Disciplinary Societies and Evaluating Scholarship: A View from History

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