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Loading...It is always interesting for me to travel around the country giving lectures at different colleges and universities. This past week I have been struck with just now different institutions of higher education can be from one another. Let me preface my remarks by saying – in this post — that I absolutely love my university. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is always ranked very near the top of state research universities in the country, and for very good reason. The faculty are on the whole absolutely stellar. Just within my own Department of Religious Studies we have eighteen full time tenured or tenure-track faculty, not counting adjuncts and emeriti, and every single one of them has a national reputation in his or her field, and several have international reputations. We all write books, articles, book reviews, essays, and so on. Many are absolutely at the top of their fields. It would be hard to assemble a more impressive faculty if you tried. I would stack us up against any faculty of religious studies in any institution of higher learning anywhere on the planet.
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I take it no one from the football team is in any of these classes?
Very rarely!
Does a trade book count as much toward tenure as an academic article? This might be a stupid question as I suspect most of the authors of trade books are already tenured.
Not a stupid question at all. The answer, to many people’s surprise, is that writing trade books is actually a *detriment* to tenure and promotion. One of several reasons that faculty don’t get encouraged to write them.
So the only publishing faculty are encouraged to pursue are those in journals?
Academic journals, encyclopedias, volumes of scholarly essays — but especially scholarly books!
Wishful thinking, perhaps, but it seems to me that trade books SHOULD count for something, at least once you become a full professor – some obligation to give back to or inform society at large. (Maybe as service or outreach, not scholarly activity?)
Yes, I understand the point! But at a research university what matters is scholarship that advances our knowledge, not packaging that presents it in a digestible guise to the non-scholar.
Are there differences in the ethos of a state university and a private university e.g. UNC compared to Duke?
To some extent. Students tend to feel less privileged and entitled. And there’s a LOT less money for lectures, projects, and so on.
I look forward to hearing the contrast.
Bart, on a side-note: do you plan to post something on the relationship between the Baptist and Jesus at some point? There are these interesting statements, attributed to Jesus, like “I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John” … Why would Jesus, himself apparently born of a woman, say something like that?
Good question! Need to think about that one. I don’t have any plans on bloggin on John the Baptist — but my good friend Joel Marcus is writing a book about him, and maybe I *will* get around to it….
Hmmm, another guest blog perhaps?
Good idea!
In your UNC Department of Religious Studies do you have faculty scholars who are experts on the Qur’an? In some of your previous postings you discuss the problem with there not being any original copy of the books in the New Testament. Since the Angel Gabriel’s revelations to Muhammad were recitations, do you believe the ancient Arabic manuscripts (7th century) of the Qur’an has no flaws or contradictions?
I really don’t know about the Qur’an and its textual tradition. My colleage Carl Ernst has just written a book about interpreting the Qur’an, and he probably does!