Collaborative Work: A Practical Guide

The terrible isolation of academic work in the humanities is like the weather. Everyone complains about it but no one does anything about it. Collegiality among humanists is so fraught because we rarely actually work together apart from the administrative chores represented by committee work and meetings. Each professor's classroom is her castle and we have only the vaguest idea of what transpires in others' domains. And our scholarship is almost always characterized as an individual possession and/or burden. The relationship to one's work is like the relationship to a spouse: intense, personal, idiosyncratic, and all but invisible to outsiders. All that is open to public view are the products: the written works, the lines on the vita and the annual report, the student evaluations. The agonies of their birth are not part of the public record and have no claim on the collective. Half-hearted efforts to mentor junior faculty aside, no one is responsible for a professor's work as either a teacher or a scholar except the individual himself or herself.

A situation more suited to generate fear and loathing would be hard to construct deliberately. But more than feeling good about oneself and sustaining cordial and productive relations with one's colleagues is at stake. The very rationale for doing the work in the first place almost inevitably disappears under such a system, one that focuses entirely on individual efforts and individuals' kudos. The ambitious desire to impress is not evil in and of itself and is probably irrepressible. But it is evil when it eclipses a continual awareness that intellectual activity, the production of knowledge and opinion both, is a collective enterprise. Each person's work is only made possible by the work of others, the work that stimulates me, to which I respond, and from which I learn. And our work hardly matters (to our profession or to any larger constituency) if there is no audience for it. That so many humanists can be moved and influenced by the written word, yet fight off face-to-face challenges to their settled positions is surely a by-product of our professional deformation, of our basing professional identity so squarely and nakedly on individual achievement.

Much more needs to be thought and said about the deep-rooted individualism of "the profession," especially in contrast to the natural sciences, where collaborative work is the rule. An adequate discussion of such matters would avoid romanticizing science or demeaning the humanities, while also considering the balance between individualism and the collective across a wide spectrum of academic practices. The astonishing thing—given how wide that spectrum actually is in today's university—is how exceedingly narrow the prevailing practices in the humanities remain. Why and how this is so has been discussed elsewhere, and will not be our subject here.¹ We come not to complain, but to suggest some ways to do something about it.

Just as the causes for the humanities' individualism is not our topic, we will also not attempt to make the case for doing collaborative work. But we do want to note, since it is the impetus for this essay, that the individualistic model of scholarly production favors those who work well under such conditions while penalizing those for whom ongoing relations with a working group are necessary for being productive themselves. The humanities exhibit a perverse refusal to admit that, for some people who have important contributions to make, the individualistic model is counter-productive, an insuperable obstacle to getting anything done. And, to add insult to injury, the humanities persist in viewing with suspicion the work that such practitioners produce, work enabled by creatively subverting the individualistic biases of the field.

These facts are, alas, not familiar to all and the temptation to lay them out fully, complete with illustrative examples, is great. But rather than convince you that collaboration has real benefits to offer all, while it is simply a necessity for many, we will instead canvas various ways to do collaborative work. Our focus will be on the mechanics, the practicalities, not...