Over at rateyourstudents this week scholars have been griping about research and publication, and it's just depressing. Here is a typical comment:
Academic publishing has long been a joke. We all can pretend that scholarship and research may fire our own teaching, but really it's just masturbatory indulgence. I don't write for any other reason than to thicken my tenure portfolio. I rarely write about things that interest me; I never write about anything that would mean a bit to my sophomore seminar students.
This is the saddest thing I've read all week. Here we have a person who has apparently put a lot of time, effort, and money into getting academic credentials without ever discovering how to make meaningful connections among his scholarship, his pedagogy, and his passions. What is the point of such a woefully incomplete education? The world is not exactly crying out for more passionless writing and teaching. Who is at fault here? And what is the cure?
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