Libraries and the socio-technical system of tenure

The Modern Language Association (MLA) Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion released a new report in December that questions the role of monographs, and more directly, the responsibilities of publishers and university presses in facilitating tenure decisions for scholars in the humanities. The report is available at: http://www.mla.org/tenure_promotion and raises the spectre of faculty failing to take appropriate responsibility for tenure decisions by placing an undue emphasis on the successful production of published monographs by new professors. Since successful publication of a monograph requires the author to pass the review stage of the press, so the argument goes, then such reviewers have more influence on eventual tenure than the faculty making up the P&T committee at the candidate’s institution. The report contains some disturbing data, suggesting that PhD’s in the fields represented by MLA have only about a 35% chance of getting tenure when viewed as a complete pool, and that the the standards for receiving tenure are becoming ever more demanding. Not only are faculty making decision based on the outcomes of publishers’ reviews of proposals, the report argues that publishers themselves are more concerned with publishing essays, editions and textbooks that they can sell rather than monographs that impress tenure committees. Of course, taking a socio-technical systems perspective here one has to bring the libraries into the equation. Since libraries form a large (the largest?) market for scholarly books, the declining interest of libraries in purchasing monographs, particularly in the humanities, means that utlimately, tenurability of faculty can rest on the decision of a librarian to purchase a work (and how many librarians now graduate from programs that do not require an understanding of research?). This is no idle concern. The Association of Research Libraries reports that monograph purchases are falling as expenditures on serials rise prohibitively. Some where in all this, innovation and quality of research output are squashed, if not lost, when it comes to judging the work of scholars. Of course, everyone would agree that assessment of quality should never rely solely on the judgements of those whose primary motive is profit, but there is a real danger that this is where we are in certain disciplines. New digital scholarship must start finding clearer indices for quality.