Professor Kirstein's Complaint Revisited
One of the charges in my new book The Professors, is that leftwing academics are being promoted to positions that exceed their qualifications. Professor Peter Kirstein, who is one of the professors profiled in my book, has posted a blog response to my claim that his academic work does not justify his promotion to full professor at St. Xavier University. He specifically claims that he has several "peer-reviewed" articles to his credit and that as a non-academic I am not qualified to pass judgment on his academic credentials. Fair enough. I therefore submitted his curriculum vitae to a full professor at a major state university who has chaired tenure committees. This is his comment:
"Professor Kirstein's reference to his numerous refereed articles is unpersuasive. He does not list any on his website. The only thing approaching a scholarly piece which he does list there as having done in the past half a decade is the short piece posted 5 years ago on an unimportant internet "journal". This internet "journal" article is only about 8 pages long (I can't be more accurate than that because it came to me just as screen pages; when I printed it out, it came to 8 pages including footnotes). "In any case, Professor Kirstein evidently doesn't dispute that he has only one slender book, published 30 years ago, to his credit. And NO ONE in a history department in any school of worth gets to be a FULL professor on the basis of one slender book of what is basically advocacy (113 pages including 5 pages of bibliography) written 30 years ago. To cite the example of me, and I have had a normal career, I was promoted to tenure on the basis of a 330 page book published by a major university press (plus 7 articles in major journals), and to full professor on the basis of a second 330 page book published by a major university press (with the number of published articles now at 20). "The only exception to these basic rules of promotion would be maybe if K has written 20 major articles in his field--and I mean what they call "paradigm-shifting" articles. Has Kirstein done this? What are these pieces and where have they been published and why doesn't he list them on his website? "But I doubt that Professor Kirstein has actually published 20 ground-breaking articles. As he has already said about SXU, "different places have different standards for promotion." Yes, but not THAT much different! As things stand now, it is a mystery to me why he has the rank of full professor. He would have had a difficult time even getting tenure (i.e., associate professor rank) at my institution even 30 years ago on the basis of the very small book of advocacy on the Braceros. And he would almost certainly NOT get tenure now if that was all he had".
Professor Kirstein is dead wrong in saying that I was in error in my testimony at the Temple Hearings in regard to a teacher. No teachers were mentioned by name at the Temple Hearings by rule of the Committee holding the hearings. If Professor Kirsten has a specific comment of mine he wants to challenge, I will be glad to hear it.
"Professor Kirstein's reference to his numerous refereed articles is unpersuasive. He does not list any on his website. The only thing approaching a scholarly piece which he does list there as having done in the past half a decade is the short piece posted 5 years ago on an unimportant internet "journal". This internet "journal" article is only about 8 pages long (I can't be more accurate than that because it came to me just as screen pages; when I printed it out, it came to 8 pages including footnotes). "In any case, Professor Kirstein evidently doesn't dispute that he has only one slender book, published 30 years ago, to his credit. And NO ONE in a history department in any school of worth gets to be a FULL professor on the basis of one slender book of what is basically advocacy (113 pages including 5 pages of bibliography) written 30 years ago. To cite the example of me, and I have had a normal career, I was promoted to tenure on the basis of a 330 page book published by a major university press (plus 7 articles in major journals), and to full professor on the basis of a second 330 page book published by a major university press (with the number of published articles now at 20). "The only exception to these basic rules of promotion would be maybe if K has written 20 major articles in his field--and I mean what they call "paradigm-shifting" articles. Has Kirstein done this? What are these pieces and where have they been published and why doesn't he list them on his website? "But I doubt that Professor Kirstein has actually published 20 ground-breaking articles. As he has already said about SXU, "different places have different standards for promotion." Yes, but not THAT much different! As things stand now, it is a mystery to me why he has the rank of full professor. He would have had a difficult time even getting tenure (i.e., associate professor rank) at my institution even 30 years ago on the basis of the very small book of advocacy on the Braceros. And he would almost certainly NOT get tenure now if that was all he had".
Professor Kirstein is dead wrong in saying that I was in error in my testimony at the Temple Hearings in regard to a teacher. No teachers were mentioned by name at the Temple Hearings by rule of the Committee holding the hearings. If Professor Kirsten has a specific comment of mine he wants to challenge, I will be glad to hear it.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home