Academic urban legends, ongoing
Ivan, the terrible Tribble, has apparently managed to create his very own academic urban legend--or so says Rebecca Goetz, based on a recent experience at Harvard. (Then again, tribbles do multiply with astonishing rapidity.) It's amazing how quickly a few scattered anecdotes can transform themselves into supposedly hard "facts." It will probably be as difficult to eradicate the "dangers of blogging" meme as it is has been to eradicate the "two books for tenure" meme--even though we actually have some statistics for the latter.*
*--According to Robert Townsend's survey of 441 history departments, 37.7% of all campuses (both research and non-) required a book, while 1.4% required a second book. 59.5% said a book would help; 90% said a second book would help. Note that over 60% of all campuses polled had no book requirement whatsoever. See Robert Townsend, "A Survey of Tenure Practices in History: Departments Indicate Books Are Key and Success Rates for Tenure High," Perspectives 42.2 (Feb. 2004): 5-8. I discussed this essay--and the academic urban legend--twice last year.
Interesting, those statistics help explain why I can not even get an adjunct position with two published books. It really is all about teaching and not publications don't count for much.
Posted by: Otto Pohl | September 14, 2005 at 02:12 PM
Very interesting statistics. Has anyone done a similar survey of English depts?
Posted by: profsynecdoche | September 14, 2005 at 09:16 PM
Curses -- did I miss these discussions of Townsend in your blog? Would you be so kind as to post links to them?
Posted by: riwipi | September 15, 2005 at 02:23 AM
HI, can u help me? i`m Harry from Armenia, 21 years old.i wanna to study at any universtity or academi of cinema in scotland, now i study at Armenia state institute of cinema and theatre at by director faculte, 5-cours.thanx.
Posted by: Harry | February 17, 2006 at 05:02 PM