Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating 
Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion
MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion

December 2006

Profession 2007

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�� Profession�2007

Report of the ML A Task Force 
on Evaluating Scholarship 
for Tenure and Promotion

Executive Summary

In 2004 the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association of 
America created a task force to examine current standards and emerging 
trends in publication requirements for tenure and promotion in English and 
foreign language departments in the United States. The council’s action came 
in response to widespread anxiety in the profession about ever-­rising demands 
for research productivity and shrinking humanities lists by academic publish-­
ers, worries that forms of scholarship other than single-­authored books were 
not being properly recognized, and fears that a generation of junior scholars 
would have a significantly reduced chance of being tenured. The task force 
was charged with investigating the factual basis behind such concerns and 
making recommendations to address the changing environment in which 
scholarship is being evaluated in tenure and promotion decisions.

To fulfill its charge, the task force reviewed numerous studies, reports, 
and documents; surveyed department chairs; interviewed deans and other 
senior administrators; solicited written comments from association mem-­
bers; and consulted with other committees and organizations. The most 
significant data-­gathering instrument was a spring 2005 online survey of 
1,339 departments in 734 institutions across the United States covering a 
range of doctorate, master’s, and baccalaureate institutions. The response 
rate to the survey (51% of all departments and 67% of all institutions) 
provided a solid basis for the task force’s analysis and recommendations.

The information gathered by the task force substantiates some worries 
and mitigates others. The results of the MLA survey, which covered the 
academic years from 1994–95 to 2003–04, initially seemed reassuring, 



10�|||�rePort

since they suggested that there has been no perceptible lowering of tenure 
rates among those in the final stages of the tenure process, where the de-­
nial rate seems to be around 10%. But further research presented a more 
complex picture. The MLA survey showed that well over 20% of tenure-­
track faculty members leave the departments that originally hired them 
before they come up for tenure. Data from studies conducted by other 
groups suggest that fewer than 40% of the PhD recipients who make up 
the pool of applicants for tenure-­track positions obtain such positions and 
go through the tenure process at the institutions where they are initially 
hired, and a somewhat larger number of modern language doctorate re-­
cipients—more than 40%—never obtain tenure-­track appointments. In 
the aggregate, then, PhDs in the fields represented by the MLA appear to 
have about a 35% chance of getting tenure.

The MLA survey further documents that the demands placed on can-­
didates for tenure, especially demands for publication, have been expand-­
ing in kind and increasing in quantity. While rising expectations have 
been driven by the nation’s most prestigious research universities, the 
effects ripple throughout all sectors of higher education, where greater 
emphasis has been placed on publication in tenure and promotion deci-­
sions even at institutions that assign heavy teaching loads. Over 62% of 
all departments report that publication has increased in importance in 
tenure decisions over the last ten years. The percentage of departments 
ranking scholarship of primary importance (over teaching) has more than 
doubled since the last comparable survey, conducted by Thomas Wilcox 
in 1968: from 35.4% to 75.7% (Comprehensive Survey 36).

Judging from the MLA’s survey findings, junior faculty members are 
meeting these ever-­growing demands even though this is a time when 
universities have lowered or eliminated subsidies for scholarly presses and 
libraries have dramatically reduced their purchases of books in the hu-­
manities. And despite a worsening climate for book publication, the mono-­
graph has become increasingly important in comparison with other forms 
of publication. Indeed, 88.9% of departments in Carnegie Doctorate-­
 granting, 44.4% in Carnegie Master’s, and 48% in Carnegie Baccalaure-­
ate institutions now rank publication of a monograph “very important” or 
“important” for tenure. The status of the monograph as a gold standard is 
confirmed by the expectation in almost one-­third of all departments sur-­
veyed (32.9%) of progress toward completion of a second book for tenure. 
This expectation is even higher in doctorate-­granting institutions, where 
49.8% of departments now demand progress toward a second book.

While publication expectations for tenure and promotion have in-­
creased, the value that departments place on scholarly activity outside 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�11

monograph publication remains within a fairly restricted range. Refereed 
journal articles continue to be valued in tenure evaluations; only 1.6% of 
responding departments rated refereed journal articles “not important” 
in tenure and promotion decisions. Other activities were more widely de-­
valued. Translations were rated “not important” by 30.4% of departments 
(including 31.3% of foreign language departments), as were textbooks by 
28.9% of departments, bibliographic scholarship by 28.8% of departments, 
scholarly editions by 20% of departments, and editing a scholarly journal 
by 20.7% of departments. Even more troubling is the state of evaluation 
for digital scholarship, now an extensively used resource for scholars across 
the humanities: 40.8% of departments in doctorate-­granting institutions 
report no experience evaluating refereed articles in electronic format, and 
65.7% report no experience evaluating monographs in electronic format.

Given the trends the task force has identified, we offer the following rec-­
ommendations to address this complex situation before it becomes a crisis.

 1. Departments and institutions should practice and promote transparency 
throughout the tenuring process.

 2. Departments and institutions should calibrate expectations for achieving 
tenure and promotion with institutional values, mission, and practice.

 3. The profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of schol-­
arship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly 
essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios.

 4. Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship 
produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and cre-­
ate procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.

 5. Departments should devise a letter of understanding that makes the expecta-­
tions for new faculty members explicit. The letter should state what previous 
scholarship will count toward tenure and how evaluation of joint appoint-­
ments will take place between departments or programs.

 6. Departments and institutions should provide support commensurate with 
expectations for achieving tenure and promotion (start-­up funds, subven-­
tions, research leaves, and so forth).

 7. Departments and institutions should establish mentoring structures that 
provide guidance to new faculty members on scholarship and on the optimal 
balance of publication, teaching, and service.

 8. Department chairs should receive guidance on the proper preparation of a 
tenure dossier.

 9. Departments and institutions should construct and implement models for 
intermediate reviews that precede tenure reviews.

10. Departments should conduct an in-­depth evaluation of candidates’ dossiers 
for tenure or promotion at the departmental level. Presses or outside referees 
should not be the main arbiters in tenure cases.

11. Scholarship, teaching, and service should be the three criteria for tenure. 
Those responsible for tenure reviews should not include collegiality as an 
additional criterion for tenure.



12�|||�rePort

12. Departments and institutions should limit the number of outside letters (in 
general, to no more than six). Scholars should be chosen to write letters 
based primarily on their knowledge of the candidate’s field(s). Letters should 
be limited to evaluating scholarly work. Candidates should participate in se-­
lecting (or rejecting) some of their potential reviewers.

13. The profession as a whole should encourage scholars at all levels to write 
substantive book reviews.

14. Departments and institutions should facilitate collaboration among scholars 
and evaluate it fairly.

15. The task force encourages further study of the unfulfilled parts of its charge 
with respect to multiple submissions of manuscripts and comparisons of the 
number of books published by university presses between 1999 and 2005.

16. The task force recommends establishing concrete measures to support uni-­
versity presses.

17. The task force recognizes that work needs to be done on several questions 
not asked in its survey: salaries of junior and recently tenured faculty mem-­
bers, the role of unions, tenure appeals processes, and the lengthening of the 
pretenure period.

18. The task force recommends that a study of faculty members of color be 
conducted.

19. The task force encourages discussion of the current form of the dissertation (as a 
 monograph-­in-­progress) and of the current trends in the graduate curriculum.

20. Departments should undertake a comprehensive review to ensure that their 
expectations for tenure are consistent with their institutions’ values and mis-­
sion and that each step in the process is fair and transparent.

Task Force Report

Preamble

“. . . How can ever-­increasing demands for publication as a qualification 
for tenure and promotion be sustained when scholars find it harder and 
harder to publish their books? On a broader level . . . how [will the] shifts 
in academic publishing . . . affect our scholarship, as well as the profession 
as a whole?” (MLA Ad Hoc Committee 176). These questions defined the 
primary concerns of the 2002 report of the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on 
the Future of Scholarly Publishing, chaired by Judith Ryan. The report 
delineated a “current crisis” (182) in the profession, exacerbated by a per-­
ceived disjunction between what tenure committees value—the scholarly 
monograph—and what they reportedly devalue—editions, collections of 
essays, anthologies, and textbooks—scholarship that is “forming a larger 
and larger part of what scholarly presses wish to publish.” The possibility 
that “younger scholars may well be increasingly edged out of the publishing 
process” (177), as the report concluded, led the MLA Executive Council 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�13

and its then president, Stephen Greenblatt, to write an open letter to the 
members of the association, outlining a “systemic, structural, and at base 
economic” problem: because of departments’ insistence “that only books 
and more books will do” to measure scholarly achievement, even as univer-­
sity presses cut back on the number of books they publish annually in cer-­
tain fields, “higher education stands to lose, or at least severely to damage, a 
generation of junior scholars.” The ideas that Greenblatt and the Executive 
Council solicited from MLA members—specific ways to ease this complex 
and self-­defeating situation largely by changing expectations for tenure—
generated an outpouring of responses. The Executive Council thus decided 
to create a task force in 2004 to continue analyzing these issues. This report 
summarizes the deliberations and findings of the task force.

The MLA Executive Council wished to address not only the concerns 
in the committee’s report and the Greenblatt letter and responses to that 
letter but also, and more broadly, the general anxiety that appears to exist 
in the profession about ever-­rising demands on the scholarship, teaching, 
and service of junior faculty members coming up for tenure; the dismay 
over the reduced output from or, in some cases, the phasing out of the 
humanities lists of academic presses; the worry that forms of scholarship 
other than the monograph are not properly recognized or evaluated, espe-­
cially when they come in electronic form; and ultimately, because of this 
confluence of factors, the fear that a generation of junior scholars will have 
a markedly reduced chance of being tenured. The council was alarmed, 
then, that a disjunction existed between rising expectations for tenure and 
diminishing availability of publishing outlets in the fields represented by 
the MLA. It was concerned about the narrowing definitions of what con-­
stitutes scholarship for tenure and promotion, about the exclusion of new, 
alternative forms of scholarship, and about the failure to take account 
of the full range of practices that now constitute the system of scholarly 
exchange. Finally, the council believed there was a need to revise proce-­
dures for evaluating scholarship to achieve equity and fairness throughout 
the tenuring process. To address this set of issues, the Executive Council 
charged the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promo-­
tion first and foremost “with examining the procedures used to evaluate 
scholarly publications for tenure and promotion.” In addition:

The task force will consider the effects of the widely discussed crisis in 
scholarly publishing (and the multiple forms that scholarly publishing now 
takes) on the criteria used to assess scholarly work in tenure reviews. The 
task force will review the guidelines and documents that the MLA has is-­
sued in the past on matters relevant to its charge (e.g., recommendations 
on outside evaluation letters for tenure cases). The task force will acquire 



14�|||�rePort

specific information from department chairs, deans of humanities, and fac-­
ulty members recently reviewed for tenure about the requirements for ten-­
ure—and the outcome of tenure cases—in research institutions as well as 
liberal arts colleges and other kinds of postsecondary schools for the period 
1999–2004. For the same period, the task force will compare the number 
of books (volumes) in the fields represented by the MLA published by aca-­
demic presses. The task force will also discuss the issue of subventions and 
of multiple submissions of manuscripts to presses. (“Meeting” 280–82)

In striving to fulfill its charge, the task force reviewed numerous 
MLA studies, reports, documents, and statements and discussed a num-­
ber of readings on topics related to our concerns; they will be referenced 
throughout this report (see the works-­cited list). We also interviewed 
deans and other administrators; we published an item in the MLA News-
letter asking recently hired and recently tenured members of our pro-­
fession to comment on the tenure process at their institutions and on 
their own experiences with this process; and we consulted with various 
MLA committees (Committee on the Status of Women in the Profes-­
sion, Committee on Information Technology, Committee on the Litera-­
tures of People of Color in the United States and Canada, Committee 
on Scholarly Editions) and held a meeting with the Council of Editors of 
Learned Journals. Several members of the task force presented some of 
our preliminary findings at the 2005 MLA Annual Convention.

The task force took seriously the charge to “acquire specific informa-­
tion from department chairs,” and we requested that the MLA conduct 
a substantial survey to determine as precisely as possible how expecta-­
tions for achievements in scholarship, teaching, and service had evolved 
from 1995 to 2004 and what rates of granting tenure were realized during 
this period. It seemed crucial to the task force that statistical information 
replace the anecdotes about heightened tenure criteria and diminishing 
tenure rates that have circulated in the profession and contributed to the 
belief in the often-­mentioned crisis. The knowledge that chairs have of 
their departments’ practices and their institutions’ procedures and values 
needed to be described as concretely as possible.

The Executive Council approved funding for this survey, which was 
conducted in spring 2005 and based on a questionnaire drafted by mem-­
bers of the task force and the MLA staff and designed for Web-­based 
administration. The MLA’s file of department administrators was used to 
define a universe of 4,138 modern language departments in 1,365 four-­year, 
 degree-­granting, Title IV–participating Carnegie Doctorate-­granting, 
Master’s, and Baccalaureate institutions in the continental United States. 
Of these 4,138 departments, a subset of 1,339 departments in 734 institu-­



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�15

tions was contacted by e-­mail and invited to complete the survey online. 
These 1,339 academic units included 596 English departments, 647 foreign 
language departments, and 96 departments that encompass both English 
and foreign languages. Data collection took place between March and May 
2005. Of the 1,339 departments, 686 (51.2%) responded, representing 490 
institutions; at least one department responded in 67% of the 734 institu-­
tions housing the entire set of 1,339 units canvassed in the survey.

The findings and analysis of the survey, which appear in this report, 
are based on responses from 671 departments in 476 institutions that re-­
ported having a tenure system: 324 of the 331 responding English depart-­
ments and 347 of the 355 foreign language or combined departments. 
While these departments and institutions do not constitute a sample rep-­
resentative of all four-­year United States colleges and universities, their 
answers nonetheless afford insight into practices and standards for tenure 
in English and other modern language departments across a significant 
swath of United States higher education.

In the interpretation of survey findings, the distribution of tenure-­track 
faculty members across the different types of four-­year institutions differs 
from the distribution of the institutions. Carnegie Doctorate-­granting in-­
stitutions constitute 18.1% of four-­year institutions covered in the United 
States Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data 
System (IPEDS) but 49% of the tenure-­track faculty members employed in 
four-­year institutions. Carnegie Master’s institutions constitute 41.8% of the 
four-­year institutions in the IPEDS but employ 36.8% of tenure-­track faculty 
members. Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions constitute 40.1% of the four-­
year institutions but employ 14.2% of tenure-­track faculty members.1 The 
large population of tenure-­track faculty members in Carnegie Doctorate-­
 granting institutions means that practices in the doctoral sector have an im-­
pact that goes far beyond the number of institutions represented.2

1. A Critical Time, a New Conjuncture
Any serious attempt to understand the issues surrounding the evaluation 
of scholarship for tenure and promotion today must first take into account 
the shifting nature of academic work over the past decades; the changes 
in the resources for disseminating scholarship, including the condition of 
university presses; and the significant changes in educational policies—all 
of which have increased pressure on the tenure system. Because of factors 
identified in our report, this conjuncture may well represent a threshold 
moment with large effects and consequences in the future.

First, we are seeing the effects of the cuts in funding for higher education 
at both the federal and the state levels. The subvention of substantial portions 



16�|||�rePort

of the costs of education for undergraduate and graduate students, what the 
MLA Committee on Professional Employment’s report calls “the social and 
financial compact,” existed for decades but began to erode with the end of the 
cold war (1163). And as Phyllis Franklin noted in 1997, citing from the report 
of the Council for Aid to Education, “Breaking the Social Contract”:

[T]he cost of educating college students grew by “more than sixfold 
between 1961 and 1995, much faster than inflation, as measured by the 
Consumer Price Index.”

. . . [B]oth federal and state governments have underfunded higher 
education since the mid-­1970s because entitlement programs like Social 
Security, Medicare, and Medicaid have required an increasingly large 
proportion of public funds. . . . Thus, while the cost of educating a stu-­
dent increased, funding from the public sector decreased. By the year 
2015, the [CAE] report concludes, “the higher education sector will 
face a funding shortfall of about $38 billion [in 1995 dollars]—almost a 
quarter of what it will need.” (5)

This underfunding has occurred at a moment of marked growth in the 
student body and in administrations of higher education institutions 
(Schuster and Finkelstein 92). Indeed, the labor sector that has been most 
downsized and underfunded in recent history is the faculty.

Insufficient funding has gone hand in hand with—and is partly the result 
of—the corporatization of the university, which promotes a managerial-­
 corporate culture that relies on the market to determine priorities and to 
value products and services to clients (Rice and Sorcinelli 105). The adop-­
tion of business models that champion performance accountability and 
greater efficiency (MLA Committee on Professional Employment 1155) 
casts faculty members as productivity managers, in contrast to their tradi-­
tional role as stewards of the educational mission of their institution, and 
undermines the commitment of academic administrations to what R. Eu-­
gene Rice and Mary Deane Sorcinelli call a prestige economy (105). For 
the faculty, this new economy means that the quantity of research takes 
on greater prominence. In many colleges and universities, the managerial-­
 corporate culture has led to a work speedup that equates more publication 
with greater productivity and productivity with accountability.

