ATG Article of the Week
Too Many Books, by Michael Ruse, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 22, 2011.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/
This isn’t so much an article as a “rant”. Ruse has a long career in publishing to his credit (Cambridge University Press for 20 years, journal editor for 15 years). He says, to paraphrase slightly, that warmed over dissertations are not real books and that it is “much better to cut your teeth on articles.” His focus is philosophy but he means to include most disciplines (with the exception of the sciences which he says allow articles for tenure unlike History and English. He says that the wrong kind of books are being published and points to limited press runs and lack of robust book sales. I remember Deanna Astle (rest her soul) and Chuck Hamaker saying the same thing twenty years ago.
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