Abstract: Networked and programmable media are part of a rapidly developing me diascape transforming how citizens of developed countries do business, conduct their social lives, communicate with one another, and?perhaps most significant?think. This essay explores the hypothesis that we are in the midst of a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses challenges to education at all levels, including colleges and universities. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the shift; it is already apparent in present-day college students, but its full effects are likely to be realized only when youngsters who are now twelve years old reach our institutions of higher education. To prepare, we need to become aware of the shift, understand its causes, and think creatively and innovatively about new educational strategies appropriate to the coming changes. The shift in cognitive styles can be seen in the contrast between deep attention and hyper attention. Deep attention, the cognitive style tradi tionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring out side stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention is character ized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom. The contrast in the two cognitive modes may be captured in an image: picture a college sophomore, deep in Pride and

Abstract: A few years ago I, along with a few colleagues from my department, went to dinner with a candidate for a junior position in eighteenth-century British literature. In the course of the conversation, the job candidate de clared that it was impossible to get published without archival work. This was something I had never heard, and it stuck in my craw. Whether or not her assessment of things was accurate and despite the likelihood that it varies a lot by field, I recognized that this remark does in fact represent something about the direction of literary studies today. While not literally true, the remark bespeaks what, for those whose disci plinary formation is taking place in the United States in the early twenty first century, is an established norm. This norm diverges widely from those that governed my own professional formation three decades ago, and I want to say?at the risk of sounding like the aging curmudgeon I am becom ing?that I believe this direction literary studies has taken is misguided. It was about twenty years ago that English studies witnessed the rise of new historicism: this burgeoning movement was not only the site of brilliant critical performances but also a much needed corrective to the ahistoricism then predominant. The time was ripe for such a course cor rection: ahistoricism had been persuasively linked to sexism, racism, and elitism; attacks on the canon had called into question the notion of time less works; literary studies had been ahistorical for too long.

Abstract: It is absolutely essential that the learned community at the university . . . contain a faculty that is independent of the government’s command with regard to its teachings; one that, having no commands to give, is free to evaluate everything, and concerns itself with the interests of the sciences, that is, with truth: one in which reason is authorized to speak out publicly. For without a faculty of this kind, the truth would not come to light (and this would be to the government’s own detriment); but reason is by its nature free and admits of no command to hold something as true (no imperative “Believe!” but only a free “I believe”). —Immanuel Kant

Abstract: The MLA's Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Pro motion is to be commended for producing a thoughtful, fair-minded, and constructive report, informed by careful research into historical trends and current conditions. The report provides an extraordinarily clear and useful account of the present crisis for all of us who are concerned about transformations in scholarly publishing and their particularly heavy im pact on junior faculty members.

Abstract: Recently the MLA and its affiliate ADE produced two significant reports that highlight the professional challenges currently facing the profession, one from the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and the other from the ADE Ad Hoc Committee on the Status of African American Faculty Members in English. While the MLA report focuses on the increasing demands being placed on faculty members in the tenure and promotion process, the ADE report details the particular difficulties that African American graduate students and faculty members contend with as they navigate the various stages of ca reer development. These two issues are not unrelated. Both reports make important and concrete recommendations on how to create more diverse academic communities that foster the expansion of the field in terms of scholarly contributions and on how to promote specific institutional prac tices that work to ensure that the professoriat more adequately reflects the population at large. These publications provide a much-needed institu tional context for understanding individual narratives of racialization and marginalization many of us witness in the profession. These reports, the result of massive effort and care, will only prove significant, however, if they are circulated, discussed, and integrated into the ongoing conversa tions all of us engage in about what it means to be part of the academy. This article and the two others (by Williams and by Justice and Barker) published in this issue of Profession under the heading taken from the ADE

