Further to the discussion of the relative merits of the university press vs. the trade press for tenure-and-promotion publishing:

As we all know, the presumption is that a university press scrutinizes manuscripts before contract through a rigorous peer-review process, so that an academic press by implication is publishing books that have already been judged to meet certain scholarly criteria. That reassures tenure/promotion committees whose members are not (as a rule) experts in the topics of the books.

Unfortunately, there are many ways in which this model does not function well. The model comes from in the hard sciences, where texts are judged (to some extent, anyway) on the measurable, quantifiable quality of hard research data. The judgments of peer reviewers in the humanities are, naturally, somewhat more subjective. Indeed, some university presses are now willing to sign contracts with authors (in the humanities) prior to peer review. University presses, like trade (for-profit) presses, want to publish books with a reasonable sales potential. That frequently rules out whole subfields of art history, as Larry Silver has noted. And it may encourage a press to acquire a book with a strong market (e.g., on Impressionism), whether or not the scholarship is of the highest order.

Among the possible solutions to this dilemma are:

-to revitalize the article (and the essay within a multiauthor volume) as a respected vehicle of scholarship;

-to grant increased value to other kinds of scholarly contribution to the field, such as curating a significant exhibition (with/without a catalogue) or creating and chairing a conference (with/without published proceedings);

-to give more respect to publications issued in electronic format.

All of these kinds of scholarship may undergo a kind of peer review, but it may not follow the traditional model. Similarly, some books published by trade houses meet adequate scholarly criteria, despite the lack of formal peer review.

To develop more flexible, field-appropriate models for peer review is difficult, of course. One place where this work has begun to happen is in the the tenure/promotion guidelines that some schools have developed for studio artists, whose contributions to their field are perhaps even more difficult to quantify.

I would be very interested to see samples of tenure guidelines for art historians from schools that have good ones. If anyone on this list is at a school whose guidelines are public, and if you think they do a good job of addressing the tenure-publishing problem, I would be grateful to see the texts (offlist).

Eve Sinaiko CAA esinaiko@collegeart.org 

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