Customer Reviews

Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship

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A publisher at Harvard University Press, Waters is the right person to offer this critique. He ruthlesly criticizes the coroporate, quantifying mentality that has crept into academics, destroying the authority and prestige of scholarly book publishing.

The last chapter is the best to read. There are nice quotes such as "Thinking is not like watching a lightning storm but more like catching lightning bugs."

Unfortunately, the book is hobbled by its own old-fashioned views. Too many books are being published, true. But Waters is part of the problem. He begins by saying that he has "an inordinate love of books." Well, so do tenure committees. At inordinate and unhealthy levels.

He criticizes the academic's unwarranted garrulousness. But he doesn't realize that this worship of the book (good, bad or ugly) has origins in the West's worship of books, texts, great books and great authors, as displayed in his own comments that "works of art spring us forth into momentary glory" and that the function of the humanities is to connect us to "great works of art." Waters elsewhere makes much of his aesthetic preoccupations, but does not acknowledge how restricted his account of the aesthetic experience is. His account of aesthetic experience is a text-obsessed, cognition-oriented, book-loving version. Pure eurocentric high-culturalism.

Waters critiques the academy's current practice of hustling junior scholars into publishing their work, even when those scholars have very little of worth to say. His point is that the quality of scholarship has decreased in direct proportion to the quantity of publications the tenure process now demands. As the editor at a major U.S. academic press (Harvard UP), Waters is uniquely positioned to observe how professors' overpublishing practices mirror the profit-seeking motives of the corporate university.

Unfortunately, that distillation of Waters's argument takes up only about half of the book. The other half consists of a rather incoherent defense of vagaries such as "judgment," "the aesthetic," and "thinking." I see where Waters wants to go with this -- he is, after all, an unapologetic humanist. But I found his falling back on Romantic notions of art and criticism to be woefully out of step with his otherwise sound critique of the academic publishing industry. Indeed one of the ironies of his Byronesque defense of "valuable" scholarship is that his own book (running at under 100pp. and published by a major university press imprint) reads like one of the incidental, careless pieces of dross Waters so loudly condemns in university circles.