As the MLA Committee on Professional Employment’s report points 
out, the tension in this country between increasing access to education 
and the expanding research mission of higher education was managed 
fairly well while resources were expanding in the 1960s. With structural 
expansion, the increase in undergraduate enrollments created a need for 
more campuses and thus more career faculty lines. In turn, the number 
of graduate students working toward the doctoral degree also increased; 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�17

in the fifteen academic years between 1958 and 1973, the expansion of 
graduate education led to an extraordinary rise in the number of PhDs. 
A limit on the capacity to fund new positions for faculty members was 
inevitably reached, however, and the market became saturated in the early 
1970s. Since then, PhDs “have faced an academic marketplace where, with 
one brief, modest exception in the late 1980s, qualified candidates seek-­
ing careers in tenure-­track positions far outnumber available positions” 
(MLA Committee on Professional Employment 1165).

In the period from 1994–95 to 2003–04, the overall number of PhD 
recipients declined (by about 10%, as reported in the annual Survey of 
Earned Doctorates for those years). There has also been a general im-­
provement in the placement of PhDs to tenure-­track positions and a 
decrease in placements to non-­tenure-­track (NTT) positions, both full-­
 time and part-­time, particularly for graduates in English. In the last three 
MLA surveys of PhD placement, placements to tenure-­track positions for 
graduates in English increased from 35% in 1996–97 to 42.9% in 2000–01 
to 49.7% in 2003–04. Placements of English graduates to NTT full-­time 
positions declined from 24.7% to 20.2% to 20%, whereas placements to 
NTT part-­time positions declined from 13% to 9.6% to 5.6%. The pat-­
tern is similar, although less clear-­cut, for graduates in foreign languages. 
In 1996–97 40.1% of foreign language doctorate recipients were placed in 
 tenure-­track positions; tenure-­track placements fell to 38.5% in 2000–01 
but rose to 45.5% in 2003–04. Placement of foreign language graduates 
to NTT full-­time positions declined from 25.9% in 1996–97 to 17.5% in 
2000–01 but increased to 26.4% in 2003–04. Placement to NTT part-­time 
positions declined from 8.5% to 6.1% to 5% (Laurence and Steward).3

2. The Shifting Composition of the Faculty and the Shifting Nature of 
 Academic Work
The decrease in the number of faculty members gaining full-­time tenure-­
track positions in language and literature during a period in which the 
number of undergraduate students increased means that full-­time faculty 
members had a significantly heavier workload in the 1990s than they did 
in the 1970s. As Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein point out, the 
weekly work effort of faculty members across institutional types increased 
from 40 hours per week in 1972 to 48.6 hours in 1998, and it increased 
most dramatically, to 50.6 hours, at research universities, where the fac-­
ulty has been subjected to both increasing instructional demands and in-­
creasing research demands (79). Across the board the proportion of faculty 
members working more than 50 hours a week has doubled since 1972, ris-­
ing from a significant minority (23.2%) in 1972 to nearly 40% in 1998.



18�|||�rePort

Even more important, however, Schuster and Finkelstein’s study con-­
cludes that we are witnessing a reshaping of the faculty by academic func-­
tion to an extent not seen since the emergence of graduate education in the 
nineteenth century (107). Most notable is the dramatic increase since the 
1970s in the use of full-­time and part-­time NTT faculty members, what 
has been called the casualization of the academic workforce.4 This casual-­
ization puts enormous pressure on the tenure system. As tenure-­track jobs 
have declined relative to all faculty positions since the 1970s and as the 
number of students has grown considerably, part-­time and full-­time NTT 
academic labor has increased throughout the academy. In the 1970s, ac-­
cording to a study led by Margaret Cahalan, 22% of the faculty nationwide 
consisted of part-­time employees; by 1993, part-­time employees constituted 
40% of the faculty (Cahalan et al. 24–25). The American Association of 
University Professors (A AUP) has noted that “through the 1990s, in all 
types of institutions, three out of four new faculty members were appointed 
to non-­tenure-­track positions.” More recent studies suggest that the rate 
of casualization has only increased. A 2005 article in Inside Higher Ed, re-­
porting on a document released in May 2005 by the National Center for 
Education Statistics, stated that “between 2001 and 2003, the number of 
 full-­time faculty jobs at degree-­granting institutions rose to 630,419 from 
617, 868—a gain of 12,551 jobs. But the number of part-­time jobs rose to 
543,137, up from 495,315—a gain of 47,822 jobs. And as a percentage of 
faculty jobs at degree-­granting institutions, part-­time positions increased 
to 46 percent, from 44 percent, over those two years” ( Jaschik).

Using figures derived from the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Fac-
ulty (Cataldi et al.), a survey of a sample of postsecondary faculty mem-­
bers conducted by the United States Department of Education at five-­year 
intervals, the AAUP produced a chart showing that over 40% of faculty 
members in foreign language departments and over 50% of faculty mem-­
bers in the field of English and literature are part-­time. Because the AAUP 
does not disaggregate four-­year and two-­year institutions (where there 
are large numbers of faculty members working part-­time), the aggregate 
percentages mask the large disparity between two-­ and four-­year sectors. 
When the figures for English and literature are combined with those in 
foreign languages and are disaggregated by Carnegie type of institution, 
the number of part-­time faculty members is 29.5% in Doctorate-­granting, 
33.6% in Baccalaureate, 45% in Master’s, and 69.5% in Associate’s institu-­
tions (i.e., two-­year colleges that grant associate degrees).

The figures for full-­time NTT relative to part-­time NTT reveal im-­
portant differences by type of institution. Of the NTT faculty members 
at doctoral institutions, 47.3% are full-­time and 52.7% are part-­time; at 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�1�

master’s, 22.3% are full-­time and 77.7% are part-­time; at baccalaureate, 
40.7% are full-­time and 59.3% are part-­time; and at associate’s, 13.0% are 
full-­time and 87.1% are part-­time. In other words, in all institutional sec-­
tors, the percentage of part-­time NTT faculty members is greater than 
the percentage of full-­time NTT faculty members.5 According to Schus-­
ter and Finkelstein, the prevalence of part-­time NTT faculty members is 
more pronounced in English composition, foreign languages, mathemat-­
ics, and business than in all other academic fields.

In Schuster and Finkelstein’s view, full-­time NT T appointments, 
which usually have term limits, have “become the model type of full-­time 
appointment for new entrants to academic careers.” There is “considerable 
permeability” between “off the tenure track” and “on track” full-­time ap-­
pointments, especially among those who have the doctorate; and men are 
more likely to move onto this track than women (219). Moreover, NTT 
faculty members appear satisfied with some aspects of their jobs, especially 
their workload and the level of control over their professional time, which 
seem to compensate partially for dissatisfaction with their organizational 
status, perquisites, and future prospects (230–31). For Schuster and Fin-­
kelstein, the emergence of full-­time NTT faculty members has been less 
visible in the faculty’s structural evolution in the past two decades than 
the growth in part-­time NTT faculty members, but they claim that this 
phenomenon “marks a seismic shift in the types of faculty appointments 
being made” and in the definition of the faculty’s function (215).

The multitiered faculty structure in higher education, which is not 
likely to change in the foreseeable future, has direct implications for 
tenure. The dramatic increase in the number of part-­time NTT fac-­
ulty members and in the number of term-­limited full-­time NTT faculty 
members puts increased demands and pressure on all full-­time tenure-­
track and tenured faculty members in many areas for which the casualized 
work force is not—and should not be—responsible: service on department 
committees and in departmental governance; student advising; teaching 
 upper-­level undergraduate and graduate courses; directing dissertations; 
and, less concretely but no less importantly, contributing to intellectual 
community building in the department and outside it, in the college and 
the university (see MLA Committee on Professional Employment 9–10; 
Schuster and Finkelstein 104–05).6

3. The Condition of University Presses and of Humanities Lists
The corporatization of the university and the imposition of business 
models of efficiency and output have affected not only the structure of 
the faculty but also the primary source for the dissemination of academic 



20�|||�rePort

scholarship in the humanities and social sciences: university presses. As 
Phil Pochada has pointed out, these presses have increasingly been asked 
to operate as businesses that must cover their costs and have lost or had 
sharply reduced their subsidies from the institution (qtd. in MLA Ad 
Hoc Committee 173).7 They have reacted to—and accommodated—this 
new situation in part by discontinuing publication in certain humanities 
subjects altogether, such as the series in contemporary poetry at Oxford 
University Press and the series in French studies at Cambridge University 
Press (MLA Ad Hoc Committee 175), or by reducing the humanities list 
(as Stanford University Press has done) and the number of translations 
published (as Northwestern University Press has done). This narrowing 
of publishing possibilities, especially in fields viewed as marginal, may not 
have bottomed out but may in fact become more acute in years to come.

To be sure, some presses are now exploring the use of digital technology 
and collaborating with their campus libraries to find alternative ways to de-­
liver humanities content, in a few cases restoring previously discontinued 
series.8 University presses have pursued further adjustments to the current 
situation. They have also learned to manage their inventories and distri-­
bution more effectively to ensure more efficient sales and fewer returns. 
They maintain their humanities lists—indeed, often subsidize them—by 
publishing marketable regional fiction, guides to wildlife and cooking, 
and encyclopedias of states; reference books, which can command high 
prices; and volumes for nonuniversity readers, such as midlist books that 
trade publishers are now less likely to produce. Presses are thus devoting 
substantial editorial resources to finding and promoting profitable books 
that can keep the entire press enterprise afloat and, more pertinent to this 
report, that can sustain publication in the fields represented by the MLA.

The plight of humanities publishing lists is a direct result of a lack of 
sales of new hardcover books from university presses. We frequently hear 
publishers describe a downward trend of monograph sales to libraries, 
from as many as 600–1,000 clothbound copies for the initial printing 
to around 250 today. Accordingly, university presses have seen the unit 
cost of their titles increase markedly: in a study of 60 libraries conducted 
by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the median cost of a 
monograph was $28.99 in 1986 and $51.19 in 2004 (an increase of 77%). 
The drop in humanities books is particularly evident for sales to col-­
lege and university libraries, the primary outlet for monographs. Even 
where library budgets have grown, purchases of books in the humani-­
ties have not increased. Libraries have scaled back on these purchases 
as costs of subscriptions to major scientific journals have skyrocketed; 
some subscription rates are in the thousands of dollars.9 The ARL study 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�21

found that, from 1986 to 2004, library expenditures for serials rose 273%, 
whereas expenditures on monographs rose 63% (“Monograph and Serial 
Expenditures”); there was an increase of 42% in the number of serials 
purchased, but a 9% decrease in the number of monographs purchased.10 
Furthermore, investment in electronic journal subscriptions, such as the 
indispensable JSTOR, has reduced budgets for humanities monographs. 
As a result, “automatic buy lists”—agreements between libraries and lead-­
ing university presses that ensure the purchase of a press’s entire list of 
new books—have largely become a thing of the past.

A corollary consideration by many editors concerns the extent to which 
books are being purchased and read by faculty members and students in 
the language and literature disciplines. If the sale of monographs is a rough 
indicator of readership (and, of course, it is a very rough measure given the 
availability of photocopying, course packs, the system of interlibrary loans, 
and, most recently, texts online), then the editors of presses conclude that 
the monographs they publish are being read by fewer and fewer scholars. 
Even if this is true, the decline in readership can be attributed only in part 
to the rising cost of books. It is possible that the accumulated volume of 
scholarship in book form is increasingly difficult to master and that schol-­
ars tend to read monographs in very restricted contexts: in relation to their 
own research, requests for reviews, teaching, and the evaluation of tenure 
and promotion cases. Thus editors express concern that too few mono-­
graphs draw a readership across different fields in language and literature 
and between these fields and the social and applied sciences.

Some scholars have suggested that online publishing would help re-­
solve the problem of the increased cost of books. However, as Jennifer 
Crewe of Columbia University Press has pointed out, only part of the cost 
of producing new books would be reduced by online publication, since 
the costs of editing and refereeing remain the same in either medium and 
keeping up with new developments in technology represents added costs 
(Crewe 28; see also MLA Ad Hoc Committee 180). Online publication by 
itself is therefore not likely to solve the problems underlying the financial 
difficulties faced by libraries and presses.

4. Changes in Educational Policy and Practices
Over and beyond the different factors that we have enumerated—the 
problems of academic presses in publishing books in the humanities, 
the altered structure of the faculty, a dominance of casualized part-­time 
NTT and full-­time term NTT faculty positions, and the reduced fund-­
ing for hiring faculty members and for supporting higher education in 
general in the past three decades—there have also been significant shifts 



22�|||�rePort

in educational policy and, as a result, in educational practices. These 
shifts have produced revised criteria for determining what faculty mem-­
bers must do to be tenured and promoted.

In 1990, Ernest Boyer published Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the 
Professoriate, an enormously influential book that attempted to reframe 
the discussion of the nature and function of scholarship and to challenge 
the traditional dichotomy between scholarship and teaching and thus be-­
tween content and process. Boyer embraced an expanded view of scholarly 
work that highlighted teaching, engagement, integration, and discovery. 
Based on a 1988 inquiry sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the 
Advancement of Teaching, Scholarship Reconsidered led to conceptualizing 
teaching as a scholarly enterprise in the 1990s. There was an outpour-­
ing of pedagogical colloquiums, teaching circles, and the production of 
teaching portfolios, a practice that has become widely used in tenure and 
promotion cases. Advocates of Boyer’s views went on to form the Carne-­
gie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and created 
a national network of institutions with teaching academies (see Rice and 
Sorcinelli 107–09).

Moreover, as the notion of a scholarship of engagement suggests, Boyer 
and his followers believed that scholars should learn from and involve 
members of the community and apply their scholarship to the nation’s 
critical societal issues. The scholarship of integration was designed to 
combat fragmentation and alienation in the academy, to promote collab-­
orative work, and to reach across disciplinary boundaries, not only con-­
necting the usual disciplines but also achieving what David Scott calls 
“transdisciplinarity” (49), an ideal that is both invoked and underfunded 
on college and university campuses. Boyer’s fourth category, the scholar-­
ship of discovery, the traditional goal of scholarship, was cast in scientific 
terms that had little to do with the humanities and, in general, seemed 
to be undervalued in his efforts to forge a more inclusive conception of 
scholarship that embraced teaching, application, and cross-­disciplinarity. 
The faculty’s intellectual and scholarly interests were depicted as narrow 
and in need of infusion, or replacement, by civic values—if not depicted 
by Boyer himself then by his followers, by higher education administra-­
tors, and by governmental voices in higher education reform who have 
been calling for a reorientation of faculty work.

The considerable amount of work required to implement the goals of 
Scholarship Reconsidered has been evaluated (see Rice and Sorcinelli 107–22), 
and its impact on institutional policy and practice has also been examined. 
KerryAnn O’Meara and Rice’s Faculty Priorities Reconsidered: Rewarding 
Multiple Forms of Scholarship features essays about the ideas of Scholarship 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�23

Reconsidered, reports from nine campuses on how they have revised ten-­
ure and promotion policies, and a national survey of chief academic of-­
ficers at four-­year institutions on concrete ways in which their institutions 
changed in the decade following the publication of Boyer’s work. The 
essays reveal that many institutions did revise their tenure and promotion 
policies in keeping with Boyer’s views, most notably in the area of the 
scholarship of teaching and learning, spurred by public concern about the 
faculty’s commitment to the education of undergraduate students. Yet in 
“Scholarship Reconsidered: Barriers to Change,” Robert M. Diamond ob-­
serves that “many faculty members in key leadership roles were comfort-­
able with the status quo and were reluctant to change reward structures 
or definitions of scholarly work that had worked so well for them” (57). He 
concludes that there are several ways to overcome “potential barriers” to 
change: ensure top leadership support, select the leaders of the initiative 
with care, institutionalize the process, reinforce new policies and proce-­
dures as they are approved, and ensure that communications are open and 
that the entire faculty has the opportunity for input (58–59).

The findings of the national survey of chief academic officers reported 
in Faculty Priorities Reconsidered reveal that the primary change in the 
decade following the publication of Scholarship Reconsidered consisted of 
heightened demands that faculty members excel in every area, principally 
“publication productivity” (51% of the chief academic officers surveyed 
said that it “counts more”). Even more notable, the officers who classified 
theirs as “reform” institutions, that is, those that were changing tenure 
and promotion policies, as compared with “traditional” institutions, those 
that were not changing policies, reported that “emphasis has increased” 
in all areas surveyed: in publication productivity (54%), teaching (39%), 
engagement and professional service (39%), service to the institution 
(23%), and service to the profession (23%). In “traditional” institutions, 
the figures for increased emphasis were lower in all these categories: 45% 
in publication, 26% in teaching, 12% in engagement, 9% in service to the 
institution, and 10% in service to the profession. Even those institutions 
that are not engaged in reforming their policies have increased expecta-­
tions in all areas (O’Meara and Rice 320).

This startling conclusion seriously concerns the task force. Change in 
favor of a more capacious conception of scholarship, which we strongly 
endorse, should not mean ever-­wider demands on faculty members, most 
especially those coming up for tenure and promotion. We endorse the 
specific ways in which Diamond suggests that change can be effected 
within an institution to combat the predominant satisfaction with the 
status quo that we found in our survey. In the same vein, we endorse most 



24�|||�rePort

of O’Meara’s principles for “encouraging multiple forms of scholarship in 
policy and practice” (290): prepare students in graduate school for the va-­
riety of roles and types of scholarship in which they will engage; socialize 
new faculty members to the broader institutional definition of scholar-­
ship; present clear expectations for scholarship in promotion and tenure 
guidelines; do not expect or reward the “overloaded plate”; provide useful 
feedback to faculty members during their evaluations; support pioneers 
with resources—structural and financial, training and development, po-­
litical and symbolic; define and emphasize scholarship in the context of 
institutional mission; and resist increasing research expectations to en-­
hance institutional prestige (293–300).

