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Thursday, January 05, 2006

SMART RESPONSE...

...to the following statement on an Inside Higher Ed comment thread:

In my experience, most faculty members who don’t get a monograph completed in their probationary period did not deserve tenure in their PhD granting departments.


...from Michael Berube, who writes:

My stars! This would mean, among other things, that almost no philosophers deserve tenure in PhD-granting philosophy departments. Taken together with some of the other skeptical remarks in this thread, I’m inclined to believe that many people think philosophers have poor scholarly standards, as well — all because they don’t require monographs for tenure.

Now, before the philosophers set upon me: I’m being facetious, of course. But I have a serious point, namely, that the monograph-for-tenure standard is not universal in academe. It’s not even universal in the humanities. The idea that monographs and monographs alone can serve as guarantors of scholarly integrity bespeaks a particularly parochial view of the scholarly world.

Personally, I’m not against monographs. I like many of them, and I own lots of ‘em too. Furthermore, the Task Force is not calling for all scholars to refrain from emulating books like Mimesis or The Mirror and the Lamp. We’re simply trying to make the case for multiple pathways to tenure and promotion, some — but not all — of which would involve monographs.