Thursday 30 May 2013

TTSR Behind “Publish Or Perish”


“Publish or Perish: A Well-Liked Professor is Bumped by Rutgers” was the title of the New York Times story that described Professor Richard L. Barr who had received three teaching awards at Rutgers University over his six years of teaching, only to find that his contract would not be renewed because he was not publishing as many pages as other profs.

Rutgers University receives a large amount of funding for ‘research’ that it has to show something for, thus pressuring professors to do ‘research’ at the expense of teaching to produce writing that proves they are making progress, at least to the naive.

 Problem is, the University cut Professor Barr off because his writing was “not so thick as the usual packet for tenure”; just because Psalms and Jeremiah are the two longest books in the Bible, with over 42,000 words each, does not mean they are the most important, a principal that should easily be recognized in universities being that it took Charles Darwin 20 years to write 230 pages of theory [1].

Thus, quality has sunk in the pool of quantity.

[1] http://darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk/pages/index.php?page_id=b9

No comments:

Post a Comment