Let’s make skinny the fashion for scholarship

Reading Saikat Majumdar’s (2007) opinion piece “The Fetish of Fullness” (College English, 69(6), 642-654), relatively soon after reading Jakob Nielsen’s (2007) “Write Articles, Not Blog Postings” has returned me to thinking about scholarship in the 21st century. Earlier this summer, I blogged about the practicality of conducting SoTL research (and heck, research in general as a two-year college faculty member). I claimed that we should acknowledge that legitimate scholarship might emerge in short bursts based on the context, time, energy, and resources of the scholar trying to share his or her work. Nielsen’s article I mentioned above then comes out, with data to support it, that professionals should write longer, focused, data driven articles instead of posting blogs on the internet. Granted, as is my problem when I look to most usability resources and apply them to education, Nielsen’s purpose is for professionals to raise their income! Our purpose in education is slightly different; however, the need to demonstrate individual expertise and production for promotion and tenure files is similar to Nielsen’s context.
Back to the point...two-year scholars and SoTL scholars might legitimately produce shorter publications that are still worth reading; they might even track their projects in blogs that then develop longer texts as a whole. However, Nielsen demonstrates thats a problem and that people want, will purchase, longer texts. This brings us to Majumdar’s piece. In an attempt to further discuss the problem with scholarly publishing and the demands of promotion and tenure (see Greenblatt’s letter to the MLA for description of the problem in the humanities), Majumdar demonstrates how the leaders of western intellectual civilization have continued to fetishize long texts, or to put it bluntly “size does matter!” (p. 643) in publication and professional recognition (writers, scholars, etc.). Majumdar, however, demonstrates that there are critical shorter texts (think of your comprehensive exams list) that carry lots of weight in the field.
I love how Majumdar then demonstrates that this emphasis on length is counter-intuitive to our understanding of how thinking, learning, and knowledge production occurs. Majumdar states:

And that is more than the well-intended platitude that knowledge is an infinite process,much more subjectively so in the humanities, and that the idea of bringing a strand of thought to completion is but an illusion, and essentially incompatible with modalities of research, scholarship, and thought in the humanities. The current practice of conferring far more cultural capital on the full length book than on the shorter work essentially pleads indifference to the unpredictable and infinite continuity of knowledge-production, which can occur even within one person’s consciousness. (pp. 650-651).

Majumdar does not discredit that some ideas need book length works; however, as those of us in rhet/comp would claim, purpose, audience, and in this case topic should drive publishing decisions, not the length demanded by a promotion and tenure committee.
Ultimately, this just makes me keep on, keepin on. Nielsen’s article helps me to understand why I might not blog as much as I want to and why my blogs tend to be a bit longer than what I regularly see. Majumdar’s opinion piece helps justify my continued push for alternative methods of research and publication.
P.S. It almost killed me to title my blog this way; however, isn’t it ironic that intellectually we love “fat” but aesthetically we desire “skinny”?

July 26 2007 | Posted in 21st Century Scholarship