Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
km,
I met my brother-in-law back when he was an Assistant Professor at University of Chicago on the tenure track. He already had dozens of peer reviewed books and articles published. However, that particular grove of academe happens to be in Hyde Park, so he negotiated a full professorship at UMD and then departed on a Guggenheim grant for a year out here on the west coast. He spent that year mentoring his grad students at both UC and UMD (via email) and co-wrote two more books. He impressed upon me the absolute imperative of academics (real academics, not womyn’s studies); publish or perish.
It’s been 25 years since we met and he’s now an Institute Professor with scores of fellowships, books and articles to his name. I twit him from time to time that Cleveland is hardly better than Hyde Park.
How can there not be a single journal article with Obama’s name on it? Is there a single grant application that he authored or any sign that he wrote a single legal brief?
Empty suit and when he’s not using a teleprompter he’s not quite as articulate as Bush.
So Curtis…I think we’re in agreement?
It’s very unlikely that Chicago would have offered Obama a tenured position…best he could have been offered was a tenure track–and as you noted–to succeed in that, one had better hit the ground running–he certainly doesn’t show up as published on J-stor, but not sure if there is a more appropriate electronic database for law publications–not my thing…and have never been sure what the professional schools seem to think counts as appropriate academic preformance…so I don’t know what the publication expectations at time of hire are in those schools. Certainly in top tier schools, even for entry level positions one should have multiple refereed journal articles and the dissertation well on the way to being a book manuscript…at least in the humanities and social sciences.
As for Women and Gender’s studies–they have to publish as much as any other social science–they just have to do it backwards and in high heels.
KM,
Absolutely.
You might find it interesting to read K.C. Johnson’s Durham in Wonderland blog. It became pretty clear to me that there are hundreds of faculty members at Duke with the flimsiest academic achievement. It looks like most of the flimsiest profs have just one article or book to their name even after years in the “grove”.
I hasten to confess that I have no such articles to my name since I’ve wasted my time writing CONOPS, UNS, ICDs, ORDs, MNSs, CCDs, OPLANS and OPORDS.
My one submission to USNI was bought, never published and returned 8 years later. Who cares that my diatribe on the idiocy of mine warfare shifting everything to Texas was never read by the Illuminati? It gave me 8 years of free membership at USNI while they slowly decided that only a jackass would decry the Navy’s decision to concentrate 100% of our MCM assets in Texas and never mind the strategic implications of that lame brained decision. Damn! I failed peer review!
These days, I’m an adjunct professor for reality.
I just simply love this kind of stuff. And thus, to Flatlander, KM, Curtis, and David Culp, I quite agree with all your arguments. To offer tenure to teacher who has no legal publications and whose scholarship is limited to editing the Harvard Law Review is unbelievable. Jim Lindgreen, professor at Northwestern University Law School, writing in Volokh Conspiracy, a Center Right legal blog that Lex has on occasion quoted, had this to say:
The good professor is my kind of guy, a bulldog without lipstick. He bases his conclusions on off the record interviews of selected members of the University of Chicago Law School (by all accounts, Center Right/Libertarian in its political philosophy). Well worth a read, for it will fortify your doubting hearts.
Meanwhile, over at the University of Chicago’s News Office has this to say:
There is no date on this news release, but to the best of my knowledge it has not been retracted.
Perhaps some insight can be gained in an article in this past Sunday New York Time Magazine (gasp, that dreadful rag again). The article focuses on the how and what Obama taught, as viewed through his students eyes, and whether this provided insight into his decision making process as a President. In it, this whole issue of tenured tract offers is mentioned, and discussed by the Dean of the Law School.
These points are presented for your consideration to emphasize that this whole business, as voiced in my post that examined Obama’s time line, is a pseudo-controversy. It distracts from the central issue, the problems our country faces today.