Transcript


0:05
One of the things I did right after the book was finished
0:09
was I made a list of topics that I touched on in the book
0:11
but didn't really get to pursue in the kind of detail I would've liked had I enough time,
0:15
and the research model that the humanities has adopted
0:21
kept coming to the top of that list.
0:24
Mostly because it seems to me ridiculous, and the statistic that really underscores that
0:30
is--it's cited in a book by Deborah Rhode called, "In Pursuit of Knowledge."
0:36
She cites a study that says only two percent of all published articles and monographs in the humanities are ever cited.
0:45
Ninety-eight percent go uncited. This means that we're an army of producers of scholarship,
0:52
but nobody's reading what we're producing. And that, to me, seems like an economy that's absolutely fractured,
0:58
but that's the heart and soul of the research model as we practice it.
1:02
Administrators expect us to continue producing and so we do
1:07
and people who are untenured and people who are in graduate school don't have any choice but to play by those rules.
1:12
But no one seems to be stopping and thinking:
1:15
"Well, is an exchange of ideas really happening here? Are people actually reading what's being written?" The answer is no.
1:23
They continue to expect their faculty to publish more and more scholarship
1:29
regardless of whether anyone is reading it--that just seems to be crazy.
1:36
I don't think there's an institutional or an organizational solution to that problem.
1:43
I think the only solution to the problem of the broken research model that we all have to operate with
1:51
--we all recognize that it's broken--the only solution is just to ridicule it until someone starts to pay attention.
2:00
Administrators are the ones who are saying, "We require a book for tenure."
2:05
Mark Bauerlein wrote a paper called, "Professors on the Production Line, Students on Their Own,"
2:13
in which he actually asks a really legitimate question. He says, towards the end of his essay:
2:19
"What university administrator is going to say, 'Come to our college we no longer require our assistant professors to write books'?"
2:27
It's as though we've painted ourselves into a corner--the entire institution of higher learning
2:31
and administrators and professors as well--where administrators are setting those research bars extremely high
2:37
and professors have no choice but to comply with them.
2:41
And the result is this crazy model where a ton of scholarship is being produced but none of it is being read.
2:47
And I don't know how we can fix that problem except by pointing out to administrators how nonsensical it is.
2:57
One of the most useful phrases that I've encountered to talk about this problem
3:01
is John Guillory's use of the phrase "scholarship expressed as publication."
3:05
He says that's the real problem. It's not the scholarship that's bad.
3:09
It's the fact that there's this mandate that scholarship should be expressed as publication that jams up the works.
3:17
I actually think the best way for an exchange of ideas to take place is at conferences.
3:23
I don't see why the end point of the development of a graduate student's or a professor's idea shouldn't be a conference presentation
3:31
where there's a live audience--even if it's only 20 or 30 people.
3:35
And there's a conversation. And there's possibilities for face-to-face conversations after the conferences.
3:40
I would actually want to reify conferences as the site at which real knowledge can be shared,
3:47
because it's not happening in the venue of monographs and articles, because nobody reads them.
3:54
So, the whole machinery of scholarly publication is in perpetual slow motion.
4:00
Whereas conferences, at least, are live and they're immediate.
4:04
It just seems to me to be a much more lively way to exchange information or ideas.
4:10
(music plays to a stop)