The tyranny of the monograph and the plight of the publisher

The Tyranny of the Monograph and the Plight of the Publisher

Lindsay Waters

C all the ambulance, the patient is dying! That urgent appeal needs to go out--and quickly--to two groups: publishers and scholars in the humani-

ties. I make my appeal as a publisher, a reader, and a humanist. I hold books sacred and hate to see them losing their value, which is exactly what they are doing today, rapidly, thanks to hyperinflation. Our system of academic book publishing, which rests on the premise that people who publish get promoted, is spiraling out of control. Universities are raising the bar for winning tenure to two books increasing what will be expected of academic publishers. Indeed, the whole system needs to be changed.

The problem is that university presses are already publishing books that they should be turning down. It is not that the books are unworthy; just that they do not justify the expenditure of time and money that goes into them. The people they are being published for don't even demand that their local librar- ies purchase them. So my question to publishers and writers is the same: Why do any of you--I mean us--want this system to go on?

The system produces many excellent scholars, but it does so in spite of, not because of, itself. The exaggerated emphasis on the publication of books pushes young scholars to go on record earlier and earlier, with less and less to say. That is not good for colleges and universities, and it is not good for scholarship. Furthermore, overproduction conceals an identity crisis in the humanities that has been developing for the past 30 years, but one that we dare not continue to ignore.

I think that the patient, the tenure monograph, is terminally ill. We mislead those in positions of authority, like deans and the heads of tenure committees, who take the books we publish as a stamp of authority, and we delude the

Address for correspondence: Mr. Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities, Harvard University Press, 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138-1499 Email: [email protected]

This article is published with permission that was published in the April 20, 2001 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. B7-10. Mr. Lindsay Waters is executive editor for the humanities at the Harvard University Press. His book Against Authoritarian Aesthetics: Towards a Poetics of Experience has just been published in 2000 in Putong Hua dialect by Peking University Press, China.

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young who keep on preparing books to get tenure, if we don' t face the current realities of academic publishing. What we should be doing is thinking about ways to prepare for the death of the tenure monograph in the humanities, and to counsel those who will soon be grieving. That could provide us with a great occasion to redirect the efforts of not just the young but also their elders, if they- - I mean w e - - d a r e to reconsider our situation.

Some defenders of the monograph dismiss talk of its demise. The obituaries are little more than wishful thinking, they say, s temming more from discom- fort with new types of scholarship than with reality. I agree that a fair amount of the bellyaching about ever more esoteric monographs with ever fewer readers has come from people who just wish that the likes of deconstruction, femi- nism, gay studies, and postcolonial studies would go away. But that doesn't change the fact that we have a crisis.

Yes, we academic publishers increased the number of titles we produced throughout the 1990s, according to annual figures prepared for the Association of American University Presses. But the increase could well be seen as a desperate effort to keep dollar income up at a time when per-title sales are flat in scholarly publishing. Dollar income has often increased at presses, but that's because publishers are bringing out more titles at higher prices.

I have experience in publishing books in economics, philosophy, literature, anthropology, and law. In economics, a treatise--a major effort to synthesize knowledge- -migh t sell 7,500 copies at $50 a copy; major books in literary studies--books that others use as tools in the classroom or for their research-- can sell 3,000 to 5,000 copies. But, in my experience, monographic studies in the humanities, and I definitely include history here, whether written to win tenure or later in a career by established giants in the field, now usually sell between 275 and 600 copies, no matter how good they are. (Paradoxically, outside of literary and historical studies, the smaller the field, the higher the sales. Most philosophy books sell, in cloth, a m in imum of 1,200 copies; books in classics do even better.) At Harvard, we figure we lose about $10,000 on every book that sells only 500 or so copies. So what do we do? We hedge our bets.

That produces an untenable situation. On one side, we have university presses that can afford to publish monographs--par t icular ly in the humani t ies - -only if they can find respectable "trade" books that sell enough copies to subsidize the books that lose money, or if they find subsidies (in some form or another) from their universities to cover their losses. On the other side, we have an academy that is demanding more and more publications from scholars at a younger and younger age.

Today, in most cases, it seems to be a matter of quantity over quality. Quan- tity is empirical, quality is elusive. The rule-unspoken at some universi t ies-- and set out in guidelines at others--is getting to be two books for tenure. With the decline in tenure-track jobs in many fields, thanks to the use of adjuncts, this has led to frenzied behavior on the part of graduate students now trying to multiply the number of publications on their C.V.'s.

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In a recent essay in an M.L.A. newsletter, Profession, "No Wine Before Its Time: The Panic Over Early Professionalization," Cary Nelson, a literary critic, reports asking a provost whether the university had any qualms about raising the bar and demanding two books for tenure. "No," the provost replied, "In- creasing expectations for tenure only proves how good a school we are." But does sheer quantity really offer conclusive proof that the enterprise is "good"?

