The thing about Water’s argument that gives me pause — which is different from disagreement — is the sense that there is one natural, virtuous way to do scholarship, and we must make our genres fit that. I think the question is what sort of genre enables what sort of work, and how we want to incorporate each of them into our scholarly projects given the fact we are coming up with new and potentially useful genres all the time. I DO think, however, that forcing slow thought into fast genres is a mistake, so I think I agree with Waters on that score.

As far as these dark details can be discerned, my department could tenure me if I do nothing about articles, since we are a four-field school and think books are for ‘humanists’. And I don’t look forward to writing a book since the last two I wrote just about killed me. But I want to write one because I have something booklength inside of me that is trying to come out.

By contrast, the other hard case is a scholar with 30-odd “essays” on every conceivable topic, some of which are widely read, but which represent only a kind of hyper-productive op-ed mentality… not serious research projects. What then? How does one argue against the hyper-productive scholar who is hyper-productive precisely for all the reasons Water’s mentions?

Having said that (and this has been discussed on this site, I believe), it would be great to see some real attempts to change the over-valuation of the monograph–and particularly the fact that a monograph (or two) is a de facto prerequisite for tenure in most departments. I often get the sense that if you mention that you’re not sure whether there’s a worthwhile book in your dissertation, fellow p.docs and others assume you’re not a serious scholar. “Yeah, uh, I’m working on my manuscript…”

But a serious question for those of you with tenure-track jobs: would you support the tenure bid of a colleague who had no monograph, but had published a series of excellent and influential articles?

Assuming a miracle happened and all these essays were really good (by whatever weird criteria of good Waters is using), I still don’t see this as solving a problem. I would like to live in a world where all essays were good, but I’m not sure quite how to describe why we need that, rather than say, better teaching and more money.

The problem I see is quite different: coordination of research fields. Water’s model is still a model of the individual scholar “owning” something, only instead of a book that claims to own or invent new ideas, it’s an essay. What we need are ways for scholars in the humanities and social sciences to discover ways to coordinate and share research work, to work collectively on issues and ideas, and to publish in targeted and meaningful ways that advance those goals, without sacrificing “creativity” and the competition that allows scholars to distinguish themselves. And most importantly, good criteria for evaluating the validity of an essay or book which are independently shared and available to argue about. I think, though, that I’m iin agreement that a Slow Scholarship movement is in order. George Marcus once wrote a nice piece on this “On the Unbearable Slowness of being an anthropologist”

One of the comments on the piece points out that physicists regard only papers as evidence of work, and are routinely in the position of assessing a paper on which a scholar has been one of hundreds of authors… one can only boggle at the hermeneutic sophistication that must be necessary to do so in that case.