I thought you weren’t going back over all this stuff?
You’re being silly. You made the comment about Sagan, and I replied. If you are just baiting me to see if you can get me to go back on my word and talk about Gonzalez again, that is puerile behavior, not adult behavior.
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Remember, Joshua, I am not arguing that publishing books is advantageous for a scientist’s career. If you say that articles are the currency, and that writing books early in one’s career is not considered useful or impressive, I believe you. The only thing I was arguing is that it is very unlikely that a tenure candidate [and I’m not speaking of Gonzalez now, just in general terms] who met all normal requirements (publications, citations, research grants, supervising grad students, etc.) would be rejected for tenure merely because he wrote a book – as if writing a book in itself contaminated the scientist so that no Department would wish to touch him. Can you imagine a tenure committee anywhere having this conversation?:
“Gee, that Carl has produced a lot of excellent research here over the past 4 years – 16 articles in print, 6 more accepted, and several more in the drafting stage. And several are published in top of the line journals. That meets and exceeds our Department’s minimum guidelines for articles published based on research done here. Add that to the 20-odd articles he published during grad-school and post-doctoral work, before coming here, and I think we have someone who is likely to be productive well into the future.”
“And he is supervising two excellent graduate students, and they are quite satisfied with him.”
“He does his share of Departmental administrative drudge-work.”
“The students in his introductory undergrad course gave him 4.2 out 5 in their reviews.”
“His citation index is nearly the highest in the Department.”
“He has brought in more than the expected amount of grant money.”
“He has a pleasant personality, and doesn’t seem to rub any of us the wrong way – he would be easy to live with on a day-by-day basis.”
“Yep, I think Carl is definitely deserving of tenure.”
“Ummm… I hate to spoil the party, boys, but are you aware that in his spare time, Carl wrote a popular book arguing that everything in the universe arose by blind chance and impersonal natural laws, without any intelligent guidance? That kind of metaphysical speculation is not research. That doesn’t contribute to new knowledge.”
“Ohhh, we didn’t know that. Gosh, we can’t have anyone writing things that don’t contribute to new knowledge in our department, can we?”
“OK, I change my vote. I vote against tenure.”
“Me, too.”
“Me, three.”
…
“And I’ll make it unanimous. We’ve got to keep %*#$! book-writers out of this Department!”
I don’t know about you, Joshua, but I find such a scenario preposterous. I am willing to believe that books count for zero points in determining tenure, but I’m not willing to believe that the mere fact of writing a book would cause an otherwise perfectly suitable candidate not to get tenure.
(On the other hand, the contents of such a book might in some cases have such an effect, if the faculty didn’t like what the book argued. But that is not the claim I was resisting.)
Yes - that’s why my lower shelves are bigger, to make room for the picture-books like My First Big Book of Cladistics.
If I were really obsessional I’d emulate the great Aristocratic country houses and have all my books re-bound uniformly. In fact it’s pretty clear most of them bought their books in matching sets to match the size of their shelves.
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