Professors: Birth Control for Books

Academic man is slowly suffocating under the sheer volume of technical books and specialized papers. Although Stanford Psychologist Nevitt Sanford would not go so far as Fahrenheit 451, in which a future civilization bans and burns the printed word entirely, he does advocate a new form of birth control—for books.

Before the end of the century, predicts Sanford, “the most prestigious colleges will forbid their professors to publish until they have been on the faculty five or even ten years.” The only exception, he suggests, should be publication by television, in which a scholar “who has something important to say goes before cameras to say it in plain language to the general public.”