical reviews and articles, monographs provide the foundations for general explanations in these fields.
The usefulness of the monograph is field-specific. It has played an important role in the humanities but not in other disciplines. The natural and social sciences carry out their business principally through articles and books. Research in those disciplines does not, as it does in the humanities, require the elaborate process of establishing what should count as data.[3]
If the monograph plays so important a role in the scholarship of the humanities, why is it near death? Going back to the ecological metaphor, one could say that the monograph is playing the role in the academic environment that the frog is playing in the natural environment. The decline of the monograph might be a sign that the academic environment has become inhospitable for the humanities.
The idea that the academy has turned its back on the humanities reverberates in the ears of provosts. We hear that the application of business principles in the allocation of resources in universities is an attack on the humanities. We hear that the decision to buy scientific journals for our libraries means that we must cancel subscriptions in other fields. How often have I heard that the cancellation of one scientific journal would save subscriptions of a dozen humanities journals? I no longer grace that sort of remark with a response. Finally, in the face of politically motivated attacks in Congress on the humanities, through attacks on the governmental agencies that support them, humanists have looked to universities to be the protectors of these fields. Unfortunately, universities cannot replace what the government has taken away; the humanities have lost ground.
But I would say that external environmental change is not the only cause at work. Speaking as a humanist, I think a good deal of the problem stems from changes in our own disciplines. The monograph is a medium of scholarship that has a particular methodological orientation. It serves the inductive method, which relies on the careful collection of data and on general explanations drawn from the analysis of data. Induction is the method of the human sciences. However, the humanities are older than the human sciences and have never been entirely faithful to the scientific method. Humanists have preserved the ancient idea--exemplified by Socrates--that the principal role of the humanities is to apply reason to the judgment of human activity. They have a moral function.
Another way to put this point is that the humanities say something to human beings, as well as about human beings.[4] The current domination of the humanities by theoretical concerns is the domination of the moral function. This orientation is evident in our curricula, which emphasize theory over the acquisition of a specific body of knowledge, and in scholarship. Even in history departments, we do not insist on a core set of courses. All courses are created equal; all of them teach what is most important, which is the nature of historical thought. To understand the nature of historical thought is more important than to know any particular history; historical thought has a moral function.
My purpose here is not to argue that we should return to a curriculum of required courses that teach students a particular history or literature or artistic tradition. All I want to say is that theory has become more important than knowledge. A glance at the contemporary student body makes it self-evident why the old approach, which universalized the value of knowledge of western civilization, became indefensible.[5] Nonetheless, we might insist that students take a series of courses that give a comprehensive knowledge of some subject, giving them freedom to choose which subject to pursue. We don't do that. We have met the challenge of diversity by reaching for the universals of theory.
As I never tire of saying to students, faculty teach what they do. The chief instructional task of university faculty is to teach students how to make and use knowledge in their fields. The challenge of the diversity that we see in our classrooms is not just a feature of the student body; it is a characteristic of our society, and beyond that it is a consequence of the revolution in communications. All academic disciplines are now international and multicultural. This fact of life has affected our scholarship, which is the source of the curricular change that has for years been getting a great deal of attention in the political arena. As in so many things, people reacted first to the symptoms and only slowly recognized their causes. It was when they recognized that curriculum rests on scholarship that conservatives began their attack on the NEH as one of the principal supporters of scholarly work.
In the main, the current condition of the monograph results from the intellectual orientation of the humanities, which determines the values and judgments of the promotion process. As long as humanists value their moral more than their scientific aims, they will not regard the monograph as proof of intellectual worth and achievement.
If this is true, should we be concerned about the fate of the monograph? If scholars are not doing the kind of research that produces narrowly focused studies aimed at establishing particular truths or narratives, then there is no reason to make an effort to save the form of publication designed to present the results of such labors.
And yet, the current orientation of the humanities is not so extreme as to wipe out the scientific tradition. Some of our colleagues may regard this tradition as a conservative remnant in the humanities, but the tradition is still strong. We see it in our departments and in the formation of new academic associations. This statement is a simple observation.[6] Speaking as a provost, I see the persistence of the scientific orientation in humanistic scholarship, and I think I have an obligation to support it.
This observation leads me to two conclusions. First, the persistence of scholarship that should be published in monographic form suggests that the humanistic community continues to honor such work, even if the leading voices of the community do not often praise it. However, if we save the monograph, it will not be truly robust again until the ground shifts in the humanities. Historians, like geophysicists, know that the ground will shift again. Second, to give the monograph new vitality, sufficient to survive the current climate, we need to deal with the larger economic realities. Expensive monographs will not survive to reproduce.
The economics of publishing and libraries and the values of the academic community as put into operation in the promotion process have deprived the 125-300 page monographic tome of oxygen. In a recent meeting, Peter Lyman, the University Librarian of Berkeley, remarked that the academy was a gift-exchange economy. He was right. Scholars want to give away their findings; the widest possible distribution of their work, and universal recognition for their achievements, are the primary objectives of scholars. What this means is that scholarship is the currency of the academic economy.
As in any economy, the aim of the managers is to maximize the speed of our currency. Currently, the speed of exchange is slowed by an inflationary sales economy. In recent years, we have been most concerned about the health of journals, which have suffered some real damage. Meanwhile, the speed of the monograph was approaching zero.
If we are going to revive the monograph, we need to find a way to reduce its cost, so that individual scholars and libraries can acquire it. Today, it is obvious that only the electronic medium can do this.[7] We will save the monograph if we provide a way to publish it on-line. In fact, the monograph may be the best vehicle for developing an electronic publishing environment, because there is virtually no competition from traditional publishers.
