In evaluating faculty for raises, promotion, and tenure, perhaps there
should be more emphasis on Science Citation Index counts, Annual Review
mentions, and evaluation by top experts elsewhere, rather than on mere publication
yardage. The distressing thing about this is that while academics regularly condemn
"mere publication count," a week later in a faculty meeting or a Dean's advisory
meeting they are actually counting pages in comparing Smith with Jones. This is
a disease of the professional intellectual, resting upon a vast group delusional
system concerning scholarly products, and I know my recommendations in this
respect have a negligible chance of being taken or even listened to seriously. Since
the null hypothesis refutation racket is "steady work" and has the merits of an
automated research grinding device, scholars who are pardonably devoted to
making more money and keeping their jobs so that they can pay off the mortgage
and buy hamburgers for the wife and kids are unlikely to contemplate with
equanimity a criticism that says that their whole procedure is scientifically feckless
and that they should quit doing it and do something else. In the soft areas of
psychology that might, in some cases, mean that they should quit the academy and
make an honest living selling shoes, which people of bookish temperament
naturally do not want to do.
