3.2 Meeting with art history chairs  (Page 2/2)

According to art history chairs, there are a number of reasons why publishers’ preferences are not matching upwell with the manuscripts the field is seeking to publish. There is a greater concern on the part of publishers to reach wideraudiences, said one chair. Another said, “The presses are out of step with where subareas in the field are growing. Publishers willsay, ‘We don’t publish Asian [art] or pre-Colombian, etc.’ So, arthistory fields are opening up, but presses are not following along.”

One chair said that part of the blame lies within the field itself. “Art history, as a discipline, is somewhatunfocused. In many cases, we are trying to sell a product to an audience that really doesn’t understand what that productis.”

Regardless of the reasons, even as the disconnect between what publishers want to publish and what thefield needs to be published grows wider, tenure committees still require the publication of a book for tenure. What this means, saidone chair, is that “we have dumped our tenure decisions onto the publishers.”

So, what ought to be done? One chair said, “If publishers can’t publish things that won’t make money, then we haveto turn this around and say that our tenure rules are too strict. But tenure rules can only be changed if institutions like Harvardand Princeton take the lead.” Another echoed this by saying, “At places where keeping good assistant professors is a problem (suchas at a ‘second-tier institution’), we need to modify our tenure expectations. [But]there is a strong sense that we have to do what the big dogs do (Harvard, Yale, etc.). We can’t get the ballrolling; that’s up to the Harvards, etc.”

In discussing alternative criteria that might be used in judging candidates for tenure, chairs offered thefollowing suggestions:

• “What’s important is the impact of the writing (in either books or articles), although a certain quantity [of output]is also important.”
• “If respected experts in the field say that this is a respected work, then so be it, regardless of where it ispublished.”
• “What is key are the letters coming from outside [in support of a candidate’s work].”

One of the chairs pointed out that it wasn’t always the case that books were the gold standard for scholarshipin the field. “I am amazed at the quality of some of the older journal articles,” he said, suggesting that the mode of publicationneed not be linked so closely to the notion of scholarly worth. One person said, though, that there are not enough journals availablefor publishing scholarship in “art history” per se. Related to this, another person noted how difficult it was to find articles inlittle-known journals.

One chair advocated moving more towards the “science model” of publishing and tenure review. That is, arthistory scholars should be encouraged to focus more on publishing articles and advancing the field incrementally, rather than throughexhaustive monographs. Another noted that many tenure committees are increasingly made up of scholars from the sciences, who areused to evaluating scholarly credentials in such a fashion, throughexamining “webs of citations,” and the like.

Although there was little time available during this meeting to discuss the possibilities of electronicpublication, there was a sense among two or three of the chairs (though by no means a consensus) that “the book problem will goaway” because the book will go away. “I see more and more citations of URLs in papers,” noted one chair. Another said, “Low-costelectronic publication will resolve some of these issues, such as textual books and CDs with images.” A third wondered, given theunfolding possibilities of working in the digital medium, “Will the next generation even want a physical book?”