Laudator Temporis Acti

Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), "The Formation of the American Humanist," Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 66.1 (February, 1951) 39-48 (at 45):

I believe indeed that the requirement of publications on the part of every college teacher—imagine as a parallel that all members of American orchestras were required to be composers!—does great harm to true scholarship, to the prestige of American scholarship abroad and, especially, to the teacher themselves in whom the false conception is fostered that teaching in itself is not a noble enough profession and on whom is foisted the ambition of reaching for scholarly laurels, without being given the possibility of living qua scholars. The formation of a cultured citizenry is a purpose noble enough and demanding enough in itself not to need justification by activity dictated by quite different ideals. The artificial enforcement of such inflationary, hybrid productivity in small articles or miscellanea was, of course, encouraged by the positivistic belief, imported from the Germany of the 1870's, according to which any small stone of truth was thought to contribute to the vast building that would be erected in some utopian future—but this trend in itself has in practice not led to any vast construction, it has only disorganized and fragmentarized the humanities and reduced them to what the Germans themselves now call Anmerkungswissenschaft, footnote-scholarship.

Id. (at 46):

Every inconsequential or mediocre article accepted by our journals creates a further precedent for the acceptance of still more inconsequential or mediocre articles. Far be it from me to suggest that anyone who has valuable thoughts to contribute to scholarship should be debarred from publication only because of lack of fame—but how can the question of value be justly decided by editors daily snowed under by new avalanches of indiscriminate material? By the time they receive a bold, thought-provoking article which could even revolutionize the field, they have already accepted so many anodine [sic, read anodyne] articles that lull the reader's mind, that they must decline the former because of "lack of space" or whatever rationalization they may fall back on in order to tranquillize their remorseful conscience which whispers to them: "Are you truly promoting scholarship?"

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