It would appear that the decline in the importance of teaching, high-­
lighted in Scholarship Reconsidered, has been followed by an increased em-­
phasis on teaching since the mid-­1990s, at least according to Schuster 
and Finkelstein’s findings. This increase is accompanied by a consistent, 
modest increase in emphasis on research spread throughout the higher 
education landscape (89–90). The findings of our survey confirm the con-­
clusions of Schuster and Finkelstein. Of the three criteria for tenure and 
promotion—scholarship, teaching, and service—teaching is the criterion 
where there is the least variation among the departments we surveyed 
(monograph publication has the most variation). Teaching was rated “very 
important” for tenure by 74.6% of departments in the doctoral institu-­
tions, 94% of the master’s, and 97.4% of the baccalaureate, in contrast 
to the monograph, which was ranked “very important” by 62% of de-­
partments in the doctoral institutions but by only 12.5% of the bacca-­
laureate and 8.6% of the master’s, and in further contrast to publication 
in general, which was ranked as “very important” by 98.3% of the doc-­
toral institutions, 59.9% of the baccalaureate, and 58.2% of the master’s. 
Overall, however, only 24.6% of departments report that teaching has 
increased in importance (far fewer than the 62.1% that report publica-­
tion increased in importance and the 30% that report monograph publi-­
cation has increased in importance). Indeed, teaching increased most in 
importance in departments in doctoral institutions (36.2%), as compared 
with 18.4% of baccalaureate and 14.2% of master’s institutions, where, 
presumably, teaching has always been considered important. That pub-­
lication increased in importance most in baccalaureate institutions con-­
firms the notion of increased demands for both teaching and publication 
throughout the Carnegie system of institutions. (Of the three traditional 
areas of faculty activity, service showed the lowest percentage increase in 
importance—17.3% across all sectors—and the highest decrease in impor-­
tance—11.2%.)



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�25

5. Teaching and Service as Forms of Scholarship; A Provisional Definition 
of Scholarship
Although it is not the primary focus of this report, the task force wants to 
emphasize, along with Boyer and others, the importance of teaching as a 
form of scholarship, indeed, as a venue for making scholarship public. As 
John Guillory (a member of the task force) has written, most of us know 
“important teachers,” brilliant scholars whose scholarship went into the 
classroom and not onto the page (26). Charles E. Glassic and his coauthors 
have rightly criticized the failure of the profession to devise ways to rec-­
ognize this kind of scholarly achievement. Similarly, service, traditionally 
viewed in research institutions as the least significant of the scholarship, 
teaching, and service triad, should be seen as a crucial part of faculty work 
that overlaps with—and involves—both other elements. The 1996 report 
of the MLA Commission on Professional Service rejects the old “unwieldy, 
confused category, encompassing almost any faculty work that falls outside 
research and scholarship or teaching” (170) in favor of the categories intel-­
lectual work and academic and professional citizenship (162), which can oc-­
cur at a number of “sites,” including classrooms, committee meetings, the 
Internet, scholarly conventions, journals, and community boards (163). In 
this schema, intellectual work “is not restricted to research and scholarship 
but is also a component of teaching and service,” and citizenship, which 
“encompasses the activities required to create, maintain, and improve the 
infrastructure that sustains the academy as a societal institution,” comprises 
aspects of research and scholarship, such as participating in promotion and 
tenure reviews, evaluating manuscripts, and serving on committees in pro-­
fessional organizations or on task forces in one’s field (162, 163). The applied 
work of citizenship makes knowledge available to government, industry, the 
law, the arts, and nongovernmental organizations; examples include “serv-­
ing on a state or local humanities council, helping a school system revamp 
its curriculum, working on a community literacy project, writing a script 
for public television, and consulting on expert testimony for Congress” 
(164). Visual grids in the MLA report on professional service convincingly 
show the overlapping, ambiguous, and connected activities in various fac-­
ulty work efforts and among sites and serve as a model for rethinking the 
conventional triad of faculty work (see also Stanton).

This more complex and expanded view of the sites of scholarship is 
subsumed in our understanding, influenced by the work of Guillory, that 
scholarship in the humanities constellates three activities: research, in-­
terpretation, and reflection. Research is not to be equated with scholar-­
ship; it is a component of scholarship that, in the fields represented by the 



26�|||�rePort

MLA (and more broadly, the humanities), can include archival, artifactual, 
or textual objects that essentially involve human matters. Scholarship in 
our field requires (re)interpretation, an analysis or critique that calls for 
a revision or reconfiguring of what has previously been thought—what 
Paul Armstrong calls “the subtle altering of opinion about ideas long and 
securely held, . . . a more effective explanation and dissemination of con-­
cepts, interpretations, and information that originated with other scholars” 
(ADE Ad Hoc Committee 87)—and that enters into conversation with 
those other scholars and interpretations. But as Guillory emphasizes, any 
serious work of scholarship in our field also demands a moment of reflec-­
tion (or theorization), “a continuous examination of concepts and argu-­
ments as they arise from and are altered by the practices of interpretation 
and research” (30), and a self-­consciousness about the method appropriate 
to the object of study. This constellation of research, interpretation, and 
reflection can produce knowledge that makes sense of complex states of 
affairs in the human world or complex states as objectified in human ar-­
tifacts. Furthermore, scholarship should not be equated with publication, 
which is, at bottom, a means to make scholarship public, just as teaching, 
service, and other activities are directed toward different audiences. Pub-­
lication is not the raison d’être of scholarship; scholarship should be the 
raison d’être of publication.

Although the working definition of scholarship that we have adopted 
differs from that of Boyer and his followers, our task force report cer-­
tainly takes up some of his recommendations and, even more pertinently, 
those of the report from the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future 
of Scholarly Publishing, with which we began. As the following pages 
show, our task force report shares the committee’s view that the goals of 
scholarship in the fields represented by the MLA would be better served 
if the monographic book were not so broadly required or considered the 
gold standard for tenure and promotion, as it is in a growing percentage 
of institutions; that journal publication should continue to be a primary 
venue for the advancement of knowledge in our field; that we need to be 
open to a variety of models and other forms of expression to do better jus-­
tice to different kinds of scholarly projects and alternative conceptions of 
the body of work; and that we always need to value quality over quantity 
(MLA Ad Hoc Committee 179).

6. Preliminary Findings and Conclusions
We are living through profound changes in the academy that should com-­
pel us to reexamine our ways of evaluating scholarship for tenure and pro-­
motion. These profound changes provide the context and the lens through 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�27

which the principal findings of the MLA survey need to be understood. 
We can report that our survey of 1,339 department chairs does not reveal 
a considerable lowering of tenure rates. Our survey does reveal, however, 
the increased demands, particularly for publication, placed on candidates 
for tenure. While this development has been driven by Carnegie Research 
I institutions, its effects ripple through all the Carnegie sectors, thereby 
placing greater emphasis on publication in tenure and promotion decisions. 
Yet our data reveal that junior faculty members have risen to meet these 
ever-­growing demands. The chairs responding to the MLA survey indicate 
that until 2004, candidates for tenure in their departments had not suffered 
for lack of publishing venues; and, in general, these chairs support the sta-­
tus quo regarding demands for tenure and the relative emphasis on schol-­
arship over teaching and service in their departments and institutions.

Thus we can state that faculty members hired to tenure-­track ap-­
pointments over the last ten years have been tenured in ways—and at 
rates—similar to their predecessors. There has, to date, been no “lost 
generation of scholars” from the tenure track. Universities have lowered 
or eliminated subsidies for scholarly presses, and libraries have dramati-­
cally reduced the purchase of books in the humanities, thereby weakening 
the market for monographs, a trend that may not yet have peaked. None-­
theless, up to 2004, these developments had not resulted in substantially 
increased tenure denials or substantially decreased rates of tenuring, at 
least in terms of the candidates who came up for tenure and promotion. 
Non-­tenure-­track appointments continue to constitute well over half of 
all faculty positions in four-­year institutions for those whose principal 
teaching fields are English and foreign languages. And available data sug-­
gest that 40% or more of graduates who receive doctorates in English 
and foreign languages remain in NTT positions or leave the academy 
for employment elsewhere three to five years after receiving their de-­
grees. Further, findings from the MLA survey, along with data from the 
2003 National Survey of College Graduates (available from Scientists and 
Engineers Statistical Data System [www .sestat .nsf .gov]) about the em-­
ployment situations of those holding doctorates in English and foreign 
languages, indicate that substantial numbers of junior scholars—from 
20% to 30%—leave the institution before their final review for tenure 
begins. (The MLA survey indicates that the largest number leave one 
 tenure-­track appointment for another. We have no way of tracking tenure 
outcomes for these junior faculty members.) By our best estimate, then, 
only about 38% of modern language doctorate recipients obtain a tenure-­
track position and go through the tenure process at the institution where 
they were hired (see fig. “Estimated Percentage”).



28�|||�rePort

The task force believes that the declining number of tenure-­track 
positions in relation to the total number of positions accounts in large 
measure for the widespread anxiety in the profession about standards 
for tenure and promotion. This anxiety may also be understood as un-­
ease about the continued escalation of quantitative demands for schol-­
arly production, the extension of such demands to a widening circle of 
institutions of higher learning, and the harm being done to scholars and 
scholarship as demands increase. As a result of our survey of 1,339 depart-­
ment chairs, we clearly see increasing pressure on the system of scholarly 
production and the mechanics of its evaluation. Scholars and institutions 
have adapted to changing circumstances over the years as requirements 
for tenure have expanded and demands have been increased throughout 
the profession. But the results have taken their toll on individual scholars 
and institutions—and on the academy’s infrastructure as a whole—and 
strained the profession in ways that are intensely serious but not yet well 
understood or articulated.

Our report aims to address this complex, critical situation before it 
becomes a crisis. The new conjuncture, born of emergent historical, edu-­
cational, economic, and professional conditions, demands new thinking, 
new flexibility and openness, and new solutions. We are living through 
profound changes in the academy that require our ways of evaluating 

�
Estimated Percentage of English and Foreign Languages Doctorate 
Recipients Who Become Tenure-­Track Faculty Members and Achieve 
Tenure at the Institution Where Hired

100

60

38
34

Completed
doctorate

degree

Awarded tenure
at institution
where hired

Considered for
tenure at institution

where hired

Hired to tenure-
track position

within five years



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�2�

scholarship for tenure and promotion to undergo serious reexamination. 
The task force concludes that we in the fields represented by the MLA 
need to change our conception of what scholarship includes and excludes; 
that institutions should calibrate their demands for tenure to their par-­
ticular mission and values and devise requirements that are appropriate 
to their own academic contexts; and that the profession as a whole should 
reconsider the processes used in evaluating scholarship for tenure in the 
interest of fostering all the forms of scholarly exchange in which scholars 
engage and in the name of fairness and transparency throughout the pro-­
cess of evaluation, principles that should exemplify the highest standards 
of equity for our profession.

Part I: Revising the Meaning of Scholarship

1. The Dominance of the Monograph; Increased Publication Demands for Tenure
The monograph lies at the nexus of a number of crucial issues: it repre-­
sents a historical matter concerning changes in requirements for tenure, 
a practical matter involving the extension of the requirement of a tenure 
monograph beyond doctoral institutions to master’s and baccalaureate 
institutions, and a policy matter regarding its proper role in promoting 
research and scholarship and their dissemination in our fields.

Few concrete longitudinal data exist on when and where the publica-­
tion of a scholarly monograph emerged as the chief requisite, the gold 
standard, for tenure. One survey from the late 1960s, conducted jointly 
by the National Council of Teachers of English and the MLA, with sup-­
port from a grant from the then United States Office of Education, pro-­
vides some answers. Designed to produce systematic information about 
English departments, the survey, which was administered to a sample 
of 300 departments in four-­year institutions and received a remarkable 
94.6% response, included questions about criteria and procedures gov-­
erning tenure and promotion. According to the findings of the survey, 
which was prepared by Thomas Wilcox of the University of Connect-­
icut,11 before 1968 neither the monograph nor other kinds of publica-­
tion were regarded as a principal requirement for tenure. Asked to list 
in order of importance the criteria used to decide tenure and promotion, 
only 35.4% of Wilcox’s respondents ranked published scholarship of any 
kind, including the monograph, first or second. By contrast, in the new 
MLA survey, 75.8% of respondents rank publication “very important” for 
earning tenure in their departments. More specifically, publication of a 
monograph is now “very important” in 32.3% of all departments in four-­



30�|||�rePort

year institutions and in 62% of Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions. 
These data document the change that has occurred in requirements for 
tenure and promotion and confirm beyond doubt that for the majority of 
institutions where the monograph became routine, it did so after 1968. 
Although requiring publication of a monograph remains a practice con-­
centrated in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions, the findings of 
the MLA survey also make clear that publication of a monograph is now 
generally regarded as desirable and considered a reasonable demand at 
 four-­year colleges and universities throughout the United States.

The MLA survey findings also indicate that the monograph has be-­
come increasingly important in comparison with other forms of pub-­
lication, a fact confirmed by the requirement in many institutions of 
“progress toward the completion of a second book,” that is, a second 
monograph for tenure. A total of 32.9% of responding departments con-­
sider “progress toward the completion of a second book” “important” or 
“very important” for tenure. Among Carnegie Doctorate-­granting insti-­
tutions, 49.8% of respondents say that progress toward the publication 
of a second monograph is “very important” or “important”; 24.4%, or 
about half of the 49.8%, indicate that emphasis on this requirement has 
increased over the past decade, and 23.3% indicate that it has remained 
about the same. These figures show that progress toward a second mono-­
graph was already well established ten years ago. In fact, 62.1% of all 
departments surveyed report that publication has increased in importance 
over the last ten years, a figure that attests to the growing significance 
of publication in master’s and baccalaureate institutions. Baccalaureate 
institutions rank the monograph even more important than do master’s 
(48% versus 44.4%); the difference reflects the tenure criteria of selective 
private institutions in the baccalaureate sector.

This dramatic change in the requirements for tenure—specifically, the 
rise of what we might call the tenure monograph—is a direct result of 
the abrupt collapse of employment opportunities for new PhDs in the 
academy, as Wilcox observed in the early 1970s. A buyers’ market thus 
emerged in the early 1970s, which made it possible for hiring departments 
to demand more of candidates seeking entry-­level jobs, particularly evi-­
dence of scholarly potential. Often today, Carnegie Doctorate-­granting 
departments expect that graduate students will already have published 
one or more articles by the time they graduate; these institutions expect 
the same of the junior faculty members they hire. Such increased de-­
mands on graduate students exerted pressure on programs to adjust their 
curricula; as they did so, the dissertation was reconceived as the first draft 
of a publishable book. The appearance of the tenure monograph was thus 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�31

linked to a reconceptualization of the dissertation. In turn, the expecta-­
tion that the dissertation would be published after revision made it easier 
for departments to demand a monograph of tenure candidates.

In addition to the buyers’ market, two other dramatic shifts in the cul-­
ture and demographics of the university, in the period after 1968, made it 
possible and even routine for departments to demand more of candidates 
for both hiring and promotion. First, the number of women entering the 
profession increased greatly (women are now a numerical majority in the 
fields of language and literature)12 and further enlarged the available pool 
of academic labor. Second, the field of literary study was shaken—some 
would say, transformed—by the emergence of theory, which provoked 
ideological factionalism in some, perhaps many, departments. These fac-­
tors, along with the effort after 1968 to democratize academic structures, 
meant that the authority for tenure decisions was largely removed from the 
office of the chair, where, according to the Wilcox survey, it had resided in 
the majority of institutions. Responses to that survey indicate that tenure 
decisions were made by the chair alone in 42.8% of the departments; in an 
additional 21%, tenure decisions were made “by the chairman and an advi-­
sory committee appointed by him” (32–33). Findings about promotion de-­
cisions matched those for tenure: in 44.6% of the departments, decisions 
about promotion were made by the chair alone; in 22.7%, they were made 
by the chair and a committee appointed by the chair (33). These statistics 
from the 1960s describe key points of the old-­boy system—Wilcox called 
the concentration of power in the chair “this most autocratic, least demo-­
cratic procedure” (33)—that over the following decades was swept away. 
In its place, ad hoc department committees and outside letters of reference 
emerged as a fairer and more objective modus operandi. The new empha-­
sis on publication and other criteria for tenure was an expression, then, 
not only of the higher demands created by a buyers’ market but also of the 
search for safeguards against the possible arbitrariness or bias of chairs 
and of department factions unsympathetic to the new demographics of the 
profession and to new developments in literary study.

In certain respects, the emergence of expectations oriented more to-­
ward publication than toward teaching in the period between 1968 and 
1995 corrected a system of promotion and reward that had few procedures 
of accountability. It could thus be argued that the buyers’ market made 
procedures of evaluation fairer throughout the profession, possibly even 
improving the general quality of the professoriat. What emerged after 
1968 is a system of bureaucratic equity, the core principle of which is that 
personnel actions are to enact (or at least appear to enact) institutional 
rules and procedures rather than personal inclinations and biases.



32�|||�rePort

2. The Rates of Tenuring, 1994–2004; Gender Difference in Tenure Rates
The increasingly prevalent demand for a tenure monograph, and some-­
times a portion of a second monograph, along with the current problems 
that university presses are facing, has produced concerns throughout our 
profession about a possible decline in the rate of tenure. A narrow major-­
ity of respondents (51.6%) agrees or strongly agrees that tenure prospects 
for junior faculty members in the humanities are at risk because of the 
financial difficulties university presses face (37.6% agree and 14% strongly 
agree). But less than a quarter of respondents (23.1%) affirm that the ten-­
ure prospects of one or more junior faculty members in their own depart-­
ments are at risk (17% agree and 6.1% strongly agree), and three-­fifths 
(60.6%) of respondents disagree that prospects for junior faculty members 
in their departments are at risk (18.6% strongly disagree and 42% dis-­
agree). A substantial group of respondents stated that they did not have 
enough information to adopt a position about the prospects of junior fac-­
ulty members, either generally (15.8%) or in their departments (16.2%).

