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WHO, IF not someone with a touch of madness, asks Erasmus's Madness in her own eulogy, would spent most of her or his best youthful years poring over dusty books and burning the midnight oil, frequently in attics paid for with the larger part of an insufficient stipend? What reasonable person would risk ill health, submit to excruciating exams, reach thirty still a student, and then face a career fraught with perils and difficulties? And what about the rewards? Don't the earnings of the astute merchant and the stockbroker, the professional athlete and the successful actress dwarf in one year a distinguished scholar's lifetime earnings? Doesn't the promised and eternal heaven for the priest and nun or the CEO's golden parachute appears as a greater prize than tenure and the chairship of a department? In today's scholarship and its institutions, Erasmus could easily claim, we see one or more reason to praise madness: without her, some of the best minds of our time would not devote themselves to Jacques Derrida and Paracelsus, Virginia Woolf and Luce Irigaray, departmental budgets and curriculum committee meetings.
Yet before we give Madness and unqualified celebration, let us examine closely how scholarship is practiced today in most American universities. Below, I describe some of our problems, I redefine and relocate scholarship, and finally, I make a few modest proposals.
Scholarship is a primary issue in at least three episodes of the scholar's career: the protracted dissertation process the candidacy for tenure, and the yearly recommendations for salary increases. The first act of this drama, the sputtering écriture of the doctoral dissertation, takes place at familiar scene for us, the research university. According to the Carnegei Foundation's 1987 classification, doctorate-granting institutions accounts for only 213 of the 3,389 colleges and universities in the United States; of these, just 142 have PhD-granting programs in English, while only 84 have one PhD-granting program or more in foreign doctoral languages (Huber, “Changes” 57n2). There is, therefore, a twenty-three-to-one chance that a graduating doctoral student will not teach at a research university. Our graduates will more likely be responsible for language instruction, survey and culture courses, and few upper-level literature courses on the model of their graduate seminars on, say, comparative postcolonial metacriticism. Even more sobering is that, as revealed in a recent MLA survey, of 597 people who received PhDs in 1993–94 in foreign languages, 78.6% obtained a position teaching in postsecondary education, but only 43% of PhD recipients found tenure-track positions (see Bettina Huber's survey report in this issue). And yet most graduate programs I know of seem to prepare their students for tenure-track appointments at Research I universities, egging them on to engage in exhaustive investigation, device original interpretations, develop a compelling style, and make a hefty contribution to the field.
It is true that Professor Blunt would probably get sued if she told one of her students that he is extremely talented as a teacher and shows promise as an administrator but that his writing is modest and even leaden. She would get little thanks for suggesting that he work from his strength, write a short and useful dissertation—edit a needed book, provide some new documents, explore a period he will be teaching—and search for a job in which publications are not crucial. Most graduate students I know would resent such advice. They like us to express the belief, easy to espouse, that all doctorates are created equal and that the pursuit of happiness necessarily involves teaching in the graduate school. Perhaps my experience has biased me against such a proposition, because it has been marked by the positive experience of teaching at Dartmouth, Vassar, and the Middlebury Spanish Summer School. But when I tell my graduate students how wonderful teaching at a four-year institution can be, I fear it seems I am trying to distribute consolation prizes instead of showing the variety of existing opportunities.
Another group of graduate students is invisible in the surveys I have seen. In 1976–77, 238 programs granted 705 doctorates, in 1977, 302 programs granted 742 doctorates, and in 1991–92, 272 programs granted 634 doctorates (Huber, “The MLA's 1991–92 Survey” 41). The proportion fluctuates around 2.5 PhDs a program. Yet clearly these programs admitted many more than 2.5 students each year. Where have all the others gone? Ubi sunt? I have found that many go through all the courses and even the comprehensive exams but then wander off, never to write a dissertation. Some succumb even sooner to the pressure of three or four long, breathless papers a semester, as well as trips to conventions and early attempts at publication. Yet it is not the demand of scholarship that is to blame but the type of scholarship prevalent in most graduate schools. A music conservatory that followed the same criteria would graduate only soloists and send away all the excellent and good musicians that can play in a regional orchestra or jazz band. Or, better, only piano soloists, relegating the bassoon and the flute to football stadia. Even the army provides soldiers with different skills for different tasks, but, except for a difference in the period or genre they study, most graduate students look very much alike.
