Sayre Blasts Ford On `Publish-Perish'

Woodrow Wilson Sayre, assistant professor of Philosophy at Tufts, yesterday attacked Dean Ford's recent article defending the research requirement for college teachers--the requirement that caused Tufts to deny him tenure.

An article by Sayre in the Boston Sunday Globe replied to Ford's April 12 column discussing the relationship between scholarly research and college teaching. Ford's article did not mention the nationally-famous case, but was obviously inspired by the Tufts dispute.

"Scholarship has too often been taken to mean actual publication. This is the least significant of all the meanings of scholarship," Sayre said in his article. Some of the best college teachers, he maintained often do not publish their research until near the end of their careers.

"When Dean Ford argues that teaching and scholarship are connected in the most fundamental way, his generalization applies only to some meanings of scholarship and to some types of teaching," according to Sayre. Dean Ford had argued that both teaching and scholarship are "most emphatically needed to produce a great professor."

Scholarship is not essential to the teacher of skills or the teacher "dedicated to bringing forth in a student the latent critical, creative, or appreciative powers," Sayre contended. "Only in predominantly informational teaching is research into new areas and new knowledge a prime requisite of the excellent professor."

The central point of Sayre's argument is that the debate over the relationship of scholarship and teaching becomes "merely a battle of slogans" without careful distinction and definitions of terms. He proceeded to define six different types of teachers, from "the great scholar who can take two pages of Aristotle and unfold the connections and meanings of the text of these pages for a whole year or more," to "the gadfly teacher, who arouses, irritates, and challenges."

All these types of teachers, plus many others, should be represented on a good faculty, Sayre argued, and the importance of scholarship varies for each.

While Ford had dismissed as a "myth" the argument that "publish or perish" has been the single rule governing academic advancement, he had insisted that only by publishing the results of research can professors share their findings with students at other institutions.