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The Promise of Enemies

Lindsey Waters’ Enemies of Promise1 is, I am reliably informed, the talk of the scholarly publishing world. Good thing I’m reliably informed, because what I hear sounds like whispering. That’s probably because my listening post is on the other side of the campus, where I office amongst folks who verb nouns and write unreadable books that university presses are supposed to go broke publishing. These are people who support and encourage the very system Waters deplores. They believe that things in the academy are just fine, and they are not inclined to brook suggestions of change. Were they to read Waters’ polemic (his word, not mine), it might strike them as nothing but futile and rather silly blasphemy; but that assessment wouldn’t keep them from wanting to burn him at the stake anyway. I agree with Waters on a number of points, most of which have been discussed in these pages during the past couple of years. But I do have a problem with his characterization of university administrators as facilitators of the bogus notion that quantity equals quality and that the book is the one valid measure of faculty productivity. I do not believe – and I have said this before – that administrators give much thought to the rise, progress, and publication of book manuscripts. They are interested in numbers, of course, but books published annually by members of a particular college or department yield only one of many numbers that deans et al. employ to establish their institution’s place in the world. Perhaps administrators once preached the gospel of the book, but nowadays faculty show up for work having already internalized what some long-defunct dean formerly wrote about in red-hot memoranda. Peer pressure, not administrative pressure, guides the novice toward that first book and the ones that had