Valuing the Humanities, Evaluating Scholarship

Abstract

The evaluation of scholarship is a difficult subject to discuss as a matter of general principle or procedure apart from individual cases. At this level of abstraction, discourse about evaluation becomes awkward, uneasy, inarticu late. Yet developments in the humanities disciplines press this conversation urgently on us at the present time. These developments have long been rec ognized as a of the humanities, a phrase that in my view is rhetorically inept but nonetheless gestures toward a real condition: the chronic institu tional disadvantage of humanities disciplines in relation to the natural and social sciences.1 More recently we have had to acknowledge a very real crisis in scholarly publishing, evidenced by the collapse of some university presses and the reduction or elimination of the humanities line in others. In a widely cited letter to the literary professoriat, Stephen Greenblatt has alerted us to the possibly dire consequences of this development for the future promotion or tenure of younger scholars.2 Although we cannot yet know what will hap pen as a result of financial retrenchment among university presses, it would be a mistake to see this development as the chief or only evidence of the vul nerability of humanities scholarship at the present time. For many reasons a conversation about the evaluation of humanities scholarship is long overdue. The humanities disciplines emerged over the last century and a half as a division of the disciplines nominally at parity with the natural and social sci

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