FROM PUBLISH OR PERISH TO PUBLISH....AND PERISH!

By reducing the number of professors who have tenure, a university can ensure higher-quality faculty. Once professors achieve tenure, typically done over a period of about seven years, they are no longer held as accountable for the work they do, nor are they held to the same standards and expectations. Because their jobs are no longer at stake, much of their incentive to work, publish and teach effectively disappears. This removal of incentives, when coupled with the process that professors go through to get tenured in the first place, has detrimental consequences for overall academic quality. While attempting to attain tenure over their first seven years, professors face an unfortunate emphasis on published work, especially in the number of articles that they produce. This leads to two unfortunate circumstances. The first has been referred to as “publish or perish,” in which academics are pushed into publishing numerous new works in order to sustain their careers. This raises the likelihood that new work will be of decreasing scholarly value, as the priority of publishing begins to trump the inherent value of the work itself. A closely related problem has been referred to humorously as the “least publishable unit.” This phenomenon involves an academic minimizing the amount of new information in each publication in order to spread his or her work into as many releases as possible and to increase both the volume of his or her published work and reputation—often deemed an academic’s most-cherished possession.Of course, these are extremes. Most professors genuinely love their disciplines and teaching, and actually resorting to these methods is likely the exception, rather than the rule. But inherent defects remain in the system. In order to gain tenure, academics are often encouraged to publish the highest volume of information, sometimes disregarding the quality of the work; after gaining tenure, their motivation to work is removed because of guaranteed jobs and salaries.

Studentlife
Dec 2 2009