The Research Bust

On researching research: Scientific research is cumulative: one well-executed experiment leads to another. Humanistic research is redundant, with squadrons of "original" researchers repeating each other ad nauseam.

Those energies ought to be reinvested in face to face explanation and discussion with students in class and their essays written in and out of class. The last,lost generation of our importing arcane European mystiphysics derived from the humanities profession's sense of intellectual inferiority vis-a-vis the successful scientific enterprises.

Just as scientists show their students how to conduct an experiment and test it, so must humanists invest in careful reading of established classics and putative ones. We have literally wasted our time with tenure granting publications instead of teaching our students how to read more and more carefully, which is to say more and more professionally.