The MLA survey, however, indicates that, at least up to 2005, anxiety 
about the future tenuring of young scholars had not yet become mani-­
fest as reality. Asked whether any candidates in their departments had 
been denied tenure because of the limitations that university presses have 
placed on monograph publication, 93.3% of respondents said, “No”; only 
1% said, “Yes, definitely,” and 3%, “Yes, possibly.” But 30.3% express con-­
cern that there may be such an effect in the future, and 26% are unsure 
but think such problems likely in the future. Our data cannot describe sit-­
uations that are in the making, but there are reasons to believe that there 
may be a narrowing of publishing opportunities in the future that can 
have a negative impact on tenure reviews. (Once again, the survey yields 
information about completed tenure reviews through 2003–04 and does 
not predict outcomes for junior professors now in pretenure positions.)

As we indicated in the preamble, the tenure rate for candidates whom 
responding departments considered for tenure in the period 1994–2004 
needs to be understood in the context of the current academic job market, 
where an estimated 40% of all those who receive doctoral degrees do not 
obtain tenure-­track positions. For graduates who began tenure-­track ap-­
pointments, findings from the MLA survey indicate that well over 20% 
leave their positions before being considered for tenure, some for tenure-­
 track or non-­tenure-­track appointments at other institutions, some for 
pursuits outside college and university teaching. For junior faculty mem-­
bers who completed their probationary period and came up for tenure, 
respondents reported a tenure rate averaging around 90%, with a slightly 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�33

lower rate of about 84% for Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions.13 
The tenure rate did not vary between the two five-­year periods the MLA 
examined—1994–95 to 1998–99 and 1999–2000 to 2003–04.

Taken together, information from the MLA survey and other sources 
suggests that about 55% to 60% of the tenure-­track assistant professors 
hired to a tenure-­track position actually go through the tenure process and 
receive tenure at the institution where they held their original appoint-­
ment. A recent study of tenure rates in the Penn State University system, 
presented by Michael Dooris and Marianne Guidos, found that “[i]n the 
2004–05 academic year, 86 percent to 96 percent of the second-­, fourth-­, 
and sixth-­year cases reviewed at the college level resulted in recommenda-­
tions for continuation or early tenure” and went on to note that “similar 
studies have clearly shown that the approval percentage at the university 
level has almost always been over 90 percent” (6). Dooris and Guidos also 
found that, in the Penn State system, where outcomes are examined from 
the point of hiring to a tenure-­track position, “[f ]or the last nine entering 
cohorts—that is, those beginning [as newly hired tenure-­track appointees] 
in 1990 through 1998—55 percent of new entrants had received tenure by 
the end of their seventh year on the tenure track” (4). The success rate for 
junior faculty members formally considered for tenure masks the actual 
number of those who held a tenure-­track position but did not come up for 
consideration at the institution that initially hired them.14

The MLA study suggests that great demands have been made on the 
junior professoriat in the last several decades and that, by and large, the 
junior scholars who completed their probationary period have risen to 
meet these demands. The heightened demands for the monograph and 
other forms of scholarship, coupled with the increased demands for 
teaching and service (which also have strong scholarly aspects), have not, 
in fact, depressed the tenure rate. Yet when there are few tenure-­track 
jobs available, department chairs and committees must work particularly 
hard to ensure that the faculty members hired will be strong candidates 
for tenure, since the failure to be approved at college committee and ad-­
ministrative levels can sometimes result in negative consequences for the 
department, such as losing the faculty line. A more worrisome possibility 
is that the need to try to ensure from the outset that the junior faculty 
member hired will be qualified to receive tenure may discourage hiring 
committees from taking risks on scholars who do not fit a narrow aca-­
demic profile and on work that is not perceived to be mainstream. But it 
is also reasonable to infer that departments are being highly selective and 
taking advantage of a pool of well-­qualified applicants in a buyers’ market 
for tenure-­track positions.



34�|||�rePort

Within the group of tenure candidates counted in the MLA study, 
there are important gender differences. Across all institutional categories, 
women consistently outnumber men in the pools of candidates considered 
for tenure and the number of candidates awarded tenure (in the candidate 
pools, 55% are women and 45% are men). The difference between the 
numbers of men and women considered for tenure is smallest in Carnegie 
 Doctorate-­granting institutions (where 53.6% are women) and largest 
in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions (where 57.5% are women) in the 
period from 1999–2000 to 2003–04. For this same period, overall ten-­
ure rates for men and women are comparable: 90.1% for women, 91.8% 
for men. Tenure rates for women are lower than for men in Carnegie 
 Doctorate-­granting institutions (86.8% for women, 90.2% for men), 
whereas tenure rates for men in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions are 
lower than for women (91.9% for men, 96.4% for women).

Almost all the differences between tenure rates for men and women can 
be traced to differences in tenure rates in foreign language departments. For 
the period from 1999–2000 to 2003–04, the tenure rate for men was 92% 
versus 91.2% for women in English; but in foreign languages, it was 92.1% 
for men versus 88.7% for women. The tenure rate for women for this five-­
year period is markedly lower in doctorate-­granting foreign language depart-­
ments: 92.3% for men versus 79.8% for women. Such differences also emerge 
in master’s-­granting foreign language departments: 93.6% for men versus 
86.4% for women. In baccalaureate-­granting foreign language departments, 
this trend is reversed: 90.8% for men versus 95.5% for women. By compari-­
son, the figures for various degree-­granting types of English departments are: 
for doctorate-­granting institutions, 88.2% for men versus 88.1% for women; 
for master’s institutions, 97.5% for men versus 94.5% for women; and for 
baccalaureate institutions, 94.2% for men versus 94.7% for women.15

The analysis of exit rates (cases where faculty members left a depart-­
ment before being formally considered for tenure) also reveals gender dif-­
ferences. Women have an exit rate slightly higher than men (22.8% versus 
20.1%), with the largest difference in departments in Carnegie Doctorate-­
 granting institutions—23.6% for women versus 19.1% for men. Exit rates 
after the third-­year review, however, are higher for men than for women: 
2.7% versus 2.2%—more specifically, 2.3% for men versus 2% for women 
in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions; 2.5% for men versus 2% for 
women in Carnegie Master’s institutions; and 4.6% for men versus 3.2% 
for women in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions. The salient exception 
to this trend is for departments in institutions with the smallest tenured 
and tenure-­track faculties, where there is a significantly higher exit rate 
for women as compared with men: 32.1% versus 24.7%.



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�35

3. Favoring the Status Quo
The tenure rate that emerges from the MLA survey thus suggests that 
over the last decade the increasing demands for scholarly publication have 
not noticeably harmed the tenure rate of junior scholars. This finding 
counters some prevailing opinions about an inverse relation between de-­
mands and the percentage of junior scholars tenured and promoted. Nev-­
ertheless, there are still compelling reasons to be concerned about the 
dominance of the tenure monograph in the system of evaluation. There 
is, inevitably, the worry that in a buyers’ market demands will continue 
to be raised, beyond those currently prevalent, although it is difficult 
to imagine that even more publication could be expected of candidates 
coming up for tenure than is already required. Nevertheless, department 
chairs do not express concern about the current level of demands for ten-­
ure; on the contrary, they seem to approve of the status quo. Only 12.7% 
of respondents overall agree or strongly agree that the tenure and pro-­
motion process in their institutions overemphasizes book-­length mono-­
graphs and gives too little credit to refereed journal articles—although 
24.4% of respondents in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions see 
too much emphasis on monograph publication and too little credit for 
articles, as compared with 4.3% of respondents in Carnegie Master’s and 
3.3% in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions.

Responses to several survey items that explored attitudes toward 
teaching and publication in tenure and promotion processes reveal the 
 broad-­based support that continues to exist for both current publication 
requirements and the current balance between publication and teach-­
ing across departments in different institutional sectors. More than 70% 
of all respondents disagree or strongly disagree that accomplishment in 
teaching should count more than it does in their institutions’ tenure and 
promotion decisions, and variation among departments in different insti-­
tutional types is modest: 67.9% of departments in Carnegie Doctorate-­
 granting institutions disagree or strongly disagree that teaching should 
count for more, compared with 71.6% of departments in Carnegie Mas-­
ter’s and 75.7% in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions. Survey findings 
also indicate respondents’ broad-­based support for the current emphasis 
on monograph publication in their institutions. When respondents were 
asked whether they agree or disagree that the tenure and promotion pro-­
cess in their institutions emphasizes monograph publication too much 
and gives too little credit to refereed journal articles, 72.8% of respon-­
dents in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions disagreed or strongly 
disagreed, as did 92.2% in Carnegie Master’s institutions and 94.1% 



36�|||�rePort

in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions. Even in the subset of Carnegie 
 Doctorate-­granting departments where monograph publication is either 
very important or important to earning tenure, only 27.5% of respondents 
agreed or strongly agreed that publication of a monograph is emphasized 
too much and refereed journal articles too little.

An even larger majority of respondents (73.2%) reports that refereed 
journal articles can suffice to earn tenure in the respondent’s institution 
and disagrees that monographs are overemphasized. Broken down by sec-­
tor, the figures are 51.9% of respondents in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting, 
88.8% in Carnegie Master’s, and 89.5% in Carnegie Baccalaureate insti-­
tutions. An additional 18.8% of the respondents in Carnegie Doctorate-­
 granting institutions disagree or strongly disagree that refereed journal 
articles can suffice to earn tenure in their institutions, but they also dis-­
agree or strongly disagree that journal articles are credited too little and 
monographs emphasized too much—that is, they are both subject to and 
support the monograph standard, at least for their departments and in-­
stitutions. Respondents who are both subject to the monograph standard 
and inclined to question it are limited to a group of 15.3% respondents 
in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions. (These are respondents in 
the Carnegie Doctorate-­granting sector who agree or strongly agree that 
there is too much emphasis on monograph publication and who also dis-­
agree or strongly disagree that publication of journal articles can suffice 
to earn tenure in their institution; outside the Carnegie Doctorate-­
 granting sector, only two respondents agreed both that monographs are 
emphasized too much in their institutions and that articles cannot suf-­
fice to earn tenure, one respondent each from a Carnegie Master’s and a 
Carnegie Baccalaureate institution.)

This series of cross-­tabulations suggests that chairs in a majority of 
departments surveyed and across all types of four-­year colleges and uni-­
versities regard the practice on their campuses and in their departments 
as sufficient. Even in the subset of 241 departments where respondents 
agree or strongly agree with the statement that candidates are unlikely to 
earn tenure without the publication of a book, almost two-­thirds disagree 
or strongly disagree (64.7%) that monograph publication is emphasized 
too much and refereed journal articles credited too little. When this sub-­
set of respondents is further limited to the 183 respondents in Carnegie 
 Doctorate-­granting institutions, 51.9% disagree and 8.2% strongly dis-­
agree that monograph publication is emphasized too much and journal 
articles credited too little (a total of 60.1%), whereas 32.2% agree and 
4.4% strongly agree that monograph publication is emphasized too much 
and journal articles credited too little (a total of 36.6%).



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�37

Examining responses for the entire group of 671 departments included 
in the survey reveals the lack of consensus and the division of outlook 
among the 287 respondents in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions 
as compared with respondents in other sectors. Of the 287 respondents 
in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions, 38.3% agree or strongly 
agree that in their institutions candidates are unlikely to earn tenure 
without publication of a book but disagree or strongly disagree that in 
their institutions there is too much emphasis on monograph publication 
and too little credit for articles in refereed journals—that is, they appear 
to support the monograph standard; 34.1% disagree or strongly disagree 
that in their institutions candidates are unlikely to earn tenure without 
publication of a book and also disagree or strongly disagree that in their 
institutions there is too much emphasis on monograph publication and 
too little credit for articles in refereed journals—that is, they appear to 
some degree not to be subject to the monograph standard; and 23.3% 
agree or strongly agree that in their institutions candidates are unlikely 
to earn tenure without publication of a book and also agree or strongly 
agree that in their institutions there is too much emphasis on monograph 
publication and too little credit for articles in refereed journals—that is, 
they appear ready to question the monograph standard.

Responses from those in Carnegie Master’s and Baccalaureate insti-­
tutions show a far higher level of consensus: 82.3% of respondents in 
Carnegie Master’s and 77.6% of respondents in Carnegie Baccalaureate 
institutions disagree or strongly disagree that in their institutions candi-­
dates are unlikely to earn tenure without publication of a book and also 
disagree or strongly disagree that in their institutions there is too much 
emphasis on monograph publication and too little credit for articles in 
refereed journals—that is, they report that their institutions’ processes 
for tenure and promotion are not governed by a monograph standard.

4. The Extension of the Monograph Requirement; Rethinking the 
 Preeminence of the Monograph; Revaluing the Essay
The survey findings reveal the manifest extension of the monograph 
requirement to master’s and baccalaureate institutions, especially those 
where the teaching load is heavier than in the Carnegie Doctorate-­
 granting system. The findings confirm the pressure of the doctoral sys-­
tem on all other types of higher education institutions and, conversely, the 
attempt of those other types to emulate the doctoral system. To be sure, 
this extension or pressure may devolve from the desire of non-­doctorate-­
 granting administrations—deans, provosts, and presidents—to improve 
their national standing in the eyes of their prospective students, donors, 



38�|||�rePort

and state legislatures. The extension of Carnegie Doctorate-­granting de-­
mands to those who teach 3-­2 or 3-­3 course loads in a given year, rather 
than 2-­2 and even less (common in research universities), and to those 
who are expected to have excellent teaching evaluations, in addition to 
numerous service and extracurricular requirements, seems excessive and 
unfair. The task force strongly recommends that non-­doctorate-­granting 
departments resist the temptation to model tenure standards on the prac-­
tices of Research I institutions.

Even if the prevalence of the monograph as the chief tenure requisite in 
a significant minority of institutions is deeply established and growing, the 
task force believes it is crucial to evaluate the status of the monograph as 
a tenure requirement more critically than our profession has done to date 
(irrespective of the situation of university presses). Among the topics in 
such an evaluation, we believe that it is critical to consider whether, in the 
words of Lindsay Waters, there is a “tyranny of the monograph” (“Res-­
cue”); to evaluate how the tenure monograph has changed the profession 
as a whole; and to imagine alternatives to this kind of scholarly text.

The high esteem given to monograph publication should not mean that 
the monograph is the only—or the best—form of scholarly communica-­
tion. The complaint occasionally heard today, and sometimes voiced by 
university press editors, that many monographs are really “articles on ste-­
roids” raises a serious question about how the demand for a book affects 
the quality of scholarship—and quality should be the first argument in 
favor of a tenure case. If, as the phrase “articles on steroids” implies, some 
books should more properly be articles, it could be argued that they do not 
take that form because of the tenure system’s demand for the monograph.

Departments should be wary of reflexively equating the publication of 
a monograph with the achievement of quality sufficient to merit tenure 
and with the “sole model for mature scholarship” (Damrosch 180). This 
idea seems to confuse scholarship’s substance with its form and to ignore 
changes in the practices of dissemination and publication over time.16 As 
David Damrosch has argued, books and articles stood at relative parity 
in many fields in the early 1960s, but the proliferation of journals, which 
outpaced the growth in university presses, had the “unintended effect of 
lowering the value of articles relative to books” (180–81). Because articles 
could be published more readily, their prestige was reduced, as was their 
impact, since a smaller proportion of scholars in a particular field would 
see a particular journal (181–82). In Damrosch’s view, in recent years 
there has been a lessening of competition between journals and books; 
in fact, presses benefit if parts of a book first appear in various journals. 
Moreover, because of costs, there is a premium today on short books, 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�3�

which reduces the difference in scale between the essay and the book 
(182–83).17 And Damrosch rightly concludes that “we need not choose 
between these two forms” (184).

The constraints on university presses make this a timely moment for us 
in the fields represented by the MLA to reaffirm that the monograph is not 
the only form in which scholarship can be produced and that there is value 
in books of linked essays as well as in the stand-­alone essay (that is, the jour-­
nal article that is not a book chapter). If journal publication is to be sustained 
as an independent venue of scholarship, then stronger arguments must be 
made in tenure cases for such articles in all institutional sectors, notably in 
Carnegie Research I institutions, which seem to be driving the definition 
of tenure requirements throughout the system. This revalorization would 
raise the possibility that the contribution of important articles might be 
equal to—or greater than—the contribution of some books. Indeed, for the 
profession as a whole, a renewed emphasis on the value of the essay can 
open up fresh possibilities for the production of knowledge and for intellec-­
tual exchange that are not constrained by the book. Scholarly journals have 
an advantage that books—with their longer lead time to publication—lack: 
they provide a forum for new ideas and research and for a timely exchange 
of argument.

