The College Professor's Dilemma
Publish or
perish. That was college professors’
main cause of insomnia.
They couldn’t sleep thinking about lengthy articles for academic journals, and of course books. O.K. Using the past tense is a bad idea because publish or perish is still crucial in the academic world.
If you are not publishing, nobody will use you in citations and you won’t be invited to conferences in Geneva and Cairo to explain your latest findings. Forget about tenure. You will get it after 15 years or never if you are not publishing.
Enter competition. No, not from learned colleagues who also have academic achievements from Makerere University in Uganda, Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany or Durham University in England. The competition is from student blogs.
Professors don’t regard them as legitimate terms of reference, but they close the curtains at home and read student blogs. What professors cannot do is deny that these blogs are ‘published’, because I will hit PUBLISH to send this little piece to you.
Publish or perish. Who will perish in this case, the prof or the student?
Nonqaba waka Msimang is the author of Sweetness, a South African novel.
www.amazon.com
They couldn’t sleep thinking about lengthy articles for academic journals, and of course books. O.K. Using the past tense is a bad idea because publish or perish is still crucial in the academic world.
If you are not publishing, nobody will use you in citations and you won’t be invited to conferences in Geneva and Cairo to explain your latest findings. Forget about tenure. You will get it after 15 years or never if you are not publishing.
Enter competition. No, not from learned colleagues who also have academic achievements from Makerere University in Uganda, Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany or Durham University in England. The competition is from student blogs.
Professors don’t regard them as legitimate terms of reference, but they close the curtains at home and read student blogs. What professors cannot do is deny that these blogs are ‘published’, because I will hit PUBLISH to send this little piece to you.
Publish or perish. Who will perish in this case, the prof or the student?
Nonqaba waka Msimang is the author of Sweetness, a South African novel.
www.amazon.com
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