Over the last decade, and in the context of the fiscal crisis in the nation in general and in higher education in particular, a debate has raged over the value of humanities research. Various commentators have argued that unlike nonhumanities disciplines, fields such as English studies and other humanistic disciplines bring very little into their universities. The federal government simply does not fund the National Endowment for the Humanities--the major federal funding agency for humanities research--at a level comparable to that of the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes for Health. This funding inequity in and of itself is an illustration of the society's value system vis-a'-vis the humanities. In this article, the author focuses on a report published at the end of 2011: "Literary Research: Costs and Impact," authored by Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein for the Center for College Affordability and Productivity. The report presents the results of an empirical analysis of faculty productivity: Bauerlein examines the costs of research in four English departments and then juxtaposes those costs to the numbers of citations of works published by faculty in those departments. The author aims to show first how this is a critically flawed study because it is representative of many attacks on the humanities and especially English studies, and because it thus illustrates a set of common assumptions about educators' work as humanists. Then he discusses how educators might better respond to these types of misunderstandings of and attacks on their work. (Contains 4 notes.)