The Transom: Too Many Cookbooks Spoil the Stupor

The Modern Language Association has released a report on 'scholarship for tenure and promotion,' which asserts that two-thirds of those persons with PhDs in English do not obtain tenure and that the successful third has achieved the goal of permanent employment by publishing monographs, a harder and harder thing to do because 'university presses are under increasing pressure to produce cookbooks and local interest publications instead of monographs.'¹ I quote not from the MLA report but from a notice prepared by a historian who believes that we in the humanities should get busy and do something about helping new PhDs to publish, because what's happening in English departments will soon happen to the rest of us. It would be useful, he says, if we agreed to consider 'the range of forms new media scholarship can take,' so as to pick a few we could consider worthy of replacing sewn signatures between boards in the must-have category for tenure candidates.²

I am not sure what 'new media scholarship' is, but if it can take a 'range of forms,' it must be substantial stuff. Given the rapidity with which technology (and, it would seem, the attendant vocabulary) changes these days, I'm afraid that by the time I learn about 'new media scholarship,' it will be as old and obsolete as yesterday afternoon's computer. I used to think, for example, that 'electronic publishing' was a good, useful term; but the historian discussing the MLA report refers 'digital scholarship,' by which, I gather, he does not mean the kind produced by people who use their fingers to push pens or pencils across paper or to depress keys on typewriters. I had hoped that he did, so that I could qualify as a 'digital scholar,' but upon reflection I have decided that he's simply trying to be high-falutin', in the manner of professional professionals, or, as I like to call them, 'digitally remastered technocrats.'

Whatever the nomenclature applied to the enterprise, the idea is to figure a way to present monographic material without employing the printed pages of actual books. More particularly, it involves an attempt to bypass university presses, which offend aspiring youngsters by declining to publish crap unless they think it might sell. Unhappily for the writers of monographs (monographers? monographists? practitioners of monographology?),³ nobody thinks their crap might sell. In fact, university presses are pretty sure it won't sell. They have their reasons, which are the products of experience. One such experience involves cleaning out the storage facility from time to time, sending a boxcar of unsold books to a remainder house somewhere, and calculating how much money was lost in the process. New PhDs know little or nothing of the publishing business, but they know they want tenure, and they've been told by their superiors that publishing arcana is the way to get it. The problem they face is this: They constitute a resistible force that has met an immovable object, namely the marketplace, upon which publishers base their decisions. Now they would like to scrap the reality and create a new one in cyberspace, currently thought to be the best and most likely place to do so.

But even our advocate of 'new media scholarship' admits that problems lie ahead. While academic departments 'seem flexible as events and opportunities require,' there are obstacles to 'creating those opportunities, or more precisely, in finding the funds to pay for such opportunities.'⁴

Yes, well, that is a problem, all right. If you could find funds lying around the old university, you could subsidize its press, which would not then have to succumb to the pressure to issue 'cookbooks and local interest publications' in order to survive.

By the way, whence comes that pressure to publish cookbooks? From university presidents who greatly admire Martha Stewart and the Galloping Gourmet? From provosts with a taste for barbecue or frou-frou pasta dishes? From boards of trustees touting chili cook-offs? Or does the pressure originate outside the university, from, say, civic groups who have collected recipes...