Universities: Moriturus Publicabo

Judged and found guilty by the hard law of “publish or perish” (TIME, April 24), Woodrow Wilson Sayre perished last week as assistant philosophy professor at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. He took his case, that eloquent classroom teaching is as worthy a trait in a professor as scholarship proved by publication, to a committee of his faculty peers — who concluded that “it is not at all evident” that Professor Sayre’s teaching “outshines that of his colleagues.” The school then dropped his contract. Sayre got several job offers almost at once — but thinks he will first settle down and get his 1957 Ph.D. thesis into hard covers.