Abstract: As a member of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, I am happy to share here a few reflections on our report and, especially, on the urgency of our policy proposals. In doing so, I want to focus on and around the report's third recommendation, which reads, "The profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of scholarship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios" (11). Indeed, if there was one aspect of the data that the task force collected that disturbed me the most, even if it confirmed my suspicions, it was the statistics showing just how fixated we are in English and foreign lan guage departments on monograph production as the gold standard in tenure and promotion cases. Almost ninety percent of Carnegie Doctorate-granting institutions rank monographs "important" or "very important" in promotion and tenure processes, and almost half of all Carnegie Master's and BA insti tutions do the same. Even more alarming, a third of all departments and half of all PhD-granting institutions now demand progress toward a second book for tenure. And while articles are also valued by almost all institutions, other forms of scholarship?broadly defined?are not: textbooks, bibliographic scholarship, scholarly editions, and journal editing are all being devalued. In my opinion, this is an untenable and unjust state of affairs. I describe this state as untenable and unjust not only for practical rea sons, given contextual factors that the report details and that I reiterate

Abstract: I am impressed with the report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and appreciate its seriousness and all the very careful work that was done to gather data and present them to the membership of the MLA. I first raised the alarm about the imminent crisis and tried to analyze the situation on the basis of my extensive work in university bookstores, my work teaching at Chicago State University and the University of Minnesota, and my work as an editor at two very differently sized and situated presses, the University of Minnesota Press (1978-84) and Harvard University Press (1984 to the present). I had a number of learned intuitions, but I had not systematically re searched the issues that surround the questions of publication and ten ure. For example, I had visited dozens of universities and attended many conferences, but my on-the-ground research was limited to the six to ten schools I had visited to participate in intensive discussions of matters I had raised in my first essay for PMLA ("Modest Proposal") and that I was raising in my writing of Enemies of Promise. I especially regretted my inability to pin down high academic administrators. When I talked to Myles Brand and Nils Hasselmo, former university presidents who had moved on to new pastures, higher up Parnassus, I was told that things were much better than I thought. But David Schulenberger, then head of the Lawrence campus of the University of Kansas, did not agree. He had come to understand the depth of the systemic problem transforming

Abstract: The publication of the report from the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion provoked a range of responses, but none so vehement as those to our recommendation that departments consider alternatives to the monograph as the gold standard in tenure cases. It was possible for some to read the recommendation of the task force as a devaluation of the monograph in favor of a lower standard for tenure. Although the task force was perceived rightly as challenging what has been called the tyranny of the monograph or its fetishization in con texts of review (the subject addressed by my colleague Donald Hall in this issue of Profession), it was by no means our intention to recommend that standards for tenure be lowered. The premise of that perhaps inevitable misunderstanding is that there can be no accomplishment higher than a published book and that the prevalence of the demand for a monograph in tenure reviews is in fact an indication of rising standards in scholarship. In truth, it is not immediately evident why the dominance of the monographic form is a bad thing. But in analyzing the monograph phe nomenon, we on the task force had to not only look at the inherent value of the monograph form but also attempt to identify and assess the full im plications of the monograph's domination for the entire system of evalu ation?from the admission of graduate students to tenure and posttenure merit reviews. Realizing in the end that we had strong reservations about

Abstract: How gratifying it was for me to read the MLA task force report earlier this year! As a longtime higher education junkie and a more recently self appointed expert on higher education policy, I have been one of the many critics lamenting the inability of the academy to redesign the reward sys tem for college and university teachers. People like me have long felt that the existing system overcompensates, research accomplishment while un dercompensating teaching and service, and this systemic dysfunctionality is becoming more pronounced. If only the reward system could be more carefully articulated, many of us argue, more scholars would respond by doing what they really want to do and what they do best. But neither disciplinary departments nor university administrations have been willing to budge from the specification of research as the primary (and, functionally, only) criterion for making tenure, promo tion, and salary judgments. The question for reformers has always been, Where to start?, in making change, and the answer usually has been, Not on my campus; we will begin to think about reform of the reward system when other, comparable departments have acted. The problem worsens the higher one gets on the academic institutional food chain, of course, but it exists even for many departments outside the research university orbit. Thus Darwinian institutional competition has been an

