The Modern Language Association has released its long-awaited report into how scholarship is being evaluated for tenure and promotion in English and foreign language departments in U.S. higher education.
     
The report, from the MLA’s Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, is based on an array of sources and a spring 2005 online survey of language departments in 734 disparate institutions across the U.S. and addresses issues for the sector such as the buyer’s market for academic labour, rising tenure standards, library impoverishment and the state of academic publishing. It also lays out 20 recommendations that should be of considerable interest to humanities and social science faculty.
     
Worries that declining monograph production may be leaving behind a generation of tenurable academics provided the initial impetus for the study, which — unlike an earlier MLA report on the future of scholarly publishing — suggests little that would redress the profession’s complicity in the “speed up” of the academic conveyor.
     
But the report does flag the upward creep of faculty workload since the 1970s, and rightly argues that it is inextricably linked to the casualization of academic labour. The ratcheting up of tenure standards during this same period is also noted, but not discussed as a treatable workload problem in its own right. Rather, the report praises junior scholars for “ris(ing) to meet … ever-growing demands” and notes the general satisfaction of survey respondents with existing requirements for tenure.
     
As the task force surveyed department chairs, this contentment should hardly be surprising. One of the unspoken pressures driving publishing expectations upwards may well be the fact that academic rewards and prestige track institution and department performance, and not just that of individuals. If one accepts that the market position of any academic — monetary rewards, likelihood of receiving outside funding and attractiveness to other institutions — is partly a function of the demonstrable productivity of his or her immediate colleagues, it becomes easier to explain the shift in academic focus from teaching, service to the institution and civic activities to publication.
     
The pressure on individuals to produce a high volume of new material, combined with the attendant proliferation of scholarship, militates against conscientious scholars even keeping abreast of developments outside their own field (narrowly construed). The MLA report acknowledges that “the accumulated volume of scholarship in book form is increasingly difficult to master and that scholars tend to read monographs in very restricted contexts,” but mutes any harsher suggestion that the publishing imperative may have had a deleterious impact on quality.
     
The difficulty of remaining engaged and knowledgeable is further exacerbated by external pressures. With reflection and reading nearly impossible to quantify, one could argue that political, corporate and managerial enthusiasm for “accountability” and “productivity” measures runs counter to the cultivation of breadth and wisdom in higher education.
     
Ultimately, the MLA’s report does not do enough to disentangle the idea of tenure from a market-driven concern for production. Properly understood, tenure should not be seen as either a carrot or a stick, but rather as a condition — the condition of security merited by the expertise of the academic professional and necessary for the proper exercise of that individual’s academic freedom. Viewed in this light, it is counterproductive for the tenure process to do more than certify an individual’s competence as a scholar based on the informed and professional judgment of his or her peers.
     
Our present system, however, conflates the tenure and hiring processes to such a degree that tenure criteria no longer serve primarily to confirm the fitness of an individual to be tenured, but now assess the relative research productivity of a candidate within a competitive labour pool.
     
The report recommends a number of solutions aimed at ensuring the tenure process is “fair,” “transparent” and far removed from the bad old days of cigar smoke and decanted sherry. The shift from Old Boyism to objective standards was laudable, but we should take pains to keep the tenuring process a judicious filter and not make it an indiscriminate goad.
     
Ironically, the evidence provided by the task force suggests the academic speed up has had little effect on the success rate of tenure candidates. Apparently, faculty hiring committees continue to do a good job of selecting candidates and survey data show the tenure “denial rate” has remained stable at around 10 per cent.
     
Junior faculty have indeed “risen” to the challenge, but one wonders at what cost.

Marcus Harvey is a professional officer at CAUT.