5. Expanding the Definition of Scholarship and the Body of Work to Be 
 Evaluated for Tenure
The task force urges department tenure and promotion committees, de-­
partment chairs, and other administrators and administrative bodies to 
rank the monograph equally with other forms of peer-­reviewed scholarship 
and other professionally significant work. We oppose the preference for 
the monograph over all other contributions and its elevation to the gold 
standard based on the purely formal character of the book as book. The 
monograph has increasingly displaced other forms of scholarship and has 
become the sine qua non for achieving tenure and promotion, especially 
in those institutions regarded as the most prestigious. We further oppose 
the extension of this standard to other institutions in the Carnegie system. 
We urge the members of the MLA and of the wider academic community 
to recognize—and to act on the recognition—that valuable and important 
scholarship can take multiple forms and that requirements for tenure and 
promotion should be tailored to the mission of the institution. In our view, 
a body of essays or articles in peer-­reviewed journals can demonstrate the 
quality of scholarly work as well as or, in some cases, better than a mono-­
graph of similar length. Moreover, edited collections of articles, critical 
editions, annotated translations of important primary texts, essays written 



40�|||�rePort

for a general audience, trade books, textbooks, and pedagogically useful 
monographs, as well as publications or other professional work in electronic 
form, may contribute to a body of scholarly and professional work that can 
meet the highest standards of scholarship in the tenure-­review process.

Our analysis of respondents’ assessments of how activities count in 
their institutions’ processes of evaluation for tenure points to the need 
for a more capacious notion of scholarship. Our survey findings generally 
show that the value department chairs place on different types of schol-­
arly activity falls within a fairly restricted range. (It should be emphasized 
that respondents were asked how various activities do count, not how they 
ought to count.) Most revealing are comparisons of the percentages of de-­
partments rating different items “not important.” The item that the low-­
est percentage of responding departments rated “not important” (1.6%) 
was refereed journal articles; the item that the highest percentage of re-­
sponding departments rated “not important” was articles for a general 
audience (54.8%). This item was followed closely by a radio or television 
broadcast—rated “not important” by 52.8% of departments—and books 
for a general audience—rated “not important” by 49.2% of departments.

Items at the next level were rated “not important” by respondents in 
25% to 30% of departments and represent the categories where reconsid-­
eration is most needed, in our view. These include:

• translations, rated “not important” by 30.4% of all responding departments 
and by 31.3% of foreign language departments

• textbooks, rated “not important” by 28.9% of departments
• bibliographic scholarship, rated “not important” by 28.8% of departments
• books and articles oriented to classroom practice, rated “not important” by 

28.5% and 25.7% of departments, respectively.

The next group, rated “not important” by respondents in 20% to 25% 
percent of departments, includes scholarly editions, rated “not important” 
by 20%, and editing a scholarly journal, rated “not important” by 20.7%. 
This last item seems highly undervalued18 when we consider that editors 
disseminate new scholarship and further the arts, stimulate and direct 
inquiry in their fields of study, help produce new knowledge, and cre-­
ate communities for discussion and debate within and among disciplines. 
Undoubtedly, editors play a critical role in shaping their disciplines. In-­
deed, the existence of a journal on campus can have the same impact on 
intellectual community building as the creation of an institute: both can 
be focal points of intellectual ferment and excitement and centers for the 
scholarly education and development of students at all levels, but espe-­
cially for junior scholars.



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�41

Publication of a scholarly print monograph was rated “not important” 
by 10.3% of responding departments but by only 0.7% of departments 
in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions (versus 19.4% and 14.5% of 
departments in Carnegie Master’s and Baccalaureate institutions, respec-­
tively). Examples of other activities with pronounced differences between 
institutional sectors are:

• translations, rated “not important” by 47.4% of foreign language departments 
in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions but by 14.5% and 16.7% of those 
in Carnegie Master’s and Baccalaureate institutions, respectively;

• textbooks, rated “not important” by 39.7% of departments in Carnegie 
 Doctorate-­granting institutions but by 19.4% and 23% of departments in Car-­
negie Master’s and Baccalaureate institutions, respectively;

• books oriented to classroom practice, rated “not important” by 41.5% of depart-­
ments in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions but by 17.2% and 21.1% of 
departments in Carnegie Master’s and Baccalaureate institutions, respectively;

• articles oriented to classroom practice, rated “not important” by 39.9% of depart-­
ments in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions but by 13.8% and 17.1% of 
departments in Carnegie Master’s and Baccalaureate institutions, respectively;

• bibliographic scholarship, rated “not important” by 35.5% of departments in 
Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions but by 23.8% and 23.7% of depart-­
ments in Carnegie Master’s and Baccalaureate institutions, respectively.

These and other items can constitute valuable parts of a candidate’s 
scholarly portfolio. Such portfolios will necessarily—and happily—be di-­
verse, in keeping both with the interests and talents of the junior scholar 
and, once again, with the mission of the institution and the ways it values 
faculty labor in scholarship, teaching, and service.19

6. Scholarship in New Media
Digital scholarship is becoming pervasive in the humanities and must be 
recognized as a legitimate scholarly endeavor to which appropriate stan-­
dards, practices, and modes of evaluation are already being applied. The 
rapid expansion of digital technology has been fundamentally transform-­
ing the production and distribution of humanities scholarship, generating 
not only new forms of publication and dissemination—ranging from Web 
sites and e-­journals to print-­on-­demand books—but also significant new 
modes of scholarship, including digital archives and humanities databases. 
 Large-­scale digital archives, for example, are contributing substantially to 
the development of standard forms of editing, reproduction, cataloging, 
and reference that facilitate the archives’ entry into research libraries. 
Indeed, such libraries are intensively engaged in solving the problems of 
collecting digital works.



42�|||�rePort

As recent studies have revealed, scholars across the humanities now 
make regular use of electronic resources, and, as the report from the MLA 
Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing indicates, “on-­
line journals are already being used by many scholars in our fields, and 
this use is likely to increase” (180). The availability of major journals in 
both print and digital formats only emphasizes the two forms’ increasing 
interdependence;20 in fact, the distinction between them is beginning to 
disintegrate. Scholarship in new media, much of it supported by research 
universities, granting agencies, learned societies, and foundations (among 
them the NEH, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Fund, and 
the American Council of Learned Societies), has resulted in the formation 
of international alliances, such as the Digital Library Federation; stan-­
dards organizations, such as the Text Encoding Initiative; and discipline-­
 based consortia, such as the Networked Interface for Nineteenth-­Century 
Electronic Scholarship (NINES). The MLA Committee on Scholarly 
Editions recently revised its guidelines to address electronic as well as 
printed editions in one set of recommendations, and in 2006 the MLA 
published Electronic Textual Editing, its first book devoted to electronic 
editing (Burnard, O’Brien O’Keeffe, and Unsworth).21

The report of the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly 
Publishing recognizes that digital publication raises many issues, includ-­
ing the need to construct viable business models for launching and sus-­
taining electronic publications, to establish standardized practices and 
adequate peer-­review procedures, and to develop reliable preservation 
strategies. Senior faculty members, outside reviewers, and administrative 
committees often share these anxieties, in part because the new technolo-­
gies are rapidly evolving and some scholars have had little experience in 
using or evaluating them.

In our survey, from 35% to over 50% of department chairs report that 
they have had no experience evaluating scholarly work produced in these 
new forms by candidates for tenure and promotion; departments in Car-­
negie Doctorate-­granting institutions consistently reported the highest 
percentages of inexperience. Among the various forms of digital scholar-­
ship, experience evaluating refereed articles in electronic format is most 
widespread. Even so, 36.5% of the responding departments indicate they 
have as yet had no experience with them: specifically, 40.8% of depart-­
ments in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions, 29.3% of departments 
in Carnegie Master’s institutions, and 39.5% of departments in Carnegie 
Baccalaureate institutions. Asked about inexperience in evaluating schol-­
arly monographs in electronic format, 65.7% of departments in Carnegie 
 Doctorate-­granting institutions report that they have no experience, as 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�43

compared with 38.4% of departments in Carnegie Master’s and 47.4% of 
departments in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions. Overall, 52.1% of 
respondents report having no experience with evaluating monographs in 
digital form. As Jennifer Howard notes in “Gutenberg-­e Lets Historians 
Present Research in Nontraditional Ways,” monographs published digi-­
tally in the Gutenberg-­e project have been considered positively in tenure 
cases, although the officers of the American Historical Association, which 
collaborates with Columbia University Press on the initiative, had to send 
letters to department chairs to disseminate information that would help 
legitimize this new form of monograph publication.

More positively, higher percentages of departments across the insti-­
tutional board regard work in digital forms as “important” rather than 
“not important” in evaluation for tenure and promotion. That is, most 
respondents who report evaluating digital forms of scholarship see the 
work as creditable—although sizable (if lower) percentages of respondents 
still consider digital work “not important” in their institutions’ assess-­
ment of candidates for tenure and promotion. Refereed articles published 
in electronic form are regarded as “important” for earning tenure and 
promotion in 38.9% of departments and “not important” in 16.7%; 28.1% 
of respondents indicate that monographs in electronic form count as “im-­
portant” in their processes of evaluation, whereas 17.8% say they are “not 
important.” Given the current rarity of digital monographs, it is, in fact, 
surprising that so high a percentage of department chairs state that such 
work counts in their institutions—an indication perhaps of willingness to 
recognize such work, were examples to be forthcoming.

The survey findings document the comparatively limited place and 
value that processes of evaluation give scholarship that appears in elec-­
tronic formats. In part, this limitation reflects the significant propor-­
tion of departments that as yet have no experience with scholarship in 
digital forms. But the cause-­and-­effect relations work in both directions 
here: probationary faculty members will be reluctant to risk publish-­
ing in electronic formats unless they see clear evidence that such work 
can count positively in evaluation for tenure and promotion. The survey 
findings suggest that work presented in electronic formats is still in the 
process of gaining the recognition necessary for it to fulfill expectations 
and requirements for tenure and promotion. Refereed articles in digital 
media count for tenure and promotion in less than half as many depart-­
ments as refereed articles in print; print articles count in some fashion 
in 97.9% of departments, as compared with 46.8% for articles in elec-­
tronic form. Monographs in electronic formats have a place in the evalu-­
ation of scholarship for tenure and promotion in only about one-­third as 



44�|||�rePort

many departments as print monographs—30.1% as compared with 87.6%. 
Scholarship in electronic formats seems to be recognized when done in 
addition to work in print formats but may place a candidate at risk if pre-­
sented as the sole or primary scholarly basis for consideration for tenure.

It is clear, however, that electronic journals are increasingly run by 
editorial boards committed to peer review and that major forms of digital 
scholarship can fully support the modes of review previously associated 
only with print publication. Although digital forms of scholarship increas-­
ingly pervade academic life, work in this area has not yet received proper 
recognition when candidates are evaluated for promotion and tenure. We 
consider it essential that tenure committees continue to learn about digi-­
tal scholarship. The MLA has produced formal guidelines that spell out 
the responsibilities of candidates and of committees for preparing and 
evaluating digital scholarship: “The principle . . . is that when institu-­
tions seek work with digital media and faculty members express interest 
in it, the institution must give full regard to this work when faculty mem-­
bers are hired or considered for reappointment, tenure, and promotion” 
(MLA Committee on Information Technology). We should recognize 
that, while new media and the infrastructure that will support them are 
evolving in tandem under considerable internal and external pressure, 
the evolution of the two cannot be perfectly coordinated. Nevertheless, 
in evaluating scholarship for tenure and promotion, committees and ad-­
ministrators must take responsibility for becoming fully aware both of 
the mechanisms of oversight and assessment that already govern the pro-­
duction of a great deal of digital scholarship and of the well-­established 
role of new media in humanities research. It is of course convenient when 
electronic scholarly editing and writing are clearly analogous to their 
print counterparts. But when new media make new forms of scholarship 
possible, those forms can be assessed with the same rigor used to judge 
scholarly quality in print media.22 We must have the flexibility to ensure 
that as new sources and instruments for knowing develop, the meaning of 
scholarship can expand and remain relevant to our changing times.

Part II: The Responsibilities of Hiring Institutions in the 
Tenure Process

In a job system that has tenure-­track positions for slightly more than half of 
those who earn a PhD, departments can afford to be highly selective in the 
hiring process. But even in a buyers’ market, departments must maintain 
their professional and ethical responsibilities to the junior faculty members 
they hire. The time to initiate communications about tenure expectations is 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�45

at the point of hiring. This initial set of communications should be the be-­
ginning of a clearly articulated, transparent tenure process, which will benefit 
not only the department’s faculty members but also the entire institution.

1. Written Expectations and Conditions of Employment and of Tenure
To ensure transparency, departments should enter into discussions with 
new faculty members and state clearly the conditions of employment and 
the requirements for tenure in the letter of hire or in a supplementary 
written document. The task force recognizes that departments hire un-­
tenured faculty members at different stages, with differing levels of experi-­
ence and varying records of scholarly achievement, which may accrue from 
work they produced while at different institutions. And as we have already 
noted, many graduate students now have publication records at the time 
they enter the job market. The status of this work and the degree to which 
it will be recognized in the tenure process need to be stated and agreed on 
by the new faculty member, the department chair, and the dean.

Departments evaluate the scholarship of newly hired faculty members 
in various ways. Some may disregard all previous scholarship and count 
for tenure only the body of work done once the faculty member has ar-­
rived, although this practice strikes us as ungenerous and unproductive, 
since scholarly achievements are not erased when one joins a new insti-­
tution. Others may give full credit to the work done at previous institu-­
tions as part of scholarly requirements for tenure. The decision about how 
much previous scholarly work counts toward tenure is often a function 
of the number of years that the new faculty member serves before be-­
ing considered for tenure. Candidates who have spent a number of years 
at another institution and who are to be considered for tenure after one 
year of service at the new institution should be judged predominantly on 
the basis of their record before they were hired, whereas candidates hired 
after a year or two at another institution and given reasonable time at the 
new institution may not always have their earlier work considered in the 
tenure dossier. It is critical to give careful consideration to the relation 
between the candidate’s previous work and the timetable for making the 
tenure decision. Faculty members have a right to know from the outset 
what the institution’s policies and practices are, and institutions have an 
obligation to provide this information in clear terms at the time of hire.

The task force therefore recommends that departments explicitly state 
in writing the timetable for the tenure period and what parts of the already 
completed scholarly work of all newly hired faculty members will count 
in the tenure decision. Such a letter or supplementary memo should also 
outline how various previous and future professional activities will count 



46�|||�rePort

and thus what the department’s expectations of the newly hired faculty 
member are.23 The letter should be reviewed and updated periodically 
throughout the pretenure period to reflect any changes in expectations or 
assigned responsibilities, such as substantial new administrative tasks that 
the junior faculty member might be asked to assume during the pretenure 
period. This written statement, which should be included in the tenure 
dossier, will clarify the department’s goals for new faculty members and, in 
turn, help them devise a schedule for their scholarly and professional work. 
It will also help protect faculty members from the declaration of new ex-­
pectations by a new chair or tenure committee and serve to promote trans-­
parency, a value that should characterize the entire pretenure period.

2. Joint Appointments
The interests of transparency and fairness demand that special attention be 
paid to joint appointments (appointments in more than one department or 
program) and that their conditions be clearly stated at the moment of hire. 
Such appointments have become more frequent in recent years in keeping 
with the growing commitment to interdisciplinary work in the humanities. 
Typically, joint appointments in the humanities designate a home depart-­
ment paired with either a program or another department, and the home 
department makes the decision recommending the candidate’s tenure. The 
other department or program, which sometimes lacks the power to grant 
tenure, often has minimal representation—and minimal say. Such joint 
appointments are not truly joint when the interdisciplinary appointment 
becomes principally, if not exclusively, subject to disciplinary evaluation. 
The department that recommends the tenure decision will understandably 
receive the bulk of the candidate’s time and attention. This disciplinary 
imperative will tend to influence the scholarship of junior scholars to make 
it more acceptable to the tenure-­granting department and less faithful to 
the interdisciplinary spirit of their appointment and their own scholarly 
interests. If they remain true to the terms of the joint appointment, they 
will risk alienating certain department faculty members.

The task force recommends that both units involved in a joint appoint-­
ment participate equally in the tenure review process from beginning 
to end. Ideally, the two units should share the hiring decision, draft the 
hiring letter and supplementary memo together, and then collaborate 
throughout the period leading up to the tenure recommendation—a rec-­
ommendation that they should also make together. In institutions that 
do not allow this kind of collaboration between the two—or conceivably 
three—units, a transparent process that is fair to jointly appointed candi-­
dates needs to be articulated from the beginning of their appointment to 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�47

the institution. Where the institution does permit this kind of collabora-­
tion, we recommend that the two units:

• together formulate the workload that the candidate will carry in both teach-­
ing and service to make sure that the demands from each side add up to a 
fair and manageable amount in conjunction with expectations for scholarship. 
Because service in two units can pose particularly heavy demands on junior 
faculty members, the letter or memo should indicate precisely how much ser-­
vice the joint appointee is expected to perform in each unit.

• together mentor the junior faculty member in the areas of teaching, scholar-­
ship, and service (see section 4).

• together assess and evaluate the candidate’s scholarship, teaching, and service 
through an intermediate review at the least but, preferably, more frequently 
during the pretenure years. As with faculty members with single appoint-­
ments, intermediate evaluations of jointly appointed faculty members should 
be in writing and followed up by meetings in person (see section 4).

• together make the recommendation regarding tenure and promotion through 
a specially formed tenure and promotion subcommittee on which the two de-­
partments or programs have equal representation. Should there be disagree-­
ments between the two units on a personnel decision, the committee should 
produce a majority and a minority report.

Other arrangements for interdisciplinary joint appointments exist, in-­
cluding uneven divisions of the faculty member’s time. In keeping with 
the recommendations made above, the task force proposes that the same 
basic arrangements obtain for an uneven joint appointment as for an even 
one, with the important exception of the composition of the tenure and 
promotion subcommittee, where the primary unit could have proportion-­
ately greater representation.

