Reply to I go to a top LAC for history and stem. It is overrated.

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Reply to "I go to a top LAC for history and stem. It is overrated."

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]That said, I can think of some LACs beloved by DCUM that are quite weak in my field, with little hope of placing their students in a good PhD program, so maybe OP has a legitimate local gripe. But I don't think it generalizes to LACs as a whole.[/quote]
Which ones?[/quote]
Quote didn’t work. Which LACs are overrated by DCUM?[/quote]
My point was field-specific, and I won't anonymously bash individual departments here (in part because that would puncture the anonymity!).

I'd advise prospective students to look up the recent publication records (say, for the past ten years) of tenured faculty to see if they're still publishing semi-regularly in respected venues, whether journals or presses. (Untenured faculty are certain to be publishing, since their upcoming tenure case will turn on that. The question is whether faculty continue to publish after getting tenure.) It's no problem at all, and might even be a good sign, if an associate or full professor is publishing only sporadically -- say, one journal article every other year -- as long as it's mainstream work in a top venue.  In my field, at least, LAC faculty should be publishing work that's nearly as good as the work done at research universities -- just less of it (because of all the time they devote to their students (without TAs), and to faculty governance of the college, which is done less by faceless administrators at a LAC). This is true, in my field, at the Claremonts, Amherst, Swarthmore, Bowdoin, Bates, Wesleyan, and quite a few others -- but certainly not at all of them.

After getting tenure, LAC faculty sometimes drift off into either not publishing at all or publishing in wacky niche sub-fields.  It's possible to 'keep up with the literature' without contributing to it, but human nature makes that predictably rare.  If a long tenured prof isn't publishing, the prof probably no longer knows the field.[/quote]

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