The Publishing Crisis and Tenure Criteria: An Issue for Research Universities?

The author is Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University. A version of this paper was presented at the 2003 MLA convention in San Diego. The essential background for a discussion of tenure deliberations at research universities or for speculation about their future is of course the evolution of research universities as we know them. Research universities—public and private—are important institutions from the standpoint of our profession since they grant doctoral degrees to those who will teach in all kinds of colleges and universities and they conduct in their facilities a great deal of the sponsored research that is responsible for the leading position of the United States in the field of education worldwide. Owing to the status of research universities as flagship institutions, their leaders are frequently called on to speak for higher education as a whole, even though such universities constitute only a small fraction of its universe. The standards they set for such procedures as faculty appointments and promotions have tended to have a far-reaching, perhaps inordinate, influence in the profession, if only because institutions below them in the pecking order often see fit to emulate them. Research universities have been changing. Two decades ago, they were still to some degree bastions of the old publish-or-perish order, under which it was possible to proclaim that, for junior faculty members, books, articles, and research grants were the sine qua non for acquiring tenure. Concomitantly, it was understood that the young academic’s performance as a classroom teacher or mentor and his or her contribution as a citizen of the community or of the