Above all, the crisis of the monograph is a crisis in leadership. From the desperation of some publishers, madly producing more new books to stay alive, to the increasing use of adjunct professors by universities eager to save money, to the demands of tenure committees, you have a lot of factors--and a lot of people who should know better--making a tough situation increasingly intolerable.

It was 10 years ago that another literary critic took me up short by coming by our Harvard press booth at a Modern Language Association convention and saying, "Lindsay, you must be a desperate man." Why? Because, he said, it was clear that anything could, by then, be published, and he was wandering the aisles in boredom. Another scholar put it to me more gently. Some five years ago, I asked an anthropologist if his colleagues were reading a book that he had read in manuscript and recommended glowingly several years before. "Oh, Lindsay," he said, "don't you know? No one automatically pays atten- tion to books anymore." Why? Because potential readers no longer assume that, if a publisher went to all the expense of bringing out a book, it had to be worth at least poking into. Once bored, twice shy.

When things come to such a pass--all of my sources were at the top of their fields, not one a slouch or a disgruntled malcontent, and I have heard similar complaints from scholars in history and art history--I think some speculation is indicated, as well as some changes in practice. The crucial point here is that the overproduction of the most endangered species in the preserve, the monograph, is a symptom of bigger problems in the humanities wing of the university. If you will allow me to lapse into the cadence of a preacher: Anxieties about authorship and authority have led to the present profligacy, in a desperate attempt to win back lost legitimacy. But I say unto ye, It is never going to be won this way!

The problem of the humanities monograph is, mutatis mutandis, the prob~ lem of the university and what counts for knowledge there. Is the university a place where intelligence is made manifest? It is, and always has been, a place where careerism makes itself manifest. But what about intelligence?

Just a few years ago, Stanley Fish, then head of the Duke press, challenged humanists to buck up and stand tail. Why should they be second-class citizens, wearing tweed like sackcloth, he asked in an essay "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos'? But chutzpah won't be enough to save us now. In a university increasingly committed to business values, the humanities have grown to be beside the point. The free fall of the monograph in the humanities is a symptom of the loss of stature of the humanists who write the books. Technology transfer, licensing the fruits of university research--that's the game being played now. More and more, the only interesting unit of knowledge is the patent.


To many of the people who run universities and to many faculty members, the humanit ies are at best a source of confusion, and at worst an embarrass- ment. Scientists, by contrast, are turning their departments into "profit centers." He who cannot cash in has no cachet, and humanists seldom can.

The first step we need to take out of this crisis is to recognize that the assumption that a humanis t needs a book (or, more likely, two) is based on a bad analogy. That analogy has a history, and we are its prisoners. The monograph fetish is a prime example of the desire of humanists to fit in and be scientists, just like all the rest of the Big Men on Campus. That scientists themselves no longer cling to the fetish seems to matter not a whit. (As any university publisher can tell you, trying to get a book out of a scientist has been impossible for decades.) When the modern research university took hold in the United States toward the end of the 19th century, scientists were writing monographs. Why should not humanists do the same? Wel l as the crisis of the monograph makes it absolutely apparent, because the strategy won ' t w o r k - - and was dangerous all along.

No one is ever going to mistake humanists for junior scientists--not even if they take to wearing pen protectors in their shirt pockets. Yes, we still consider the book valuable, but too often not because it is well done. No, in our profit- driven university, the book is valuable because a universi ty-wide committee can unders tand that it costs a lot of mony to produce. Even if committee members can glean nothing about the book's content, they know that it cost somebody a lot of money to publish and, therefore, somebody else a lot of effort to mobilize support to get it published. All that's true. Books also have the distinction of thumping when you drop them on a table, and they stand up in a display case, the way an offprint cannot.

Humanists can do better than this. Why do we want people to write? Why do we want to see their writing? Because we want authors and readers, alike, to be humanists. An old-fashioned word, "humanist ," but not outmoded. A humanism that dares speak its name speaks in a way that is persuasive to humankind. Humanists need to highlight the differences between the humanities and the sciences, and they need to get over the vulgar phobia about science that hobbles so much humanist ic discourse.

The reason so many of the book proposals ! see from the young today fail is because all of the frameworks that would justify writing a book seem to have collapsed. People pay lip service to interdisciplinary study, but that's about it. (Why else do we need all those interdisciplinary humanit ies centers?) Profes- sionalism rejects the notion that it is worthwhile to have real expertise in a field of knowledge other than one's own.

I find myself spending an increasing amount of time trying to persuade the talented that it is worth writing a humanities book filled with gusto. I feel bad that some of the really interesting young intellectuals--like those who edit and write for the journal Hermenaut , kids passionately interested in philosophy, rock "n' roll, and zine cul ture--prefer to drive cabs, think, write, and have zilch to do with the university.

