Should tenure requirement go up?

[jacib]

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/technology-and-tenure/

It's a very interesting proposal. There are similar things going on in the more quantitative sides of these thing. These days data is so much easier to get ahold of, easier to processes, and easier to compute than it was before. One of my friends at a prestigious University wrote their (Bachelor's) thesis on results that it took less than an hour between starting to prepare the data and getting the results. The rest was just writing up the numbers.

[johndiligent]

Or should publication standards go up?

In the humanities, I'd like to think that it's never been enough for one to simply rehash research results. Sure, finding information has become a faster and more convenient process than ever before, but simply finding information isn't what we do. It's approaching information, contextualising it, ruminating over it, analysing it, synthesising it, etc. - that's what takes the bulk of time in research. Whether you google it or you're flipping through yellowed cards in an old filing cabinet, it isn't going to make the important parts any speedier or easier. If anything, having electronic access to a greater repository of information (or the very assumption that you have this access) should exact more rigor from the scholar, as far as I'm concerned.

[JerryLandis]

I've often wondered about this myself. I've been meaning to ask an older faculty member whether there's been any discernible difference in the quality of students' work since internet and Wikipedia usage became more widespread. Since information is so much easier to find, it's not really as "precious," i.e. it does not need to be memorized, simply bookmarked in Firefox, and it does not need to be hunted down quite so vigorously. I'd imagine, though, that the general increase in easily-discovered facts in many students' essays must be matched by a less thematically coherent argument. I personally find that some of my best essays are those that have less impressive bibliographies, because instead of trying to glean every index I can possibly get my hands on, I spend more time mulling over individual texts and arguments.

I definitely understand the author's frustration with his apparent disadvantage, working at an institution that does not have quite as useful resources. The library at my university is, frankly, a disgrace. The benefit, however, of facing extreme competition for books and/or needing books that the library does not own is that one becomes much more organized in his approach to research. Since I know that I cannot expect to check out the necessary books when the deadline is fewer than 2 weeks away, I end up doing the bulk of my research 3 weeks in advance, allowing me to absorb the information and think about the issue in advance of the deadline, instead of just checking out all the books and zipping through them the night before. Faster and more efficient research tools are definitely very useful, but they don't necessarily result in the production of better work.