… a economist already featured in these pages, has won a MacArthur.

The greatest contribution of Saez? He helps us understand why Todd Henderson thinks he’s just getting by.

An op-ed in the New York Times by the chair of religion at Columbia brings together familiar arguments about how American universities should change to avoid obsolescence.

Like Francis Fukuyama, Mark C. Taylor wants to abolish tenure because it has created “institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change.”

Although university tenure as an institution still seems to UD pretty secure, she reminds you of the recent upheaval at Mr UD’s University of Maryland over how stringent post-tenure review should be.

UD‘s most intrigued by Taylor’s comment about scholarly publication:

In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

It’s certainly true that tenure has wedged into place senior professors who may value nothing but older models of print publication. These professors review junior professors who look more and more like Taylor’s mixed modern model.

The Modern Language Association came out a number of years ago against the tyranny of the book manuscript and for the new formats Taylor mentions, but he’s correct that virtually nothing has changed.

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Update: It’s useful, in this connection, to look at the latest recipient of the Clark Medal in economics, second in importance to the Nobel. Professor of Economics at Berkeley, Emmanuel Saez has never published a book, and he has never occupied a narrow subject band. He publishes articles, mainly online. His work sometimes appears as book chapters.

In an earlier post on this subject, UD quoted Lindsay Waters: “To make a group of scholars turn on a dime, we need a publication not as thick as a brick, but as thin as a dime.” UD continued:

Economists, scientists, and political scientists have long known this, and their tenure standards focus upon essays as much as, if not more than, books. Waters describes an economist asking him “why the people in many of the disciplines in which I publish want to waste so much of the time of young people in the prime of their lives with such a lot of make-work. In economics, he said, they want to keep the kids working hard to generate new ideas that the rest of the profession can feed off of, because youth is the leading edge.” The economist, Waters concludes, is right: “Why should we encourage young humanists to do a lot of Mickey Mouse work, to go through the motions, when what they should be trying to write are moving essays… .?”

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(Paul Krugman titles his blog entry on the prize SAEZ DOES MATTER.)

(“Mr. Saez, an easygoing Frenchman who loves surfing, has resisted overtures from the powerhouse economics departments at MIT and Harvard University.” The model here, of course, is Colin McGinn.)