Liberation

[thedarkages]

I've just been reading a very neat book: Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship, by Harvard University Press director Lindsay Waters. It says all the right things: that academic hiring and tenure are granted contingent on an absurdly high rate of publication; that university presses are used as the guarantors of quality instead of faculty, who are nominally supposed to read the books themselves; that academic books are aimed at a smaller and smaller audience, achieving a technicality which may only be understood by a few colleagues worldwide; and that the pressure to publish results in many half-baked ideas being loosed upon the world, ideas that could benefit from longer incubation. (Block that metaphor!) Also lovely is the intellectual world with which the book engages; skeptical of Derrida (though using some of his ideas), forceful when it comes to the cynicism and aggression of Stanley Fish. The book is beautifully written and an excellent polemic.

I like the quote with which the work begins:

I don't mind your thinking slowly. I mind your publishing faster than you can think.
(Wolfgang Pauli)