Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Nerd Notes: The No-Win Scenario of Research Versus Teaching

Prioritizing research over teaching = bad research AND bad teaching?

Read this Inside Higher Ed piece, and then go read this whole thing, written by Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory.

My own nerd observations: a lot, and I do mean a LOT of new "research" being churned out by journals and book presses isn't worth the time it takes to read it. (I am talking mainly about the humanities and liberal arts, not the hard sciences.) Look, to be perfectly honest, if you have a choice between reading an unintelligible new scholarly monograph about, say, Dante and reading actual things written by Dante, I'm going to tell you to read the primary source first, last, and always. If you have a choice between reading a new gender-theory-driven tome about colonial America and reading the actual correspondence between John and Abigail Adams, you know what I'll tell you to do. And in all cases, AVOID NERDSPEAK / ACADEMESE.

And wasn't I just ranting about research versus teaching only this morning?

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