The need for special attention to joint appointments is not only a matter 
of fairness to junior colleagues. The task force’s recommendations are also 
designed to make the commitment to interdisciplinarity more than a valued 
but abstract ideal, as it often is in United States colleges and universities 
today; it should be embodied in the concrete practices of the institution.

3. Start-Up Funds, Subventions, Research Funds, and Leaves
To assemble the necessary elements of a scholarly and professional dos-­
sier for tenure and promotion, faculty members in the humanities should 
benefit from institutional support of the kind routinely provided to the 
sciences. These can include start-­up packages, summer or other research 
funds, subventions for accepted manuscripts, and one-­semester and full-­
year paid leaves.

Start-­up funds for faculty members in the humanities have become fairly 
common in both private and public institutions. They are widely available 



48�|||�rePort

in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions, where 80% of the depart-­
ments surveyed reported offering them to some or all junior faculty mem-­
bers, but are unusual in Carnegie Master’s institutions, where a third or 
fewer departments say that a start-­up package is available to some or all 
junior faculty members. In the 348 departments in our survey that provided 
information about the date they began to offer them, start-­up packages have 
been available since before 1994 in 42.7% of Carnegie Doctorate-­granting, 
38.7% of Master’s, and 54.5% of Baccalaureate institutions; from 1999 to 
2004, an additional 30.5% of Carnegie Doctorate-­granting, 38.7% of Mas-­
ter’s, and 28.8% of Baccalaureate institutions established start-­up packages. 
These packages are a way of recognizing that the scholarship of language 
and literature professors carries with it costs that may not be as visible to 
the institution as they are in the sciences (laboratories, research assistants, 
and so forth) but that this work is no less important. Institutions that expect 
humanities faculty members to produce significant scholarship have a duty 
to provide the conditions and financial resources to make this accomplish-­
ment possible throughout the entire probationary period and beyond.

While it would be difficult to generalize about the dollar amount of 
start-­up funds, a range of $5,000 to $20,000 seems appropriate to the 
task force. In the MLA survey, however, the average maximum amount 
was $7,056 in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting, $2,973 in Carnegie Master’s, 
and $3,335 in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions. These stipends seem 
low considering that they need to help cover the expense of books and 
other materials; computing equipment and software; research assistance; 
travel to do research and to participate in conferences; institutional li-­
brary acquisitions; permissions, translations, and other costs related to 
publication; and training, consulting, and other educational and profes-­
sional advancement opportunities.

At institutions with high scholarly demands, release time from teach-­
ing and paid leaves of absence from the campus are often built into initial 
faculty appointments. One-­semester paid leaves are available to some or all 
junior faculty members in almost two-­thirds of departments in private Car-­
negie Doctorate-­granting institutions but in less than two-­fifths of depart-­
ments in public Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions and in only 14% 
of departments in Carnegie Master’s institutions. Full-­year paid leaves are 
unusual—overall fewer than one in ten departments say they are available, 
and they are almost unknown in Carnegie Master’s institutions, where 1.3% 
of departments report offering them. Summer and other research leaves are 
well established and have been available since before the 1994–95 academic 
year in close to three-­quarters of the departments that offer them (500 offer 
summer leave, 573 report offering other types of research leave).



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�4�

Subventions for book publication often play a role in the support offered 
to faculty members when they are hired. They may be part of the start-­up 
funds or be separate from them. Some institutions distribute subvention 
funds on a limited, competitive basis (a pool of scholars apply for grants, 
and not all projects are funded). A common practice is to restrict the use of 
such subventions to not-­for-­profit publishers that use stringent peer-­review 
processes. The MLA survey indicates that 280 (or 41.7%) of the report-­
ing departments offer them. Of the 268 departments that provided more 
detailed information, 61.6% in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions 
started offering subventions before 1994, while 50% in Carnegie Master’s 
and 68.1% in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions did so. The period 1999–
2004 saw departments in another 25.3% of Carnegie Doctorate-­granting, 
30.0% of Carnegie Master’s, and 23.6% of Carnegie Baccalaureate institu-­
tions offer subventions. Survey respondents cite very modest figures for 
the subventions they offer, with average maximums ranging from $2,776 
at Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions to $2,435 at Carnegie Doctorate-­
 granting institutions to $1,531 at Carnegie Master’s institutions.

Many university presses have come to expect scholars to seek subven-­
tions for the publication of monographs, especially for those works that 
have limited sales potential. Editors say that the presence or absence of a 
subvention is never the determining factor in considering a manuscript for 
publication. Nevertheless, once a book is accepted, a stipulation for a sub-­
vention often figures in the contract. Presses assume that subventions will 
come from university research funds, scholars’ start-­up funds, or founda-­
tions. In the current climate, university and other scholarly presses cannot 
afford to publish all the manuscripts they wish to accept—particularly first 
books—without subventions. Universities that place a high value on pub-­
lished research and scholarship from their faculty members should be pre-­
pared to provide funding for publication. Some institutions will be more 
able than others to subsidize faculty research, but expectations should be 
commensurate with the ability to provide the means to achieve them.

4. Intermediate Reviews; Mentoring
From the time junior faculty members are hired at an institution, it is 
imperative that they receive professional advice from the department 
chair and from colleagues about teaching, scholarship and publication, 
and service. As we have already emphasized, chairs and administrators 
should make tenure and promotion expectations, in writing and in per-­
son, as transparent as possible to their junior colleagues from the begin-­
ning. Moreover, the task force believes it is critical to have a third-­year or 
intermediate review—some institutions conduct multiple reviews before a 



50�|||�rePort

candidate comes up for tenure—with procedures, expectations, and goals 
for each review clearly outlined to the junior faculty member and carried 
out by a departmental committee (or a bi-­ or multidisciplinary committee 
for joint appointments or for work that goes beyond disciplinary bound-­
aries). We oppose soliciting external letters for this intermediate review.

Following an open and thorough intermediate review process, the de-­
partment chair and the members of the review committee should have 
frank discussions with their junior colleague about the strengths and 
weaknesses of the emerging dossier for tenure; the completed and future 
projects of scholarship and publication; the teaching portfolio; and the re-­
cord of service to the institution, the profession, and the community. This 
constructive feedback will give junior scholars time to strengthen their 
tenure profiles. Mentoring should also include practical advice on how best 
to construct a tenure file that will demonstrate the candidate’s strengths 
when she or he approaches the tenure and promotion review process.

Appropriate mentoring will facilitate and enhance the candidate’s jour-­
ney from the point of hire to the tenure decision. A successful mentoring 
relationship does not simply concern the practicalities of the tenure process; 
it often touches on issues as far-­ranging as time management, selecting an 
appropriate journal or press for publication, choosing service and teach-­
ing assignments carefully, and developing productive ties with colleagues 
and administrators.24 Senior colleagues should make themselves available to 
read junior colleagues’ scholarship and should make constructive comments 
to facilitate its publication. The best mentoring relationships are sensitive to 
the many differences in our professional and personal lives, including differ-­
ences in ethnicity, gender, age, sexuality, and familial responsibilities. Junior 
faculty members also have responsibilities, however, in seeking appropriate 
mentor relationships, asking for clarification if any confusion remains about 
professional expectations, and examining carefully the advice that they re-­
ceive from outside as well as inside the department. Mentoring relationships 
help prepare a junior faculty member not only for tenure and promotion but 
also for a long, vibrant, and productive career that recognizes in turn the 
value of collegiality and the ethics of responsibility toward junior scholars.

Part III: The Mechanics of the Tenure Review

1. Proper Preparation of the Tenure Dossier by the Chair and the Department
The evaluation process that we recommend will be meaningless if a 
positive recommendation for tenure and promotion is accompanied by a 
poorly crafted and weakly made case presented to division, college-­wide, 
and university administrators and committees. Inevitably, these commit-­



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�51

tees involve faculty members, administrators, and staff from nonhumanist 
disciplines who will not be familiar with the candidate’s disciplinary or 
interdisciplinary field(s) of specialization. The person who prepares the 
dossier, typically the department chair, should function as the advocate 
for the candidate’s promotion on behalf of the department that is recom-­
mending tenure and promotion. Thus the chair should make the case for 
the significance to the humanities at large of the candidate’s scholarship 
(broadly defined) and publications and of the foci and critical approaches 
in his or her work. The chair should foresee and respond in advance to 
questions or concerns that the committee reading the dossier may have—
for instance, why the press publishing work in a recently emerging field 
does not come from the North American institutions deemed the most 
prestigious and whether criticisms made by external referees are justified. 
Finally, it is important for the chair to comment on the significance of 
the candidate’s work and on his or her potential as a scholar, teacher, and 
contributor to the department, the institution, and the humanities.

The success of the tenure and promotion dossier should not depend on 
the chair’s skills at making a persuasive case. Rather, it should rest on the 
merits of the candidate. It is incumbent on institutions to train incom-­
ing chairs in the preparation of a properly documented dossier, perhaps 
through workshops where outstanding and successful dossiers can be held 
up as models. In fact, the dean should return for revision those dossiers 
that do not do justice to the candidate’s scholarship, teaching, and service 
or that do not make an informed case for the candidate to colleagues from 
other fields, notably fields outside the humanities.

2. Who Does the Reviewing—Academic Presses or Internal and 
 External Referees?
Lindsay Waters has observed that in the current system of tenure and 
promotion at research universities, humanities departments “outsource” 
the substantive review of the scholarly work of their junior colleagues to 
university press readers (Enemies 25). As he points out, this process of ex-­
ternal review serves to obviate the process of internal review: departmen-­
tal committees behave as if they cannot or should not determine the value 
of their junior colleagues’ work unless university presses deemed suffi-­
ciently prestigious have determined the value of that scholarship for them 
(35). In fact, this practice of relying on university press readers continues 
today as if there were no systemic problems in scholarly publishing, even 
in fields (medieval studies, for example, or literatures in languages other 
than English) in which there are fewer venues for monograph publication 
and in which university presses have been scaling back production.



52�|||�rePort

This disturbing overreliance on university press readers is not identi-­
cal to the system of peer review, which depends chiefly on external ref-­
erees chosen from a list of scholars in a candidate’s field of study. There 
are good reasons why the system of external peer review was established 
and why it should be maintained. As Christopher Jencks and David Reis-­
man argued in The Academic Revolution, the development of external peer 
review freed individual scholars from the vertical—and sometimes pa-­
rochial and territorial—evaluation of their work by local college deans 
and upper-­level administrators. And as Jonathan Culler pointed out in 
Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions, the external review process 
enabled the rise of many forms of innovative and even controversial work 
in the humanities. Nonetheless, this apparatus of external peer review 
also created the conditions whereby individual departments can practi-­
cally abdicate their responsibility to review the scholarly work of the very 
colleagues they have appointed to tenure-­track positions.

If internal review is to be a meaningful part of the tenure process, it 
cannot be used as a fallback mechanism when a junior scholar’s manu-­
script has not yet been accepted by a university press. Rather, internal 
review should be as rigorous and as substantive as external review. De-­
partment heads (and advisory or executive committees, where appropriate) 
must ensure that the fairness of the internal review is not compromised 
by departmental or intradisciplinary factionalism.25 The only matter at 
issue should be the quality of the candidate’s dossier in scholarship, teach-­
ing, and service. This means that the candidate’s perceived collegiality 
should not be at issue. The task force agrees with the AAUP’s argument 
(“On Collegiality”) against the inclusion of collegiality as “a criterion 
for faculty evaluation” and tenure, almost as “a fourth criterion” beyond 
scholarship, teaching, and service. To be sure, as the A AUP observed, 
collegiality, “in the sense of collaboration and constructive cooperation, 
identifies important aspects of a faculty member’s overall performance . . . 
not a distinct capacity . . . rather a quality . . . expressed in the successful 
execution” of the three functions. It thus recommended that the virtues 
of collegiality be reflected in the department’s and the institution’s defi-­
nitions of scholarship, teaching, and service. Like the AAUP, this MLA 
task force opposes practices that exclude faculty members on the basis 
of their difference from a perceived professorial norm. The charge of 
uncollegiality may also threaten academic freedom when collegiality is 
confused with the expectation that faculty members display deference to 
administrative or faculty decisions and help ensure internal harmony. At 
the risk of stating the obvious, criticism and dissent do not necessarily 
conflict with the substantive virtues of collegiality.26



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�53

The task force recognizes that internal reviews may often be under-­
taken by scholars who are not specialists in the tenure candidate’s field 
of expertise. In small departments, this situation is frequently the case, 
but even large departments may not always be able to assign the work 
of a junior scholar to senior faculty members who are familiar with the 
candidate’s area of study. We believe nonetheless that any department 
capable of hiring a junior scholar must be capable of reviewing the work 
of that scholar for tenure and promotion. Senior scholars whose research 
lies outside the tenure candidate’s area of expertise are still able to dis-­
cern the quality of the conceptual framework, the scholarly apparatus 
and documentation, the writing, and the impact of the candidate’s work 
on other scholars. Internal review by nonspecialists and external reviews 
by specialists should be regarded as complementary parts of the whole 
tenure review process.

3. External Letters: Their Number and Form and the Reviewer’s Institution
Judging from the findings of our survey, practices involving external re-­
viewers vary widely from institution to institution. Overall, 419 (62.4%) of 
the 671 departments that responded to the MLA survey reported that their 
institutions require them to seek letters from outside referees as part of the 
process of review for tenure and promotion. Of the 287 responding depart-­
ments in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions, 269 (93.7%) said that 
they are required to seek outside letters, in contrast to only 71 (30.6%) of 
the 232 departments in Carnegie Master’s and 79 (52%) of the 152 depart-­
ments in Carnegie Baccalaureate institutions. Over half of the departments 
in Carnegie Master’s (55.2%), nearly a third of the departments in Car-­
negie Baccalaureate (32.9%), but only 3.5% of the departments in Carnegie 
 Doctorate-­granting institutions reported that neither are they required to 
seek outside letters nor do they seek them of their own volition.

Of the responding departments required to solicit outside letters, 
398 provided information about the number of letters they must seek. 
Departments in Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions require the 
greatest number of external referees for tenure decisions—71.8% of these 
departments must seek four or more letters, compared with 36.6% and 
32.8% of departments in Carnegie Baccalaureate and Carnegie Master’s 
institutions, respectively. Among departments in Carnegie Baccalau-­
reate institutions, 63.4% report that they must seek one to three let-­
ters. Over two-­thirds (67.2%) of Carnegie Master’s institutions report 
the same requirement. By contrast, 38.7% of departments in Carnegie 
 Doctorate-­granting institutions are required to seek six or more letters, 
and a handful of institutions require an astounding twelve, fourteen, and 



54�|||�rePort

sixteen letters (one case each). Nine or more letters were required for 18 
(4.5%) of the 398 departments that provided answers to this question.27

It is nearly impossible to suggest best practices that will cover all in-­
stitutions and all forms of external review. Nonetheless, the task force 
developed guidelines for conducting external reviews. In ordinary cir-­
cumstances, six external letters should be sufficient testimony to the value 
of a candidate’s scholarship.28 Larger numbers inevitably add to the work-­
load of leading senior scholars in a field, particularly in small subfields, 
where the same senior names come up again and again as potential re-­
viewers. The crushing number of reviews some senior scholars are asked 
to do may negatively affect the quality of the individual letter, and the 
demand for a large number of letters is sometimes harmful to candidates 
as well, since some departments and colleges count it against candidates 
when potential referees decline to review their work. Indeed, extrapolat-­
ing from our survey data, specifically from the number of candidates our 
responding departments considered for tenure over five years—1999–2000 
to 2003–04—we can say that 800 letters were solicited per year; and since 
our sample represents 16% of the 2,000 departments in the MLA database 
that we assume seek letters (or 50% of the 4,000 departments in the data-­
base), then something on the order of 5,000 letters are sought annually.

In an effort to ensure the highest standards for external reviews, we 
recommend that the following procedures be adopted:

• Departments should solicit letters from the most knowledgeable reviewers in 
a candidate’s field, regardless of the perceived status of the reviewers’ institu-­
tions. Some college and university guidelines urge department heads to seek 
reviewers exclusively from colleges and universities viewed as more presti-­
gious than their own, even though there may be no reason to believe that the 
most knowledgeable reviewers will come from those institutions. Specialists 
in some fields, particularly emerging fields, may be affiliated with all types 
of institutions, and it is the job of the department head or the departmental 
committee that prepares the tenure dossier to explain to deans and provosts 
why a candidate’s referees are qualified to conduct a tenure review even when 
they do not come from institutions that equal or exceed the perceived prestige 
of the candidate’s own.

• Candidates should have the privilege and the responsibility of naming some 
of their potential reviewers (we recommend half ) and excluding one or two 
figures in their field who they believe, for various professional reasons, would 
be inappropriate referees.

• External referees should be remunerated. We recognize that many depart-­
ment budgets are already strained. But refereeing is one of the most important 
evaluative mechanisms in the profession, and institutions should make funds 
available for external reviewers as a form of recognition for their work, along 
the lines of the $100–$200 offered by most university presses. While this is 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�55

hardly adequate compensation for the task, it does recognize refereeing as 
scholarly labor rather than as an obligation attendant on scholarly achieve-­
ment (see “MLA Recommendations on Extramural Evaluations”).

