Publish and perish!

Imagine an alternate universe in which young professors don't face the ultimatum to "publish or perish." Instead, they'd face a contrary threat -- censured if they rushed sloppy ideas into print, denied tenure if they'd ground out a numbing, heavily padded 400-page tome when a few nimble essays would have sufficed. Scott McLemee, of Inside Higher Ed, dares to envision such a future. "Of course," he qualifies,

there would be occasions when some wunderkind had so many ideas that brisk and frequent publication became a matter of urgent necessity. But that would be rare. A strictly enforced set of proscriptions would add excitement to things. Picking up a book or journal, you would know that it had involved some risk. Scholars might begin to publish pseudonymously, if they felt it was absolutely urgent to get a piece of research out. The spirit of adventure would probably be good for people's prose as well.

McLemee has allies in high places: Lindsay Waters, the executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, has been arguing in numerous venues-- most recently the Journal of Scholarly Publishing -- that the essay ought to replace the book as the intellectual currency by which young professors are judged. (From Montaigne through Paul de Man and Edward Said, Waters points out, much of the best scholarly work in the humanities has been in the form of essays.) Virtually no one under 30 -- or, more precisely, six years out from a Ph.D. -- is qualified to produce a full-blown academic book, Waters believes.

Such views remain heretical in the academy, but Waters argues that he and McLemee will ultimately win out, in part because the existing system is so mindless -- and therefore nothing less than an "obscenity." Like the mortgage business on Wall Street until recently, the academic system in the humanities has been erected upon a shaky foundation -- in this case, books no one reads, and which even the authors don't like.