The second act is the tenure review. I often get asked, as many of you do, to be an outside referee. The letter I usually receive, and I have signed a similar one a few times, goes something like this: “Since you are one of the most knowledgeable scholars in the field, we would like you to evaluate Professor Nietzche's publications and anything else you know about him. Please tell us if he would get tenure at your university and compare him with others at a similar stage of their careers. Your comments will not be revealed to the candidate unless we get sued. We know you are busy, but we hope you are sufficiently rewarded for your efforts with our eternal gratitude.” Here again candidates' futures revert to the type of institutions that granted them their PhDs. A large envelope arrives, at times a large box, and for three days I enjoy reading a condensed version of a person's work of six years. Usually I am favorably surprised: I knew Professor Nietzche only from a paper he gave on homeric scholarship at the San Francisco MLA convention, and I see now a book on the origins of Greek theater that, while fiery and at times opinionated and misguided—and published, I might add, at a minor house—shows decent knowledge of the bibliography and is rather convincing. Who could I compare him with? At young Richard Rorty? Would he get tenure at my university? Perhaps, but I would not be sure. We are not big on Continental philosophy. What does Professor Nietzche know of cognitive science? Is the real question whether I think his writing is any good? Is that the same as saying whether I think his scholarship is any good.
The third act comes every year at budget time, when many of us are asked to judge the merits of the faculty members who serve in our departments. Publications again are an important factor and often the most important one.
The main problem here is that we confuse scholarship with publications. We expect publications at certain times and in a certain quantity—increasingly early times and large quantities—varying institution to institutions. Ironically, school and scholarship derived from the Greek 
‘leisure,’ implying a state of having enough time to contemplate and study. Language and literature departments are busier than ever, teaching more students with fewer professors and facing higher demands: we have become like businesspeople, knowing that the addition or loss of three more majors may translate to the gain or loss of a tenure-track slot. As Bettina Hubere spells out in a recent MLA survey report, PhD-granting departments that can point to growth in their undergraduate majors are more likely to fill vacant positions and receive new positions. Yet the increased ratios of majors per professor in classrooms, useful as bargaining chips, undercut the leisured work of a seminar. The advanced level is precisely where we need the spirit of inquiry, the fearless exploration of the unknown, the vast erudition, the patient effort, the enthusiasm for the subject matter, the joy of discovery, and the engaging dialogue that characterize scholarship.
The new solution I propose to a relatively old problem involves making a rigorous distinction between scholarship and publications, between the activity and one of its results. Let me give you some examples of what I mean by scholarship and why I consider it vital to our profession. Last fall I taught a comparative literature freshman seminar on the topic Who Am I? in which we read works ranging from Plato's Symposium to Oliver Sacks's An Anthropologist from Mars. As a comparatist I feel obligated to read works in their original language whenever possible, so I rescued my old Greek dictionary from the basement of my house and bought a couple of Greek readers and a grammar. I had not attempted to read Greek seriously since my days in college in Chile, more than three decades ago. Miraculously, it had not all faded away, especially none of the joy of reading this strikingly beautiful language. And as I struggled through the first pages of Plato, I found the scholars I admire. You may remember that the description of Socrates's unruly seminar on love begins surprisingly not with the voice of an authorial narrator representing Plato but with Apollodorus, a young disciple of Socrates, speaking directly to a group of friends several years after the symposium. His friends want to know what happened that famous evening. Apollodorus confesses he is not unprepared, because a few days ago, as he returned from his country house to Athens, Glaucon, a friend who met him on the road, asked him to tell the same story. And why? Because Glaucon had heard it already from the someone else, but in a not altogether clear version. That fellow in turn had heard it from someone who was at the banquet, Aristodemus, a little fellow known for always going barefoot, as Socrates himself did. All these storytellers and avid listeners at the start of this dialogue are themselves a lesson in scholarship. The story matters to them and they do not tire of listening to it and telling it, just as some of our students pursue us down the corridors to tell them again what happened when Lacan met Derrida or Benet came to Yale. Without this passion, there is no scholarship, only a representation of it.
Similarly, while preparing for the ADFL seminar, I was struck by two further passages at the start of Plato's Symposium. Apollodorus says that he has been for almost three years observing closely what Socrates says and does. I have forgotten much of what my most admired teachers taught me in graduate school, the medieval sagas that W.T.H. Jackson brought to life and the Calderón plays minutely analyzed by Gonzalo Sobejano, but I remember them for their lessons in scholarship: Jackson for his enthusiasm and admiration for people long gone, Sobejano for his respectful consideration of the text, for the lucidity of his language, and for his profound erudition with never a trace of arrogance—he always welcomed dissent and exploration. Similarly, some of my colleagues that I have come to admire as mentors, such as John Kronik and Sara Castro-Klarén, have affected me not so much through what they have written, however admirable that may be, as through the consistency with which they say and do the right thing, their disposition to understand the new, and their endless, generous, and intelligent curiosity.
