Rescue Tenure From the Tyranny of the Monograph

By LINDSAY WATERS

Call the ambulance, the patient is dying! That urgent appeal needs to go out -- and quickly -- to two groups: college administrators and scholars in the humanities. I make the appeal as a publisher, a reader, and a humanist. I hold books sacred and hate to see them losing their value, which is exactly what they are doing today, rapidly. The currency of books is becoming deflated in a way that is reminiscent of the decline of the German deutsche mark in the early 1920's, and the culprit is the