What makes a person tenurable?
Like those old ads by Revlon (“What makes a woman unforgettable?”), the criteria seem to vary from discipline to discipline. I’ve heard of a single paper with the right equation being sufficient in some math departments, and probably discovering an important new prion or protein or whatever is sufficient in various fields of science, but I’ve never heard of anyone in the humanities being tenured simply because of a similar striking discovery. And, yet it must happen:
“His interest in the history of printing led him to discover a discrepancy in chapter and line numbers between the 1667 and 1674 editions of Paradise Lost, as cited in the Oxford English Dictionary.” (from keynote speaker Jorge Reina Schement’s brief bio on the ALISE conference website.)
Of course, Dr. Schement has considerably more claim to fame than this one episode. (In fact, I’ve read several of his books on information policy with great pleasure and profit!) But I think this one might well be enough for most schools: though I doubt that I’ll ever get the opportunity to find out!
