It's Not about the Book

During the 2006 MLA convention in Philadelphia, I wandered into a ses sion sponsored by the association at which David Laurence and one or two members of the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion were presenting some of the task force's preliminary findings. Okay, I didn't exactly wander in: I'd heard John Guillory talk about expand ing the idea of scholarship?unlinking it from publication and thinking instead (along the lines of the Boyer Commission, but with more nuance) of the different ways in which our academic work, what we tend to think of as research but which gets "cashed" almost exclusively as publication?at an ADE seminar in the summer of 2004 and knew instantly that his ideas could help loosen some orthodoxies with which we've been living in our profession. Because Guillory's call had very much to do with unseating the scholarly monograph from its supreme position in the academic order, I should say that, having made the connection, I anticipated what the task force had to say. I also vaguely remembered filling out a survey like the one described by members of the task force (but then, as a department chair, I fill out a lot of surveys). Finally, I'd been talking with some of my col leagues in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, with whom I shared the concern that the task force hadn't paid enough attention to the differences between the traditional fields in English and other language departments and other fields, often housed in these departments, whose work wasn't principally hermeneutic and thus not scholarly monograph material. (I'm ^_ ^