Distinguishing the genuine from the fake in South African universities: Scholarly awards, books and academic credibility

Abstract

maintaining universities as places of enquiry, debate and engagement rather than as mass-production factories. We argue that the scholarly book acts as a counterweight to quick and cynical practices. Its production takes time but it is a goal available to all scholars in all disciplines. The scholarly book offers an alternative, we would argue the supreme, form of research validation. In this short piece we reflect on the production of one sort of scholarly output, the book. We ask specifically what the ethnographic life of the book tells us about how seriously a university takes questions of academic credibility and the robustness of an academic culture at a university. We also consider how individual academics approach the question of producing this most time-and energy-consuming of academic outputs in the light of the incentives offered for quicker easier forms of output. Moreover, we ask whether the emergence of a book from a university, the