• When approached for external evaluations months before the deadline, refer-­
ees should respond promptly, particularly if they believe they will be unable 
to conduct the review. When they agree to conduct a review, referees should 
complete their work in a timely and responsible fashion that includes a care-­
ful, lengthy assessment of the candidate’s primary works of scholarship and 
his or her potential to contribute to the field in the future. The review should 
present a critical evaluation of the work, not a list of superlatives for fear that 
anything more nuanced will be used against the candidate. Referees should 
not be asked to judge the quality of teaching and service to the institution, 
which they have no way of evaluating.

• Departments should request evaluations by means of a form letter to ensure 
consistency and thus equity. Although there are potentially as many such let-­
ters as there are departments, we strongly recommend that the form letter not 
ask referees to indicate whether the candidate would receive tenure at their 
own institution. Different institutions have different needs and expectations, 
and letters should not presume that one tenure standard fits all. In fact, the 
form letter should not ask the referee to adjudicate the question of tenure 
at all; rather, it should focus solely on evaluating the scholarly merit of the 
candidate’s work, leaving the tenure determination to the candidate’s depart-­
ment and institution.

The task force believes that it is incumbent on all departments and in-­
stitutions to make their own substantive determinations about the quality 
of candidates’ scholarship, regardless of the venue in which it appears and 
even when some part of it has not been publicly disseminated at the time 
of the tenure review. External reviews and press readers’ reports are un-­
deniably important to the tenure process, but they must be accompanied 
by rigorous and fair internal evaluation.

4. Reviews of Scholarly Books
The book review plays an essential role in humanities scholarship, dis-­
seminating information about new works, critically evaluating them, 
and engaging them in often pointed debate. As such, the best published 
reviews constitute an important scholarly activity that helps direct, al-­
ter, and sustain ongoing conversations in the field. While book reviews 
should be an important element of tenure evaluations, their special role in 
disciplinary and interdisciplinary conversations should be recognized and 
should not be confused or conflated with other forms of review, including 
internal and external evaluations and reader reports from presses. In fact, 
the growing emphasis placed on book reviews in tenure evaluations may 
have had a deleterious effect on this kind of scholarly forum, dampening 



56�|||�rePort

disagreements and transforming critical interrogation into a standard-­
ized summation. Many senior scholars, faced with evaluating a number 
of tenure dossiers, lack the time to write book reviews, and some journal 
editors have begun to reduce the amount of space dedicated to reviews, 
whereas others increasingly turn the task over to graduate students or 
junior scholars in the field, who may not be sufficiently specialized in the 
subject or treatment of the book to draft anything other than a summary. 
Such reviews have little value as part of a tenure dossier.

In response to this many-­faceted issue, we offer the following recom-­
mendations:

• Tenure committees and senior administrators need to understand the nature 
of the humanities book review so that its generic distinction from other forms 
of peer evaluation can be recognized. A hostile or barbed review, for instance, 
should not necessarily be seen as an indication that the book is of poor quality. 
Reviews can often be explicit in their disagreements and aggressive in their 
critique of a line of argument or mode of interpretation because they are tak-­
ing a position within particular disciplinary debates.

• Senior scholars should write book reviews to model this critical genre for 
younger scholars and to help identify significant new work.

• Journal editors should cultivate a more critical culture of reviewing, seeking 
out well-­qualified evaluators and asking tenured scholars, in particular, to 
make regular contributions.

• New forums should be developed for the circulation of reviews in the hu-­
manities, since they have diminished or even disappeared from many schol-­
arly journals. We applaud the publication of state-­of-­the-­field review essays in 
such journals as Signs and PMLA.

5. Evaluating Collaboration
Solitary scholarship, the paradigm of one-­author–one-­work, is deeply em-­
bedded in the practices of humanities scholarship, including the processes 
of evaluation for tenure and promotion. Collaboration, however, offers 
significant opportunities for enterprising, untenured scholars to tackle 
problems or interdisciplinary topics too formidable in scale or scope for 
an individual. Sometimes collaboration simply offers the most satisfying 
way to approach an issue or problem in an article or a monograph. In 
fact, recent technological advances have made collaboration with distant 
colleagues easier, faster, and more efficient. And the special challenges 
involved in creating digital scholarship have led to new forms of collabo-­
ration in that arena as well.29

Such opportunities to collaborate should be welcomed rather than 
treated with suspicion because of traditional prejudices or the difficulty 
of assigning credit. After all, academic disciplines in the sciences and so-­



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�57

cial sciences have worked out rigorous systems for evaluating articles with 
multiple authors and research projects with multiple collaborators. We 
need to devise a system of evaluation for collaborative work that is appro-­
priate to research in the humanities and that resolves questions of credit 
in our discipline as in others. The guiding rule, once again, should be to 
evaluate the quality of the results.

Going Forward

It is a truism that one report begs for—and begets—other reports. This 
report is no exception. The questions and issues that the task force has 
considered, including the survey findings and the legitimate concerns of 
all faculty members (junior and senior, tenure-­track and non-­tenure-­track), 
chairs, and administrators in language and literature programs as well as 
in other academic fields, have in no way been exhausted by this report.

To begin with, there were aspects of our charge that we did not ful-­
fill. In our discussion of publication practices, we decided not to examine 
the issue of multiple submissions and to defer, for the time being, to the 
MLA’s current statement, outlined in “Advice for Authors, Reviewers, 
Publishers, and Editors of Scholarly Books and Articles” (MLA Commit-­
tee on Academic Freedom). This document states that publishers “should 
make available to prospective authors clear statements about editorial pol-­
icies . . . and of procedures for the submission and review of manuscripts” 
but that, barring explicit strictures, an author could submit the prospec-­
tus of a book or monograph to several presses simultaneously. When a 
publisher asks to see the entire manuscript, however, the author should 
“inform the publisher if the manuscript has been submitted elsewhere” 
(108). On the submission of articles and essays, the MLA’s current posi-­
tion is that “an author submitting a manuscript to two or more journals 
simultaneously should notify each editor concerned,” although some jour-­
nals, including PMLA, do not allow multiple submissions because they 
“often create unnecessary work for reviewers and editors” (110).

It should be noted that strictures against multiple submissions of 
book manuscripts are peculiar to academic presses; in trade publishing, 
multiple—and competitive—submissions are the norm, although trade 
editors do not usually commission peer reviews. The current MLA rec-­
ommendation states that “if, after four months, a press that requires ex-­
clusive examination rights is unable to decide on acceptance or rejection 
and the publisher and author cannot agree on a reasonable timetable, the 
author may submit the manuscript elsewhere after writing to notify the 
publisher” (109). Since publishers rely on peers from the field to assist 



58�|||�rePort

in evaluating manuscripts, scholars who agree to write reviews should 
comply rigorously with the agreed schedule for completion. All too of-­
ten, however, as many of us have experienced or heard from younger 
colleagues, presses and journals delay decisions for a year or even more, 
thus restricting the options of junior faculty members who need multiple 
publications before the tenure process formally begins. Given the reali-­
ties of tenure demands and, as our report confirms, the raised and rising 
requirements for scholarly production from junior scholars, the task force 
urges all parties involved in the review process—authors, editors, and re-­
viewers—to refrain from significant delays, especially for the untenured. 
We further recommend that the MLA undertake a reexamination of its 
current policies on multiple submissions for books and articles.

Aside from the issue of multiple submissions, we were not able to com-­
pare the number of books published by university presses in the fields 
represented by the MLA between 1999 and 2005, as the council charged 
the task force, because, as Peter Givler of the Association of American 
University Presses informed us, presses do not share a standard way of 
codifying those fields. Further, Givler doubted that a comparison between 
only two points in time (only a few years apart) would lead to significant 
conclusions; a much broader study of trends would be preferable, though 
even more difficult to conduct. In this interdisciplinary age, presses list 
books under multiple rubrics, in part to increase the books’ sales poten-­
tial. To obtain quantitative information about the number of books pub-­
lished in the fields represented by the MLA, we would have to conduct a 
systematic survey of university press directors, which would be costly and 
time-­consuming. The task force thus concluded that the MLA’s funds 
should be used for a different survey, one that engaged the primary con-­
cerns of our charge.

As we reported, our survey did not confirm the existence of a crisis 
of publication in the humanities, at least as late as 2004, although there 
are reasons to believe that publishing opportunities may be narrowing 
further. The troubling signals we noted give us, teacher-­scholars in lan-­
guage and literature departments, ample reason for taking simple and 
constructive measures to support university presses on our campuses. We 
can become members of a permanent library committee and try to get 
our libraries to increase the size of their humanities budgets for books, 
reference works, and journals, and we can also offer to serve as members 
of press boards to affect publishing priorities and financial allocations 
(see also MLA Ad Hoc Committee 184). Moreover, we should urge our 
administrators to subsidize our academic presses and to earmark portions 
of the current or the next capital campaign for enlarging humanities li-­



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�5�

brary collections. The press is crucial to the mission of the university: the 
production of knowledge for society at large would be seriously compro-­
mised without the presses’ dissemination of innovative academic research 
and rigorous scholarship, on which policy makers, opinion leaders, and 
authors of works for the general public constantly draw.

In retrospect, our survey questionnaire did not investigate several top-­
ics and areas that warrant further consideration. For instance, we did not 
ask department chairs to report on the salaries of their junior or recently 
tenured faculty members. We also did not inquire how unions at pub-­
lic institutions influence the evaluation of scholarship, even though they 
sometimes play an important role in establishing and defending proce-­
dural norms and rights in cases of tenure and promotion. Further, we did 
not ask about existing appeals processes when tenure is not recommended 
at the department level or is denied at a higher administrative level—an 
area that certainly merits further study. And finally, the survey did not 
pose questions about lengthening the time to tenure or the probationary 
period before tenure to eight or nine years, which some institutions are 
now recommending.30

Within the purview of our survey findings, it is clear that issues re-­
lated to faculty members of color (hiring, exiting, promoting, and tenur-­
ing) need further study and more precise documentation. The number 
of departments that reported cases of junior faculty members other than 
 non-­Hispanic whites coming up for tenure is small, in some categories 
fewer than a dozen; indeed, the number is too small to allow for signifi-­
cant inferences. For instance, only 65 of the 324 English departments that 
responded to the survey (or 20.1%) reported on the 90 cases of African 
American candidates who came up for tenure between 1999–2000 and 
2003–04. Over the most recent five-­year period covered in the survey 
(1999–2000 to 2003–04), non-­Hispanic whites made up 76.7% of the 
candidates considered for tenure in English departments that answered 
questions about their candidates’ race and ethnicity and 79.7% of those 
awarded tenure. On the foreign language side, 173 departments reported 
on 323 non-­Hispanic white candidates, but only 10 departments reported 
on 12 African American candidates for tenure over the five-­year period 
between 1999–2000 and 2003–04. Fifty to 60 departments reported on 
106 Hispanic candidates who made up 17.3% of foreign language depart-­
ment candidates. Because the small numbers make it difficult to discern 
general patterns, we urge the MLA to undertake further analysis of the 
exit and tenure rates of academic populations other than non-­Hispanic 
whites. And we further urge the MLA to study, through both quantitative 
and qualitative methods, the career paths of faculty members of color.



60�|||�rePort

More broadly, the small number of departments reporting figures 
about faculty members of color who were considered for tenure is symp-­
tomatic of the minimal presence of diverse races and ethnicities in the 
United States system of higher education. Although this issue is beyond 
the task force’s purview, we feel compelled to emphasize the importance 
of increasing diversity in the pool of doctorates in the fields of the mod-­
ern languages and thus in the pool of applicants for academic positions 
and for tenure and promotion. We hope that our emphasis is not simply 
dismissed as a tropism and that MLA members will urge their faculty and 
administration colleagues to undertake a campuswide study of faculty 
diversity, an essential component of a good education in the twenty-­first 
century, and to try to find concrete ways of grappling contextually with 
the historical, ideological, economic, political, and educational causes of 
this complex problem.

Our findings regarding the “tyranny of the monograph,” as it applies 
to a very influential sector of the Carnegie institutions that we surveyed, 
led us to conclude that this is the moment to ask whether the needs of 
the profession—and of graduate students in the fields represented by 
the MLA—are best served by the current idea of the dissertation as a 
 book-­in-­progress. To be sure, we are not the first to raise this question. 
In We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University, David Damrosch 
lamented the hegemony of the book-­length dissertation in the modern 
languages and its contribution to the overproduction of monographs. 
He asked, “Why should the dissertation be presumed to be a protobook 
rather than a series of articles, each produced independently, sharing a 
common general theme or approach rather than developing a single argu-­
ment?” (162). He argued that a series of articles might well be as valuable 
a form of scholarship as a single book, without ruling out the possibility 
that the work of some graduate students might best take shape as a book. 
Damrosch’s idea that dissertations could take the form of linked articles 
rather than a single monograph is even more timely now than a decade 
ago because boundaries of disciplinary inquiry have been significantly 
altered by multi-­ and interdisciplinary work.

A shift in the conception and structure of the modern language dis-­
sertation is one valid option for creating a more capacious understanding 
of scholarship. The monograph as the gold standard for tenure dossiers is 
a relatively recent development, and rigorous quality standards for schol-­
arship are not tied directly to monograph production. For example, in 
departments of philosophy, as well as in most departments in the social 
sciences, faculty members uphold the essay as the fundamental unit of 
scholarly production. If departments of English and other modern lan-­



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�61

guages were to encourage new structures for the dissertations required of 
their doctoral candidates, then deans and provosts would support such a 
change, in our view, because experts in the field had determined the va-­
lidity and the value of such a change. Indeed, if the institutions perceived 
as the most prestigious thought anew about the various ways and forms 
in which advanced graduate students in the humanities demonstrate that 
they are able to conduct sustained original scholarly inquiry, these uni-­
versities would open the door to a long overdue reconsideration of the 
dissertation across the spectrum of graduate education programs in the 
United States.

Of necessity, the relation of the dissertation to the monograph will 
have to be reconsidered as dissertations are made accessible in electronic 
form through institutional repositories, multischool consortia, or com-­
mercial distributors.31 Advocates regard making dissertations available 
electronically as a logical and desirable replacement for dissertation ab-­
stracts and the microfilm or microform system. They consider it retro-­
grade to continue using nineteenth-­century technologies and modes of 
dissemination and to deny academics and others access to new research 
and scholarship.32

More pertinent to our purposes in this report is the impact of the 
potential shift to the electronic dissertation on the process of evaluating 
scholarship for tenure and promotion. For if dissertations are so freely 
and widely accessible that they are in effect published, the typical route 
of the revised dissertation to a first book will need to be fundamentally 
rethought. University presses could well decide that there would virtu-­
ally be no sales of the printed form of a dissertation, even after it was 
revised. Is it possible, however, as advocates of electronic dissemination 
claim, that those dissertations that generate interest online will make 
publication more attractive? Perhaps, but the widely circulated electronic 
dissertation can create yet another level of increased expectations for 
writing and publication from nontenured members of the profession, 
who could be asked to produce an entirely new book-­length manuscript 
in the postdoctoral pretenure years. To prevent a further escalation of 
demands on young faculty members, institutions could protect their stu-­
dents’ dissertations for three to five years before the dissertations are 
posted on university library sites and give students the right to decide 
the year in which their dissertations become electronically available.33 
This delay may only be a temporary measure if, as some advocates pre-­
dict, all faculty work will eventually be uploaded and disseminated freely 
through library servers instead of taking the form of print books and 
journals; such an open archive system, which is currently the subject of 



62�|||�rePort

considerable discussion within the research library community, would 
constitute a radical change in the ways in which scholarly communica-­
tion functions.34

It seems clear to the task force that our profession and the academy as 
a whole need to rethink not only the conception of the dissertation as a 
larval monograph but also, and more broadly, the entire graduate cur-­
riculum for students confronting a particular conjuncture of intellectual, 
academic, technological, and economic circumstances today. It is equally 
clear that the institutions perceived as the most prestigious in our fields 
will need to initiate such an effort if there is eventually to be a recon-­
ceptualization of the culminating piece of scholarship for the doctoral 
degree. But, in keeping with a principle that runs throughout this report, 
it is incumbent on each institution to define what type of final scholarly 
production is appropriate for its specific educational mission and for the 
kinds of academic positions that its PhD recipients are likely to have, 
positions that may be very different from those of its own tenured senior 
faculty members. Here again, we believe that the MLA can act as a cata-­
lyst for this national conversation.

Indeed, if there is a final recommendation that the task force would 
make, it is this: discussions of the issues we have raised must begin in 
departments and institutions that have not yet undertaken them and must 
continue in departments and institutions that have already begun them. 
Our survey suggests that such deliberations are in fact going on in a sub-­
stantial number—if not a majority—of the responding departments and 
thus in their institutions. Asked whether their institution is reviewing its 
processes and reconsidering its criteria for tenure and promotion, 308 
(45.9%) departments said no in 2005. But 119 (17.7%) said that their in-­
stitution had completed such a review in the past three years, 128 (19.1%) 
that such a review was in progress, and 116 (17.3%) that such a review was 
under discussion. We advocate that discussions not be an end in them-­
selves but that they result in a genuine, comprehensive review. Institutions 
should rethink on a regular basis their requirements for tenure and the 
process by which they evaluate the ways in which junior faculty members 
have met those requirements. For, as this report has tried to show, the 
meanings and functions of scholarship and scholarly exchange are histori-­
cal phenomena. The criteria for tenure and the processes of evaluation 
have shifted over the last few decades and will undoubtedly shift again. It 
is up to us, then, the teacher-­scholars of the MLA, to become agents in 
our academic systems and effect changes that reflect and instantiate ap-­
propriate standards of scholarly production and equity and transparency 
for our colleagues, our institutions, and our society.