Abstract: It was March of 1997, and I was wandering through the book fair at the CCCC convention in Minneapolis. I'd nearly completed my first year as a faculty member at a small college?a job I'd dreamed of throughout my graduate years?and though I'd enjoyed it, I'd been looking forward to this conference for weeks, for the opportunity to meet up with old friends, the chance to reinvigorate my teaching and writing by catching a good panel or two, and the opportunity to load up on a year's worth of reading. For me, CCCC had always been my home away from home. That year, though, I was feeling something different: browsing through the titles, skimming the tables of contents?indeed, even flipping through the conference program?I felt a growing sense of unease, like looking into a mir ror and seeing someone else's face. I recognized the language of these works and the validity of their arguments. Nevertheless?and it took me a while to articulate this, even to myself?very little of what concerned these authors seemed relevant to my own life; to the challenges I'd faced in the last seven months at my new job; and to the joys I'd discovered working at an institu tion where my relationships with students went beyond the classroom, where my best friends were in the sociology and music departments, and where, if I needed to talk to the college president about an emergency, all I had to do was call her house, and her husband would give me her cell-phone number. In the next few years, I learned that I was not the only small-school academic feeling this sense of?well, alienation, for what else can you call

Abstract: Michel Foucault would have found rich material in dissecting America's structures of primary and secondary education, increasingly constituted as they are by a regime of accountability and assessment. In Massachu setts, a state often cited as leading the nation in the development of this regime, history teachers must prepare students for state tests by cover ing just enough information about several hundred historical events or issues to enable their students to get the right answer. The curriculum guide to the Massachusetts English Language Arts assessment lists well over a hundred recommended books that teachers might wish to use in their classrooms. But lest some students be unfairly advantaged by hav ing read books that might appear on the tests, the textual excerpts in those tests don't use examples from any of the recommended books. If we put aside for a moment the issue of the fundamental educational value of these tests, the approach to date has produced at best mixed results: National Assessment of Educational Progress scores are essentially flat, while evidence from international comparisons (PISA and TIMSS) shows that American children's academic skills are too often a mile wide and an inch deep (Beatty). As a result, students are consistently unable to answer questions that do not match a familiar format. Nor is there better news with regard to our use of "pure" ability testing such as the SAT. As Rich ard Rothstein has persuasively argued, future life prospects, measured in

Abstract: To begin, I want to clarify "teaching institution," a term I use here as short hand for those institutions that generally focus on undergraduate rather than graduate education, that are thus categorized by the Carnegie sys tem as either Master's or Baccalaureate institutions, and that are therefore distinct in this way from research universities. I am not using the term to suggest that teaching is the only activity such institutions find important, nor am I using the term to imply that teaching is an activity that research institutions devalue. Teaching is an important activity at research institu tions, and indeed high-quality teaching?even of undergraduates?may be found there, no matter what certain polemicists and pundits say. Likewise, scholarship is an important activity at teaching institutions, and indeed high-quality scholarship goes on there too, no matter what others, includ ing some of our colleagues at research institutions, might think. My own institution, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, is classified in the cur rent Carnegie Classification system as a Master's institution in the "smaller programs" subcategory. At Mansfield, English faculty members teach four courses per semester, two of which are usually composition courses. We are a unionized faculty, contractually obligated to demonstrate teaching effectiveness, scholarly growth, and university service in order to have our appointments renewed and ultimately to earn tenure and promotion. Now that you know where I'm coming from, I'll arrive at my main point as quickly as I can. Textual scholarship is devalued across academia,

Abstract: The assertion that scholarship is limited on the relation between ethnicity and student evaluations of faculty members is perhaps an understatement. While there is a wealth of scholarship on the relation between gender and student evaluations of faculty members, little has been published on how ethnicity (of both faculty members and students) informs students' rat ing of teaching effectiveness. Throughout research into issues specific to minority faculty members there are passing references to the sometimes unfair use of student evaluations to determine faculty tenure, promotion, and merit pay; but these references do not and cannot serve as pertinent scholarship on how a faculty member's ethnic background creates biases that reveal themselves in those evaluations. In one of the few essays that address the relation between ethnicity and evaluation, Heidi J. Nast explores, among other things, "student re sistances to multicultural teaching and faculty diversity [and] the risks that derive from problematic institutional deployment of student evalua tions as a means of judging multicultural curricular and faculty success" (103). Nast's essay is especially revealing in the following articulations. First, "students use evaluations to register anger and disapproval at hav ing to negotiate topics and issues in a scholarly way which conflict with heretofore learned social values and assumptions." Second, the likelihood of negative evaluations increases when faculty members "curricularly ad dress issues of homophobia, racism, classism, misogyny or heterosexism"