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  • Whose Crisis Is It?
  • Patrice Petro (bio)

Let me begin by sharing the best advice I was given as a young scholar by my first and life-long mentor in film studies, Chuck Wolfe, of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Years ago, when I talked with him about my anxieties and fears about publishing my first scholarly article, he told me this (from his own then untenured position): publish only when you have something to say, when you believe you have something of value to contribute to scholarly dialogue, and when you are sure that what you have written is what you truly think. With this in mind, I would like in this brief piece to address the current crisis in scholarly publishing by asking, for whom, especially, does it present a crisis?

Obviously, declining state and federal budgets have hit universities and hence university presses hard. In this forum, Leslie Mitchner carefully outlines the many changes that have taken place in academic publishing during the last thirty years or more. Needless to say, we are all experiencing the current fiscal challenges facing universities in a variety of ways. These challenges have created a crisis for university [End Page 86] presses and for many editors and staff who are committed to soliciting, publishing, and promoting the best new work.

But the crisis, it seems to me, is also in large part of our own making. While there can be no doubt that the problems of scholarly publishing are at base economic and systemic, and thus outside individual control, a larger set of issues relating to institutional cultures and faculty governance have fueled this crisis, and those are within our control. The crisis in scholarly publishing, I believe, is most immediately a crisis for junior scholars but ultimately is a looming crisis for us all—our students, colleagues, departments, disciplines, and university cultures.

It is the responsibility of tenured faculty and administrators to address this crisis by reviewing the standards for tenure and promotion in an effort to rethink the professional culture we have inherited. This culture is of relatively recent origin and in dire need of serious rethinking, revision, and change.

I am hardly the first person to say this. In his May 2002 letter to the Modern Language Association (MLA), then president Stephen Greenblatt underscored the pressures facing junior faculty who are expected to have a book published when they come up for tenure at the same time as university presses are scaling back production.1 A year earlier, in 2001, Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the "tyranny of the monograph" and criticized what he saw as the exaggerated emphasis on the publication of a book to gain tenure.2 Waters argued that junior scholars should not have to publish books to gain tenure because it places undue focus on professional development and fundamentally diminishes the quality of all academic work. I agree but would add that no one, whether junior or senior, should publish books or articles or deliver conference papers just to fill the pages of their curriculum vitae. This is precisely the kind of professionalism we must resist, not only because we must oppose all forms of packaged (and administrative) thinking but because we must keep speculative, insightful, and intellectual thought alive and vital in everything we do.

Given the criteria for tenure and promotion at most institutions, what can realistically be done? My own experience confirms what I have recently read regarding the intractable views of many senior faculty and administrators nationwide. Many fervently believe that the book is the gold standard, the only standard, for tenure (as is the second book for promotion to the rank of full professor). As evident in written criteria that explicitly state that "a book or its equivalent" is required for tenure (or "a second book or its equivalent" for promotion), there are those who steadfastly believe that a series of articles can never add up to a book because the experience of producing a sustained piece of writing and research can never be "equivalent" to writing a collection of essays. Of course, as...

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