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�63

Summary Recommendations

 1. Departments and institutions should practice and promote transparency 
throughout the tenuring process.

 2. Departments and institutions should calibrate expectations for achieving 
tenure and promotion with institutional values, mission, and practice.

 3. The profession as a whole should develop a more capacious conception of schol-­
arship by rethinking the dominance of the monograph, promoting the scholarly 
essay, establishing multiple pathways to tenure, and using scholarly portfolios.

 4. Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship 
produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and cre-­
ate procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.

 5. Departments should devise a letter of understanding that makes the expecta-­
tions for new faculty members explicit. The letter should state what previous 
scholarship will count toward tenure and how evaluation of joint appoint-­
ments will take place between departments or programs.

 6. Departments and institutions should provide support commensurate with 
expectations for achieving tenure and promotion (start-­up funds, subven-­
tions, research leaves, and so forth).

 7. Departments and institutions should establish mentoring structures that 
provide guidance to new faculty members on scholarship and on the optimal 
balance of publication, teaching, and service.

 8. Department chairs should receive guidance on the proper preparation of a 
tenure dossier.

 9. Departments and institutions should construct and implement models for 
intermediate reviews that precede tenure reviews.

10. Departments should conduct an in-­depth evaluation of candidates’ dossiers 
for tenure or promotion at the departmental level. Presses or outside referees 
should not be the main arbiters in tenure cases.

11. Scholarship, teaching, and service should be the three criteria for tenure. 
Those responsible for tenure reviews should not include collegiality as an 
additional criterion for tenure.

12. Departments and institutions should limit the number of outside letters (in 
general, to no more than six). Scholars should be chosen to write letters 
based primarily on their knowledge of the candidate’s field(s). Letters should 
be limited to evaluating scholarly work. Candidates should participate in se-­
lecting (or rejecting) some of their potential reviewers.

13. The profession as a whole should encourage scholars at all levels to write 
substantive book reviews.

14. Departments and institutions should facilitate collaboration among scholars 
and evaluate it fairly.

15. The task force encourages further study of the unfulfilled parts of its charge 
with respect to multiple submissions of manuscripts and comparisons of the 
number of books published by university presses between 1999 and 2005.

16. The task force recommends establishing concrete measures to support uni-­
versity presses.

17. The task force recognizes that work needs to be done on several ques-­
tions not asked in its survey: salaries of junior and recently tenured faculty 



64�|||�rePort

 members, the role of unions, tenure appeals processes, and the lengthening 
of the pretenure period.

18. The task force recommends that a study of faculty members of color be 
conducted.

19. The task force encourages discussion of the current form of the dissertation (as a 
monograph in progress) and of the current trends in the graduate curriculum.

20. Departments should undertake a comprehensive review to ensure that their 
expectations for tenure are consistent with their institutions’ values and mis-­
sion and that each step in the process is fair and transparent.

Domna C. Stanton, Graduate Center, City University of New York (chair)
Michael Bérubé, Penn State University, University Park

Leonard Cassuto, Fordham University, Lincoln Center
Morris Eaves, University of Rochester
John Guillory, New York University

Donald E. Hall, West Virginia University, Morgantown
Sean Latham, University of Tulsa

notes�

1. These percentages are derived from two IPEDS components: the 2004 Institu-­
tional Characteristics file, which provides a systematic count of institutions covered 
in the IPEDS, and the 2004 Employees by Assigned Position file, which counts the 
employees in various categories that institutions have on their payrolls as of 1 No-­
vember of the given survey year. Each data set was queried for degree-­granting, 
Title IV–participating, Carnegie Doctorate-­granting, Master’s, and Baccalaureate 
institutions in the fifty states and the District of Columbia.

2. Our survey used the 2000 Carnegie classifications, not the new Carnegie clas-­
sifications announced in 2005. A comparative analysis of the 2005 and the 2000 clas-­
sifications shows that more than 95% of the institutions in the 2000 classification 
that classify groups as Carnegie Doctorate-­granting institutions remain in one of 
the three new categories—RU/ V H: Research Universities (very high research ac-­
tivity), RU/H: Research Universities (high research activity), or DRU: Doctoral/ 
Research Universities. More than 90% of the institutions in the 2000 classification 
that our survey grouped as Carnegie Master’s institutions remain in one of the three 
categories of Master’s Colleges and Universities in the 2005 classification. Three and 
a half percent of the institutions classified as Carnegie Master’s institutions in 2000 
are classified in 2005 as Research Universities or Doctoral/ Research Universities. 
The remaining institutions are classified as Master’s institutions in 2000 and placed 
in the Baccalaureate Colleges categories in 2005. Just over 85% of the institutions 
classified as Baccalaureate Colleges in 2000 are placed in one of the Baccalaureate 
Colleges categories in 2005. Most of the remainder (12.2%) are institutions classi-­
fied as Master’s institutions in 2005. We can safely state that the new classifications, 
while they allow for finer-­grained analysis in some respects, affect the analysis of the 
survey findings only marginally.

3. The remaining percentage of PhD recipients—ranging from 39% to 24%—rep-­
resent the following categories: non-­tenure-­track full-­time or part-­time unknown; 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�65

higher education, appointment type not specified; postdoctoral fellowships; academic 
administration; secondary and elementary school teaching; business, government, 
and not-­for-­profit organizations; self-­employed; not employed seeking employment; 
and not seeking employment.

4. Different types of faculty members can be classified under “full-­time non-­
 tenure-­track.” These include, as we see in the “Statement on Non-­Tenure-­Track 
Faculty Members,” approved by the Executive Council of the MLA in 2003 and en-­
dorsed by the Delegate Assembly in December 2003, “external postdoctoral fellows, 
internal postdoctoral fellows, and more permanent NTTs [non-­tenure-­track faculty 
members], the last of whom go by almost as many names as there are institutions.”

5. The percentages for full-­time and part-­time faculty members in English and 
foreign languages were calculated 8 July 2006 using the United States Department of 
Education DAS-­T online data analysis system, http:// nces.ed.gov/ das.

6. Some would argue that tenure-­track faculty members have benefited from the 
large presence of NTT colleagues because they are relieved from teaching lower-­
 division courses. But it could also be argued that such purported relief increases the 
destructive consequences of departmental hierarchies and undermines the value of 
the tenure-­track faculty in the eyes of administrations focused on the bottom line.

7. We are not suggesting that universities are asking their presses to become profit 
centers and sources of revenue to subsidize other parts of the institution, as the term 
“for-­profit” business might imply, but we are emphasizing a new unwillingness to 
subsidize the not-­for-­profit university press.

8. Penn State University Press has revived its Romance Studies monograph series 
(http:// romancestudies .psu .edu/) in collaboration with the Penn State University Li-­
braries, the Department of French and Francophone Studies, and the Department 
of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese; monographs are offered in a free online version 
and for purchase in print. The University of California Press is publishing mono-­
graph series online in collaboration with the California Digital Library (http:// www 
 .ucpress .edu/ digpub/). And Oxford University Press plans to sell licenses of its hu-­
manities list to libraries. In an e-­mail message to David Nicholls, director of MLA 
book publications, Sanford Thatcher, director of the Penn State University Press, 
reported that the press is reviving a series in Romance studies suspended several 
years ago by getting library support on the technical side (the press is becoming part 
of the library administratively). The program offers older titles in the discontinued 
series (then called Penn State Studies in Romance Literatures) online and for Print 
on Demand (POD). It also publishes new titles in Romance Studies (the new title of 
the series) in the same format; for new titles, the press expects sales of POD copies in 
the range of 100 to 150 to libraries and 100 to 150 to individuals. In an e-­mail mes-­
sage to David Nicholls, Lynne Withey, director of the University of California Press, 
indicated that the press is also experimenting with monographs that faculty series 
editors select; the staff then posts the texts online in the institutional repository 
maintained by the California Digital Library and produces print copies on demand. 
In the series in science and in linguistics that the University of California Press has 
launched, the press is selling 250 to 300 copies per series, which allows it to continue 
publishing specialized work. The press is about to announce a series in literature. 
Both of these instances, which revive publication in the fields represented by the 
MLA, confirm yet again the crucial importance of digital technology to the future 
of scholarship and publication in the humanities.



66�|||�rePort

9. In “Journals in the Time of Google,” Lee C. Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born 
cite average prices per journal title in 2004: whereas in chemistry it is $2,845 and in 
physics, $2,538, in language and literature it is $153.

10. Lindsay Waters writes that in 1980, 65% of the acquisitions budget in the 
University of California library system went for books, 35% for journals. In the early 
2000s, these percentages changed dramatically: 20% went for books, 80% for jour-­
nals (Enemies 37).

11. Wilcox’s A Comprehensive Survey represents the report to the Office of Edu-­
cation in the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which 
provided the grant to support the sur vey, initiated as a project of the College 
Section of the National Council of Teachers of English in 1965. The project was 
subsequently endorsed by the MLA and the ADE, which participated in the advi-­
sory committee that was formed to oversee the project; Wilcox was the survey’s 
director. The survey was mailed to a random sample of 300 departments, which 
received the questionnaire in 1967 (the survey asked questions about the academic 
year 1966–67); 284 of the 300 departments (94.6%) returned questionnaires. Wil-­
cox’s The Anatomy of College English drew on the survey but is not a report of the 
survey findings.

12. Women continue to be underrepresented, however, at the highest rank; ac-­
cording to the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, women make up 38% of 
full-­time tenured faculty members in English and foreign languages at the rank of 
professor. More encouraging, they make up 50.6% of full-­time tenured faculty mem-­
bers in these fields at the rank of associate professor (Cataldi et al.).

13. Findings about tenure rates from other recent surveys are comparable with 
those reported in the MLA study. A survey conducted by the American Historical 
Association in fall 2003 (Townsend) found that of the 910 faculty members that the 
history programs surveyed had considered for tenure in the preceding five years, 856 
received tenure, a 94.1% success rate across the range of institutions (not including 
two-­year colleges). Tenure rates at doctoral and research institutions and in PhD 
programs were only slightly below this average at 92.3%, and, when broken down 
by region, history programs in the Midwest, which accounted for a quarter of the 
history faculty members who came up for tenure, reported a 98.3% rate, whereas the 
other regions were all close to the 94.1% average.

14. The 20% exit rate among those hired between 1994 and 2004 was calculated 
from a base number that includes persons hired between 1999 and 2004, most of 
whom would not as yet have been considered for tenure and who would be the least 
likely to have left the departments that hired them for any reason. The percentage of 
exits would doubtless be significantly higher, and the implied tenure rate lower, were 
the base number limited to cohorts of assistant professors whose members either had 
already been considered for tenure by 2005 or who would have been had they not 
left before their cases could be sent forward for review. We have no way of tracking 
persons in the 20% who were hired at other institutions and eventually received 
tenure, those in the percentage who went on to NTT positions, or those who left the 
profession. The discrepancy implied by the difference between Dooris and Guidos’s 
55% success rate and the MLA’s estimated 20% exit rate suggests the degree to which 
the MLA exit rate is lowered because, unlike Dooris and Guidos’s study, it is calcu-­
lated from a base that includes recently hired persons who are just beginning their 
probationary appointments.



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�67

15. There are also gender differences in the tenure rate according to the field. 
Thus film and media studies have tenured more men than women; literary studies 
and creative writing have tenured about the same number of men and women; and 
rhetoric and composition, applied linguistics, and language learning and acquisition 
have tenured more women than men. It is, of course, difficult to know the histori-­
cal and intellectual community factors that account for these differences among the 
fields represented by the MLA.

16. To cite an obvious example, publication provides a poor framework for evalu-­
ating scholarship in digital form, including “print” books and articles aggregated in 
major databases, such as Project MUSE.

17. Digital repositories in libraries and at other sites may further diminish the 
distinction between the essay and the book.

18. See “The Contributions of Journal Editors to the Scholarly Community” 
(Council), which also urges recognition of editorial experience in hiring, tenure, and 
promotion. As this document argues, the conceptualization and execution of special 
issues of a journal are often commensurate with editing a collection of essays in book 
form. Thus special issues are often subsequently published as books.

19. This acceptance of diversity should also hold true for scholarship published 
abroad, where journal and press editors sometimes serve as the peer-­review body and 
readers’ reports may be unavailable. Tenure review committees should always judge 
the merit of the scholarship itself, while understanding that international communi-­
ties have different vetting processes for academic publishing.

20. Increasingly, many journals possess a significant digital component and 
place electronic versions of print articles in repositories, such as Project MUSE and 
 JSTOR; this is the case with PMLA. However, in “A CELJ Snapshot of Learned 
Journals and E-­Publication in 2004,” based on the responses of 190 member jour-­
nals (out of 350 to whom the questionnaire had been sent), Elizabeth Haluska-­
 Rausch and Bonnie Wheeler found “no immediate compulsion to add or change to 
an electronic format” among their respondents (2). Indeed, the respondents did 
not see an intellectual need to “go digital,” since they viewed the digital revolution 
as “market and consumer driven” (5). Editors also reported that for journals with 
 print-­only subscriptions or with both formats there was no evidence of decline in 
print sales due to electronic availability and that much of the evidence of decreased 
sales is anecdotal.

21. The MLA International Bibliography has been updated to provide links to digi-­
tal materials of indexed items.

22. The task force thus supports the recommendation of the ACLS Commission 
on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences that “policies for 
tenure and promotion . . . recognize and reward digital scholarship and scholarly 
communication; recognition should be given not only to scholarship that uses the 
humanities and social science infrastructure but also to scholarship that contributes 
to its design, construction, and growth.”

23. This letter might include, for instance, how work with digital media in re-­
search, as well as in teaching and service, will be evaluated and credited. See “Guide-­
lines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages” (MLA 
Committee on Information Technology).

24. This mentoring process should include initiation into the work ings and 
the policy statements of the faculty member’s professional organizations. See, for 



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 instance, “Advice for Authors, Reviewers, Publishers, and Editors of Scholarly Books 
and Articles” (MLA Committee on Academic Freedom) on issues of multiple submis-­
sions, appropriate time of response for submissions, and so on, as well as the “MLA 
Statement of Professional Ethics.”

25. This view is consistent with the provisions of the “MLA Statement of Profes-­
sional Ethics” for external and internal reviews: “A scholar who has any conflict of 
interest or is so out of sympathy with the [colleague’s work] as to be unable to judge 
its merits without prejudice must decline to serve as referee or reviewer.”

26. See Heather Dubrow’s introduction to the special topic on collegiality in Pro-
fession. She notes factors that cause a lack of collegiality in departments today: the job 
market, changes in career patterns, increased diversity within departments, changes 
in family patterns, and the influence of business models on the academy.

27. A significant, but puzzling, difference in tenure rates for women and men 
emerges in relation to the number of outside letters departments are required to 
solicit: women have a lower tenure rate than men in departments required to solicit 
the largest number of letters (6 or more). For the years 1999–2000 and 2003–04, the 
figures show that when 6 or more outside letters are required, 87.6% of men versus 
81.1% of women are tenured; when 4 or 5 letters are required, 93.4% of men versus 
90.7% of women are tenured; with 1 to 3 letters, 90% of men versus 90.1% of women 
are tenured; and when letters are not required, 94.3% of men versus 95.2% of women 
are tenured.

28. In MLA documents, the number of outside letters recommended ranges from 
2 to 6. The “ADE and ADFL Statement on the Use of Outside Reviewers” rec-­
ommends 2 to 4 letters; the “MLA Recommendations on Extramural Evaluations,” 
which was endorsed by the MLA Delegate Assembly in 1994 and the MLA Executive 
Council at its February 1995 meeting, recommends up to 6 letters. In extraordinary 
circumstances, when there is substantial disagreement about a candidate or when a 
candidate’s work does not fit neatly into one disciplinary specialty, a dean or depart-­
ment head might ask for additional letters to supplement those of external referees 
who were already named or whose reviews were received.

29. See Damrosch’s argument for collaboration as opposed to the idea of the iso-­
lated, individual scholar (188–91).

30. Under the 1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” 
the AAUP stipulated that “this period may not exceed seven years.” The association’s 
2001 “Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work,” how-­
ever, said that “a faculty member [can] be entitled to stop the clock or extend the 
probationary period, with or without taking a full or partial leave of absence, if the 
faculty member . . . is a primary or coequal caregiver of newborn or newly adopted 
children,” that “institutions [can] allow the tenure clock to be stopped for up to one 
year for each child, and . . . that faculty [can] be allowed to stop the clock only twice, 
resulting in no more than two one-­year extensions of the probationary period” (n1). 
In our view, it would also be appropriate to stop the clock or extend the probationary 
period for primary care of significant others, infirm parents, or relatives.

31. Making dissertations available in electronic form as an institutional require-­
ment has elicited considerable comment at several universities, including Ohio State 
University, Columbus, especially from graduate students, who have expressed con-­
cern that their manuscripts may not be published in print form if they have already 
appeared on the Web. Because of such opposition, Ohio State allows students a delay 



mla�task�force�on�evaluating�scholarshiP�|||�6�

of one to three years in releasing their dissertations in electronic form, and the ad-­
ministration is considering a five-­year delay to allow PhD recipients more time to 
publish their work (Carlson).

32. ProQuest/ UMI receives dissertations electronically, prints them out, and then 
microfilms them to create an archival copy. Thus this company still considers the 
“retrograde” microfilm or microform system the most reliable way to create an ar-­
chive of electronic texts.

33. This move raises the thorny issue of who owns the rights to the intellectual 
content of the dissertation, the author or the university?

34. See the final draft report from the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure 
for the Humanities and Social Sciences, chaired by John Unsworth.

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