The Promise of Enemies

Lindsey Waters' Enemies of Promise¹ is, I am reliably informed, the talk of the scholarly publishing world. Good thing I'm reliably informed, because what I hear sounds like whispering. That's probably because my listening post is on the other side of the campus, where I office amongst folks who verb nouns and write unreadable books that university presses are supposed to go broke publishing. These are people who support and encourage the very system Waters deplores. They believe that things in the academy are just fine, and they are not inclined to brook suggestions of change. Were they to read Waters' polemic (his word, not mine), it might strike them as nothing but futile and rather silly blasphemy; but that assessment wouldn't keep them from wanting to burn him at the stake anyway.

I agree with Waters on a number of points, most of which have been discussed in these pages during the past couple of years. But I do have a problem with his characterization of university administrators as facilitators of the bogus notion that quantity equals quality and that the book is the one valid measure of faculty productivity. I do not believe - and I have said this before - that administrators give much thought to the rise, progress, and publication of book manuscripts. They are interested in numbers, of course, but books published annually by members of a particular college or department yield only one of many numbers that deans et al. employ to establish their institution's place in the world. Perhaps administrators once preached the gospel of the book, but nowadays faculty show up for work having already internalized what some long-defunct dean formerly wrote about in red-hot memoranda. Peer pressure, not administrative pressure, guides the novice toward that first book and the ones that had better come later. Faculties quickly dispense with the services of the assistant professor who has no book at tenure time. Write that opus and find a publisher, the rookie learns, or prepare to live life inside a revolving door where it is impractical to unpack. A poor dean can't get a word in edgewise. We faculty produce the verbiage, get it between hard covers, and send forward the numbers, along with numbers involving courses taught, credit hours generated, student evaluations of our teaching, professional and community service, and so forth. Good (which is to say big) numbers make the dean happy, so the provost and the president will be happy, too; and the department gains a reputation for being 'solid,' which allows its members to stroll the campus being snotty to faculty from lesser departments. Trust me, it's peer pressure.

Lindsay Waters has met a few enemies of promise, and they are, among others, Stanley Fish and his intellectual entourage, who are 'opposed to new ideas.'² Such a description might bring the promise of enemies; but one gathers from Waters' essay that he has enemies in abundance already. Because he keeps presenting his notions about books and presses and what constitutes scholarship in various invited lectures, he has 'been attacked a number of times vociferously'³ by audience members dedicated to maintaining the statusquoanteWaters. Well, to distort the words of Dirty Harry, a man's got to know the limitations of those in attendance. You can't successfully preach to people who are true believers in something else.

My advice to Waters is this: Assume an air of moral superiority and move on. The system you so roundly damn will implode soon enough, and everybody with a dollop of common sense knows it. If scholars have failed to notice the collapse of some university presses, or the enormous deficits run up by some of the survivors, or the cavalcade of press directors en route from one stress-inducing job to another, who is surprised by that? Look at all the other stuff they've failed to notice, including the empty wardrobe shared by deconstruction and other categories of Francobabble, the folly of political correctness, the useless triumph of obfuscation over communication, the ethical and moral bankruptcy of big-time intercollegiate...