One last point to take from the Symposium. As Glaucon begs Apollodorus to tell his story, he points out that the road invites conversation, since it holds few distractions, so they can concentrate on telling and listening to the story. Glaucon believes listening is an art as important as telling and is essential to good scholarship.
This kind of conversation takes place at the most illuminating moments at a research university. There is time to consider an issue that matters with people we care for, to pursue a question, to compare versions, to document positions, to invite other informed people into the dialogue, and to scribble our own version. This activity is the core of our leisure, of our scholarship, while our business may be publications. Creating and preserving that space of inquiry is a basic form of scholarship and is what a good graduate school does. As we all know, the good teacher, the one who brings people in to the upper-level course, attracts majors, and thus makes possible that extra tenure-track slot is such a scholar. Because some might seek to answer the problems outlined above by retreating from scholarship into some kind of technical training in which students could learn to teach basic language courses, survey and culture courses, and perhaps a masterpieces of marginal literature course, we must remember that information ages and spoils, that dogma is ultimately sickening, and that the times drift away from us if we slumber. Like Alice, we must run as fast as we can just to stay in the same place, or, as Rimbaud put it, we must try above all to be contemporary.
Finally, I offer a few practical conclusions.
We should encourage scholarship in all its forms, not only those resulting in publications. We all know professors who are well informed, who explore new fields, and who connect in mysterious ways with the students. Can we see these characteristics as manifestations of live scholarship and not of dead wood?
We should reconsider the structure of our classes and seminars. Too many of them culminate in twenty- or thirty-page papers. At Washington University, in Spanish, we decided two years ago to require that doctoral graduate students write a long paper for only one of their three or four courses each semester. The student presents the paper as a draft to the professor of the chosen class and to two other professors the student chooses as readers. We write long comments and make appointments to discuss the papers with students. They get three different and careful readings; we get to read interesting papers and to talk with our colleagues about literature and how to speak about it. It is too early to say if this if this system produces better papers, but at least it allows a concentrated effort and creates a community of scholars within the department.
We should allow alternative forms of dissertations: hypertexts, movies, theater productions, novels, language-instruction materials—anything the demonstrates the work of research and the exploration of creativity and is a public statement open to criticism.
We should encourage students to attend conferences without reading papers. At many conferences there are so many parallel sections that one misses many of the best talks. And isn't much of what one learns at a conference serendipitous: a chance encounter on a bus, a conversation next to the swimming pool, a book discovered in the book exhibit, or a painting seen at the museum when one escapes the hotel and the conference?
We should reduce the number of items presented to tenure committees and stress quality instead of quantity. Four articles and one book might be a reasonable maximum. We should require fewer readers—some universities use eight or more, which is clearly overkill—and reward them reasonably (as much, for example, as a doctor is paid to examine a set of x-rays or a plumber to determine and fix a leak in the seminar room's ceiling), so that chairs can expect consistent careful evaluations of scholarship and so that candidates can aim for quality more than for quantity.
We should encourage faculty members to become students again periodically. We must reward daring and exploration. Why shouldn't the learning of a language be as legitimate a basis for a salary increase as the publication of an essay? We must pray that the NEH summer seminars and institutes continue to exist: they are the best examples of continuing scholarship I know, and I have learned much from the two I have directed.
We should encourage opportunities for faculty members and students to meet to practice scholarship. We should have fewer lectures and more seminars; we should promote departmental computer bulletin boards, social activities, and brown-bag lunches. We should be patient with new paths that seem eccentric. Structuralism, Marxism, deconstruction, feminism, gay studies, and postcolonialism were once emerging areas of scholarship with no name, few antecedents, and no jargon to imitate or authorities to invoke. We must celebrate the activities of scholarship more than, or at least as much as, its results as publications. And we must believe in it.
Scholarship will always involve a strong curiosity, the tools to access information, the criteria to determine what the objects of the search are, and considerable time, support, and erudition. Without them, teaching soon becomes repetitive and meaningless. While we do not need an excess of publications, we need true scholarship more than ever, and as chairs we must find ways to keep time for the important among the urgent. Why scholarship? What else can we teach?
The author is Professor of Spanish and Chair of Comparative Literature at Washington University. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar West, 22–24 June 1995, in Eugene, Oregon.
Huber, Bettina J. “Changes in Faculty Size from 1990 to 1994: A Survey of PhD-Granting Modern Language Departments.” ADFL Bulletin 26.2 (1995): 47–58. [Show Article]
———. “The MLA's 1993–94 Survey of PhD Placement: The Latest Foreign Language Findings and Trends through Time.” ADFL Bulletin 27.3 (1996): 58–77. [Show Article]
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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