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Sales of individual titles are down for university-press publishers not because--as some academics believe they are so good and society is so bad, but because they can't convince even themselves that what they are doing makes a difference. Humanists buy books because books excite them, not out of duty. So their publications need to be more like those of Swift and Voltaire--proper humanistic emanations that offer persuasive accounts of the world, no matter how much they flaunt their improprieties, rather than empty exercises of sci- entific competence designed to please two men in New Haven and no one else in this world.

The second step we need to take to get out of the crisis of the tenure monograph is to consider what shou ld - -and should not be a monograph. Write scholars must, but why must it be books and not essays? Jerry Green, Harvard 's provost in the early 1990s and an economist, recently asked me w h y the people in many of the humanit ies 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. We need to remember that the humanis t ideal of publication that flourished for years took the form of books and articles. It was embodied in books like Thomas More's Utopia, Michel de Montaigne's Essais, Erasmus's Adagia, Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction; and in essays like Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." History reveals that the best work of many scholars appeared in essay form: Sometimes, to make a group of scholars turn on a dime, what is needed is a publication not as thick as a brick, but as thin as a dime.

The third step we need to take is to recognize just w h o m and what the current system of publishing serves. The benefit of the system is that it allows universities to outsource tenure decisions to university presses. That looks like a win-win situation: Institutions can count on a decentralized decision-making system to legitimate the credentials of their employees, and the people who love books so much that they want to be part of the making of them can ge t - - as the words of the Dire Straits song go-- thei r money for nothing and their books for free. But there are h idden costs here that we have not considered, and the bill is coming due.

My personal concern is this, and it is very personal and may seem sentimen- tal: I love books, and I love the humanities, and I see anything that undermines their value as a threat. We all worry about electronic publications' putting books out of existence, but I fear that the overreliance on books by bookish people is an equal threat. The sacredness of books is not something that needs to be inflated, least of all by the people of the book. The idea that you can cook up a book fast, the way we used to cook up burgers when I worked at McDonald's as a kid, deeply disturbs me. Books should take years to write (although, even then, deadlines can help). "You can't hurry love," sang the Supremes years ago. Wel l you can't hurry scholarship, either. Pushing young scholars to publish books doesn't lead to more better books. It leads to more books-- that is, until the system collapses.


W. H. Auden wrote that the sign of promise in a young poet is technical competence, not originality or emotion. The same is true, probably, for young scholars. Their work does not need to be published with the full fanfare of the book of a mature scholar, and there ought to be and no doubt are at many institutions--ways of granting tenure to the young person who reveals such competence. But the imperative given by universities to the untenured to publish promising juvenilia as midlist books, and the proliferation of such publications, has triggered Gresham's Law, creating a situation in which even the best books come to be taken as mere exercises, overproduced term papers, just as bad money drives out good.

My economist friend Jerry Green 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 and--maybe later than sooner--passionate books like Empson's Milton's God?

The scholarly book is becoming an endangered species, I contend, but not for the reasons most people think of. We have put the cart before the horse. People should not be given tenure because they have written books; people should be given tenure so they have the leisure to develop big projects that make good books. In any case, what a university really needs to know about a young scholar is whether his or her writing is competent and shows promise that the candidate will develop into a person who really has something to say. Seen from that perspective, the turning of a large percentage of academic jobs into adjunct positions is hastening a waning of scholarship that is already taking place.

Lastly, we need to rethink who should be evaluating scholars and scholarship. Why leave it to book publishers? Maybe we should consider indepen- dent bureaus, financed by the leading professional organization in each disci- pline, to do the work of judging. Alternatively, and probably preferably, we might actually bring evaluation back into the department. If the system has so evolved--as I think it has--that departments can avoid direct appraisal and criticism of a colleague's work by farming out that labor, is that good? If things were to change, scholars might have to learn to be directly critical of a candidate's ideas; the candidate might have to rebut criticism, publicly if pos- sible. (Many departments do ask candidates to give a public lecture, but real discussion there is scarce.) That might lead to a system closer to the one that prevailed in the medieval university, with disputations among scholars; and that, in turn, might have the big payoff of making scholarship more public and evaluation less something that goes on somewhere else at the faculty board of a distant university press, or behind closed doors at home. Students might even love it.

What I am urging is that publishers get more selective, and also that they help scholars figure out how to write books that will appeal to a broader audience than at present. Surely, scholars ought to at least be able to explain what they are doing in general enough terms in their introductions that people outside their fields can see what is at stake. I don't tout massive shrinking of

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lists, but I do long for better books. During the years that we could publish monographs with impunity (and please bear in mind, that was not yesterday), we all became too complacent.

If we can salvage anything from the present crisis of the monograph in the humanities, let it be that we humanists see that our lot is with rhetoric and not science; that ideas--and young people--need nurturing. If we can do that, we would have much to be grateful for.

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The tyranny of the monograph and the plight of the publisher