To establish the e-monograph, we need to resolve some issues. We do not want to leave the monograph to private publication, in which scholars mount their work on the Internet without the traditional refereeing and editing process. No one has or will pay attention to such publications. We need to preserve the refereeing/editing process. At Caltech last spring, a group of provosts, librarians, and representatives of scientific societies proposed that the key to building an electronic publication that compares with the print medium is the separation of the refereeing/editing process from publication. Scholarly societies and university publishers already maintain highly valued refereeing systems; we need to find a way to use them for e-publication.
To do that, we need to design a way to pay for the costs of refereeing and editing that does not rely on the sales of the monograph. We also need to develop a system for archiving the works that both ensures their permanence and safeguards the authority of editions. AAUand the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) are working to resolve these issues for the publication of articles that would normally be published in paper journals; what will work for articles will also work for monographs.
As most of you know, the archival issues are relatively easy to resolve. It is the economics of publication that are challenging. The majority of the cost of publication is in the editing process, not in printing; so the replacement of printing with essentially costless e-publication will save only about one-third of the cost of current publications. However, one-third is a substantial savings, and there is more to it than that. Provosts, those we identified earlier as the ones most to blame--for everything--may be the ones who can provide the solution to this problem. University budgets now provide the cost of publication through library acquisition budgets, and universities benefit from the publication process not only by acquiring the information necessary for scholarship and teaching but also by relying on the referees for certification of the quality of their faculty members' work. If universities rearrange their budgets to buy the refereeing and editing processes, they will save considerable money on printing and storage facilities, not to mention the profit margin of publishers.
The advantages and disadvantages of electronic publication of monographs are pretty obvious. Among the advantages are the universal availability of the works, the reduction of their cost to readers, the speed of distribution, and the capacity of scholars and students to find information and discussion of specific topics using powerful search engines. Imagine taking notes from electronic monographs; it would be a matter of downloading into your database. Imagine the illustrations that could be embedded in an e-mongraph.
The disadvantages are cultural and technological. At the moment, monographs are the favored scholarly venue of conservative scholars who are uncomfortable with or just plain opposed to the new technology. They like to read printed books. Theirs will be the jeremiads we'll hear about the end of civilization. But even those of us who are open to new modes of publication do not want to read hundreds of pages with thousands of footnotes on the screens we have now. The old technology of the codex is still the best one for readers, so we need screens that emulate it. People in the computer business tell me that prototypes of booklike screens--flat devices that can lie on the desk and that can replicate the sharp contrasts of the printed page--already exist; anyone with influence should urge the rapid deployment of such screens. I believe that between technological development and the passing of generations--an indelicate remark perhaps--the electronic monograph will flourish.
[1]This statement is controversial. The contributors to the conference itself took opposing positions on the condition of the monograph. The title of the conference, "The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis," trumpeted the view I have taken here. But many speakers and discussants argued that the problem was not in the decline of the monograph as a form of literature but in the flood of monographs that was overwhelming scholars in many fields. Several people pointed out that publishers were still issuing a great many monographs. See also, Ken Wissoker, "Scholarly Monographs are Flourishing, not Dying," Chronicle of Higher Education, Sept. 12, 1997, pp. B4-5. I think that in part this controversy is a question of definition, as I note below.
[2]People use the term "monograph" imprecisely. Many use the term to describe any book-length work that deals with a subject of interest only to a small audience. In this usage, "specialization" does not mean narrowly defined within a subject or discipline but focused on a subject that relatively few people are interested in. See, for example, K.J. Winkler, "Academic Presses Look to the Internet to Save Scholarly Monographs," The Chronicle of Higher Education 9/12/97, pp. A18, 20. If books in fields with small audiences are defined as monographs, then many would say that there are too many, not too few of them published each year. The crisis, then, would be that academic presses are not selective enough. But academic presses must publish books, and the growth in the industry has necessarily increased the number of books published. A burden on scholars is not necessarily a crisis that anyone need concern oneself about.
I wish to use the term "monograph" more technically. For me, a book is aimed at the broadest possible audience within a field and deals with general theoretical issues or offers a general explanation of a broad issue. A monograph has a more specific purpose. Understood this way, the monograph is in crisis, for the kind of work I am concerned about has virtually disappeared.
[3]In effect, the social and natural sciences skip a step in scholarly discourse, because they do not have to argue the validity of their evidence; they can explain how the data was collected and move quickly on to its meaning. Moreover, in the social sciences the data is usually collected by someone other than the scholar--by a governmental agency or polling organization--while in the natural sciences the data is compiled from many laboratories.
[4]In thinking about this dichotomy in the humanistic tradition, I am tempted to argue that we should define the humanities as descriptive and explanatory--i.e. scientific--and call the moral-political tradition something else. However, this is an argument for a very different paper.
[5]On the history of the curricular manifestation of European (western) universalism, see W.B. Carnochan, The Battleground of the Curriculum: Liberal Education and American Experience (Stanford Univ. Press, Palo Alto 1993).
[6]It could also be a political statement. In a paper I gave at the ACLS meeting in spring 1997, "Taking the Humanities Off Life Support," I began, as I see it now, to develop an argument that the scientific tradition in the humanities justifies the role of the humanities in the university. The university is based on the rationalist tradition that evolved into the scientific tradition. I think that one of the reasons why so many scientists, social scientists, and other members of the academy have made a sport of attacking or disparaging the humanities is that they perceive the humanities as having abandoned the scientific, inductive, tradition. The ACLS will publish my talk along with others delivered at the meeting in one of its occasional papers.
[7]On this point, I was scooped by the Chronicle article by K.J. Winkler, cited in note 1 above.