Cutting The Gordian Knot

"[A] number of informed observers have noted, books are not the only way of judging scholarly achievement. Should our departments continue to insist that only books and more books will do? We could try to persuade departments and universities to change their expectations for tenure reviews: after all, these expectations are, for the most part, set by us and not by administrators. The book has only fairly recently emerged as the sine qua non and even now is not uniformly the requirement in all academic fields."

--Stephen Greenblatt, A Letter to MLA Members (republished in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Tuesday, July 2, 2002)