Thread by @roopikarisam

The MLA guidelines are out! Two years of work with brilliant collaborators, reading and thinking and debating. A few observations below. mla.org/Guidelines-Pub…

https://twitter.com/PaulaKrebs/status/1558108178264604673

Guidelines are fine and well but if no one does anything with them, then we wasted two years of our lives. In part, #ReviewsInDH exists because so many wonderful orgs put out digital humanities evaluation guidelines and *crickets.* Let’s not do that again.

How do we do that? I saw a great example in a (non-confidential) letter from my first tenure case, where a letter writer went systematically through the MLA digital humanities guidelines and evaluated my work by them. Genius. You can do that for public humanities!

My colleagues and I who founded the New England Equity and Engagement Consortium got together around the issue of evaluating community-engaged work — and operationalizing changes in our union contract that put that kind of work in our tenure & promotion criteria.

a) get that language into collective bargaining agreements and faculty handbooks, b) like guidelines, it’s not enough. Our consortium has done hours of trainings at multiple universities on how to evaluate community-engaged work. I could do them in my sleep we did so many.

We did workshops for candidates, for chairs, department committees, university-wide committees, upper admin. It’s ongoing effort since there is a lot of turnover. The lesson here is if you really care and you are a tenured faculty member, do the work or bring in people who can.

This is not just important for tenure and promotion, the dying breed of academics. It’s important for contingent faculty and reappointment & hiring and for grad students. It’s about demonstrating we and our universities actually value the work the humanities does in the world.

Two infuriating things about universities (among many): 1) universities are ready to talk about their commitment to “the community” for a nice photo-op or a feel-good story for the annual report…but not about what it means to maintain ongoing accountability and be in relation.

2) and while universities are happy to put those stories on their websites, here are faculty, especially faculty of color, doing this work — and then doing all the work to get a job or tenure or promotion by “traditional” standards. It’s an equity problem.

If you look at my CV or the CV of anyone who does this work, it may be easy to miss the toll it takes on our lives to work double (or triple if you add the implicit and explicit expectations of diversity work). But many of us do it because it’s a core part of our identities.

Isn’t it time our universities start valuing this work as part of their professed commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion”?

Nothing drives me up the wall more than tenured faculty who act like this is out of their hands — how can I convince my colleagues or university this is important when Harvard, Yale, or Princeton don’t think so? Where to begin….

Having spent 9 years at a regional public university where we made this kind of work “count,” let me tell you, those should be all our aspirations, not the Harvard, Yale, Princetons of the world.

And FFS, if the tenureds are sitting around wringing our hands about how we can’t do anything, how does it change? Do your jobs, ppl. Look to examples of places that have done it. Take on responsibility of advocacy - up line, down line, across our institutions.

And, conveniently, one of your professional orgs has some guidelines. Use them. It is no longer acceptable to not know this work is part of the humanities or to not work to have it be appropriately valued in our institutions. That’s it. I’m done now.