Let us talk about the role learned journals and journals in general might fill in the future. The MLA in last year's Report on Evaluating Scholarship asked its members whether they could not work to make articles count more for tenure. I think this is a pressing question, and I think we should all be happy the report made this a major recommendation. I am now tempted to go beyond what I said in my Enemies of Promise and ask the scholarly community in the humanities to agree that, if a person publishes a book in the first six or seven years after earning a PhD, he or she be denied tenure! If we look seriously at how humanists' careers develop, it is clear that they get stronger and more interesting as they get older; flipping the question over, as sociologist Robert K. Merton does, we see that demanding publication, especially books, from young humanists has troubling effects. We need to help the scholarly community understand why journal essays are probably the best units of publication for humanists. The point of publication is not quantity but quality: if we accept that notion, then learned journals really become the chief places for circulating work that can win people tenure. Why is the article a superb genre for flexing one's critical muscles and really revealing them, for writing something that will change others' minds? Can you think of essays you know that changed a field?
We need to prepare a newer province for learned journals in the humanities. In the past thirty years the genre of the scholarly article has not enjoyed particularly high esteem; some have even shunned it. All of us—publishers and scholars alike—can work to turn this around, clearing a path to sustainable growth.
Lindsay E. Waters, Harvard Univ. Press
