Over a decade ago, Jennifer Whiting (Pittsburgh) asked us to seriously consider an idea of Annette Baier‘s regarding tenure and promotion decisions. Recent technological developments speak in favor of revisiting it. Initially, Baier’s proposal was meant to address how pregnancy and childcare may interfere with or delay the research productivity of women, and hence unfairly affect tenure decisions. Baier put the proposal this way: “One possibility, perhaps the best solution, would be to make all tenure decisions rest on evaluation only of what the candidate selects as say, her or his four best articles.” In her post about Baier’s idea, “A Modest Proposal: Slow Philosophy“, Whiting suggested we take this idea seriously. She wrote: What would happen if the APA were to set guidelines for the maximum number of pages on which a tenure decision should be based?  Suppose, for example, it were 100 pages—or even 175—of what the candidate takes to be his or her best work.  Of course no one would be prevented from writing—nor even from publishing—thousands of pages. But the letters of referees and departmental recommendations to deans, as well as the deliberations of departments, ad hoc committees and administrators, would all be restricted (officially at least) to the merits and demerits of the designated corpus. This would not only address Baier’s concern, Whiting noted, but other issues, such as the massive production of writings incentivized by the current system, which leads to bottlenecking at journals, and raises questions about how much of any of it actually gets read. She says: Just think. Candidates would be encouraged to focus more on the quality (and less on the quantity) of their work. They might also have an easier time balancing work with other responsibilities (including civic and family ones). Referees, as well as colleagues expected to vote on the candidates’ cases, might have more time to read their work carefully and arrive at well-informedjudgments—especially if as a result of the proposed limits these colleagues and referees had fewer book manuscripts and journal submissions on their hands. Time spared could be used—by referees and candidates alike—reading work that had actually been selected for publication by discerning referees and perhaps even improved before publication in response to the sort of insightful comments that less harried referees would have time..

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