Executive Summary:
In higher education in the United States, teaching and research in the fields of language and literature are in a desperate condition. Laboring on the age-old axiom “publish-or-perish,” thousands of professors, lecturers, and graduate students are busy producing dissertations, books, essays, and reviews. Over the past five decades, their collective productivity has risen from 13,000 to 72,000 publications per year. But the audience for language and literature scholarship has diminished, with unit sales for books now hovering around 300.
At the same time, the relations between teachers and students have declined. While 43 percent of two-year public college students and 29 percent of four-year public college students require remedial coursework, costing $2 billion annually, one national survey reports that 37 percent of first-year arts/humanities students “never” discuss course readings with teachers outside of class, and 41 percent only do so “sometimes.”
These trends are not unrelated. Academic engagement on the part of students is a reflection of how much teachers demand it. But with the research mandate hovering over them, teachers have no incentive to push it. If the system favors publication, not mentoring, hours in the office in conversation with sophomores are counter-productive or even damaging to career and livelihood.
Universities need to reconsider the relative value placed on research and teaching in the evaluation of professors. This paper offers several recommendations, including limiting the amount of material that tenure committees will review and creating a “teacher track” in which doctoral students are trained and rewarded for generalist knowledge and multiple course facility rather than a highly-specialized expertise.
Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research. By Mark Bauerlein. The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 2009.
Research As Self-Branding. By Mark Bauerlein. Minding the Campus, July 24, 2007.
Are the Kids All Right? By Christy Hall Robinson. The American, January 27, 2009. Review of The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein.
Unread Monographs, Uninspired Undergrads. By Elizabeth Redden. Inside Higher Ed, March 18, 2009.
Mark Bauerlein asks the “so what”question. By Alex Reid. alex-reid.net, March 2009.
Grad School scrutinized. By David Burt. Yale Daily News, September 21, 2011.
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The Tribes That Hire the PhDs. By Daniel B. Klein. Minding the Campus, February 10, 2013.
Superpowers: The American Academic Elite. By Robert Oprisko. The Georgetown Public Policy Review, December 3, 2012.
Academic Superpowers. By Scott Jaschik. Inside Higher Ed, December 5, 2012.
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