At the panel on Participatory Learning at the HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competition Showcase, Mimi Ito talked about the way peers will beat up on one another, policing one another's behavior, coming up with rigid hierarchies of what counts and doesn't and then publicly humiliating and abusing those deemed, by the narrowest of standards, to be dweebs, dorks, nerds, or other outcasts, a practice now made even more public and vicious by the Internet. We knew she must be talking about the horrors of cyberbullying . . . but then she delivered the punchline: "I'm talking about academic peer review," she deadpanned.

Brilliant, and sadly, so often, true.

I then moved from the splendid MacArthur Competition gathering to HASTAC III at UIUC where the amazing (and biggest) HASTAC conference yet began with three full parties. At the third one, a bit o gin under my belt, I ended up repeating a story from almost twenty years ago and (in the best cyberbulling aka peer review manner) I'm going to repeat it here. The occasion was a comment made by a colleague who is one of the world's most important innovators in electronic publishing and multimedia, multinodal scholarly communication. She said she considers her work to be research, even though some colleagues would say only publication of a university-press monograph counts as "research." If her landmark work isn't research, what in the world is? That's when I launched into an anecodote of peer review = cyberbullying from another era but one that continues to have potency today.

Here's the anecdote: It was twenty years ago. I was invited to apply for a job at a major state university. I was teaching for the year at Princeton, considering a permanent position there, on leave from Michigan State, and I had five universities I was considering in those flush Good Ol Days. But at said major state university, when I sent in my vita, one member of the department wrote her colleages (and me!) an apologetic note about how, because I'd taught at a second-tier institution, I had padded my vita, so, instead of there being something like ten or whatever books, I really only had two "real" books--a monograph on Ambrose Bierce from U Nebraska Press and then Revolution and the Word from Oxford, so I still "counted" as a full professor because I had the requisite two books . . . but she really needed to apologize for all those things that didn't count. She listed all the fraudulent non-research publications: Co-authored work, of course, did not count. A collective project did not count. An edited book that changed the field and is still regularly reissued did not count. A journal issue turned book did not count. An encyclopedia did not count. Editions of works that I had found and reprinted for the first time in a few hundred years did not count. A trade book did not count. A collection of my articles published in Japanese didn't count. A book outside my field, that wasn't about literature, didn't count and on and on.

I withdrew from the search immediately and she could not figure out why, even after I tried to explain why I would never teach at a place that defined and then policed productivity in such a narrow way. Nor one where a person who was being recruited would be held up to such public bullying as an object lesson to the juniors then coming through the ranks. It was an appalling exercise in "professionalism" in the bullying mode. I felt like Hester Prynne wearing her Scarlet A . . . for Adulterous Authorship.

But this isn't about me. Really. It isn't. Because some form of that rigid form of "counting" recurs all the time. Junior faculty are often told don't do an edited book, don't do too many articles, don't write collaboratively . . . because all that counts is a single-author refereed monograph published by a reputable university press. Only that gold standard of publication, junior faculty are often told, "counts" toward tenure. Yes, the other work may well be reseach and may have an impact far beyond the monograph, but the monograph is what we prize, what we hold dear, it is only and all that counts.

So when my friend tells me some people don't consider her pioneering work on new modes of publication to be "research" because they disrespect electronic publishing and new media forms of publication, I have to refer to this pre-cyber-bullying and suggest that electronic publishing is merely the most current form of policing. The issue here is how to keep the standards of a field as static, closed, cloistered, and intractable as possible. It is, like all bullying, a form of gatekeeping. And the assiduousness of attending to the gate means you never really (not really, in a profound way) have to examine the territory within the gates or even (heaven forbid!) think about what spaciousness the landscape might afford if the gate came down entirely.

This anecdote from my personal past, to my mind, also defines the reason why so many humanities fields are shrinking into oblivion. We police ourselves into irrelevance and insignificance. And we don't even believe our own story of strict professionalism. For in some ways the most bitter truth of "what counts" is we ourselves don't even believe it, or if we do, then we are hypocrites who do not practice what we preach. Ask any editor at one of those distinguished university presses--supposedly the gold standard of our profession--and they will tell you that, especially in English, profs don't even bother to teach one another's work and don't buy it in significant quantities either. In the classroom, they cannibalize the monograph and teach parts of monographs in unpaid for, uncompensated course paks. The material result is that 300 or 400 copies of a monograph constitutes good sales in many fields, especially literary fields. That is appalling. Why should any publisher bother to publish work we don't buy, support, and teach? And if they don't, then what happens to our stupidly narrow concept of "professionalism"?

Can you do more to assure your own inconsequentiality than that? We beat up junior scholars for not publishing in a venue that, as a profession, we do not even support. We don't even teach the monograph as a form, in other words, even in our graduate classes, and yet we say that is the standard to which our younger colleagues must conform.

And we wonder why universities no longer respect humanists?! We do not respect ourselves enough to see our own importance in the world we live in and so we police ourselves into obsolescence. This infuriates me. On every level. That is why I am here, at HASTAC III, with a rich, multidisciplinary, multimedia, multimodal program that looks thrilling, and there is vibrancy and vision in the air.

In fact, at our Steering Committee meeting, we decided that HASTAC will work to put together a document on what "counts" as scholarship to offer broader guidelines for different forms of productivity, research, and professional contribution, analogue and digital. Professor Tim Murray of Cornell has offered to take the lead on a document we plan to write, post for comments, and then circulate widely. Stay tuned.

We invite anyone who has developed new guidelines for tenure in the humanities or who knows of any that might inspire us to please post them here. We are also thinking of hosting a wiki where others might contribute to a statement that we will distribute widely.

Even if you could not be at HASTAC 3, please join us for this endeavor which will have impact far beyond this one convention or group.