In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein publishes a study the results of which every honest humanities professor should know already: Just about everybody is publishing — and just about nobody is reading.
To test this hypothesis, Bauerlein studied the literary research produced by the English departments at the University of Georgia, the University of Buffalo, the University of Vermont, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There were three elements in his study: faculty salaries, books and articles published, and the impact of these publications on the scholarly community as measured by citations.
What he found was that the overwhelming majority of publications are rarely ever read – not by students, not by the general public, and not even by fellow scholars. To give one example, “Of 13 research articles published by current SUNY-Buffalo professors in 2004, 11 of them received zero to two citations, one had five, one 12.” The other schools in the study scored comparably.
The truth unearthed by this study is that most of us humanities academics are, in effect, journaling, not publishing. And that’s all right — or at least it was, until we began to insist that taxpayers shell out for ringside seats to our shadowboxing. But there’s the rub: The taxpayers are tapped out, state legislatures are cutting budgets, students and parents are pushing back at ever-escalating tuition costs, and total college-loan debt is about to hit one trillion dollars — more than total credit-card debt.
While there is virtue in the deep study of the humanities, the current system of public higher education is on a collision course with economic reality, and one of the casualties likely will be taxpayer support for research in the humanities. Bauerlein would not regard this retrenchment as necessarily harmful to teaching and learning. Far from it, in fact. To be sure, he is not anti-research, and neither am I. He agrees with the general proposition that “research makes professors better teachers and colleagues,” but he adds the qualification, “not at the current pace.” “We have reached the point at which the commitment to research at the current level actually damages the humanities, turning the human capital of the discipline toward ineffectual toil,” he writes. A corollary of the academy’s preoccupation with publishing is its indifference to students — especially undergraduates, whom professors all too often regard as distractions from the imperative business of getting tenure and promotion, which means getting published.
If cutbacks in funding for humanities research pull teachers away from their journaling, pushing them back into the classroom — where all but the precious few who are first-rate researchers belong — one result will be that more students will get taught by these previously absent professors, which should reduce costs at our public universities. More important, the resulting de-emphasis on publishing should help to return teaching to the forefront, where it belongs.
This is a really terrible study. Citation metrics are a really bad measure. The primary reason here is that most of the citations metrics used in these types of studies come from ISI, which only looks at citations in journals. The humanities depend much more on publication via books or collected editions, which aren't normally counted in such citation. databases.
Secondly, different fields have wildly different average citation numbers (see External Link
). The average immunology paper will receive 21 citations, while an average mathematics paper or computer science paper will get 3. This reflects more on the norms about publishing and citation within the field rather than the true impact of the work. Science articles get more citations because there are more publications in those fields, and if you've ever read one, they throw around citations like it was going out of style.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuseminormirror, OK, gotcha. Then what, pray tell, is the proper metric? Or if they're all rather stinky, which is best? "None of the above" is not an option for your reply: at least this study is a good faith attempt to see if the piles of paper (or "electrons") produced by professors are accorded worth even within the cocoon academia.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhat has always amazed me about English departments is how they have set up a tenure structure that rewards derivative articles of literary criticism over actual production of original literature....a Tom Clancy, John Grisham would never get tenure, but someone who wrote a dozen articles trying to reinterpret their work might.
As G.B. Shaw noted..."THose who can, do, those who can't....."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'll bet it would have been more amusing to study the citations themselves, tracing how many of them actually had relevance to the point they were cited to support. If no one reads the publications - then even fewer ever bother to look up the citations. The temptation to just cite anything is obvious. I have seen it often enough in college undergraduate work, and I wouldn't be shocked to discover it among the faculty.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI spent time in a public health program stuck in a PE department. The chair, a sports philosopher (?), urged me to concentrate on doing more "high impact" work - at a time when I was serving on a state EMS task force, wrote the guidance plan for the state to use to develop healthcare surge capacity for a public health emergency, and was consulting for DoD on the use of humanitarian assistance and medical civic action in stability operations (as the surge was building). When I mentione this, he told me he meant in journals where the articles would be cited more! (and from 2006-2011 I was among the department leaders in that regard ANYWAYS). The same guy referred to me as "a young guy just starting his career, even though I had over 20 years experience in public health - he didn't grasp that in this field, people tend to go back for PhDs midcareer rather than entering grad school immediately after a Bachelors as a way of avoiding the real world.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAlso, what funding for humanities research is their to pull back? Most humanities faculty members I know of rarely if ever even apply for external funding, much less receive it. At the school I taught at, they largely recieved funding from internal grant programs, generally funded by the earnings on accounts held by the universiy's research foundation. Essentially, their funding was obtained by siphoning off grants obtained by the science, engineering, and management faculties.
Universities can do this because of the ridiculous levels at which federal programs (NIH/NSF/etc) allow them to charge for indirect costs. At mypre-grad school state health agency, we were allowed to charge a maximum of 10.3% of direct expenses for indirect costs - at the school I mentioned above, the rate was 52%. Even a university is unlike to be 5x less administratively efficient than a government agency! Foundations and private sector funders do not allow such rates - the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a major funder of health research, for example, allows a maximum rate of 12%. Besides being an inefficient use of public funds, it distorts priorities and causes Universities to place an inordinate emphasis on faculty obtaining these federal grants - some medical and public health schools will not give tenure, for example, to a professor who does not get an NIH or AHRQ research grant even if they obtain a high level of non-federal funding. A sign of this is the mad bullrush Universities made for stimulus funds, the growth of Washington lobbying operations by larger schools, and in my field, the fact that last year MOST positions advertised were specifically seeking people doing "clinical outcomes research," because of the new funding for that area under the Obama healthcare bill.
I can understand the relatively low teaching loads for STEM faculty, given that they in general are well funded and the University maximizes its investment in faculty by hiring a lot of them who devote the majority of their time to research that produces more income than tuition and using a smaller portion of the time of each to support the educational mission, What I can't understand is having such low teaching loads for liberal arts and humanities faculties - except for the fact that they are more likely to be insecure and whine if they are treated differently! Frankly, their research efforts provides a poor return in general on the academy's investment, because they generate less revenue from research (and much of what is generated is in the form of book royalties, which they, rather than the school, retain - unlike grant funds for STEM researchers which offset part of their salaries). As a resultr, an undergraduate STEM major is MORE likely to be taught by a faculty member than a liberal arts students. At the school I taught at, I also received an undergrad chemistry degree. Then, as now, ALL classes were primarily taught by a tenure-track faculty member, with graduate teaching assistants serving to supplement their efforts through smaller breakout recitation sessions and by running laboratory sessions. In many liberal arts programs, on the other hand, essentially all freshman-sophomore courses are taught by graduate teaching assistants with little or no faculty involvement.
Low liberal arts teaching loads serve the faculty in a number of ways - it lowers the amount of high-demand teaching, provides funding for graduate students that encourages enrollment past the level that can be supported by the non-academic workforce (resulting in the known issue of oversuppy of liberal arts PhDs - "Do you want fries with that?"), which means a greater demand for *graduate courses*, which further keeps faculty away from dealing with freshman-sophomore survey courses, and supports their egos by allowing them to imagine that their is as much demand for their research - and it is as valuable - as that done by STEM, Management, and Medical researchers, despite clear market signals that it isn't as valuable. I seriously doubt that most of the Mickey Mouse-type courses that are often described in this blog would exist if the universities demanded that liberal art professors teach courses that were demanded to make up for the lack of market demand for their work.
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