"Publish or perish" has long been the formula of academic labor at research universities, but for many humanities professors that imperative has decayed into a simple rule of production. The publish-or-perish model assumed a peer-review process that maintained quality, but more and more it is the bare volume of printed words that counts. When humanities departments and committees and chairpersons examine a professor's record, all too often they measure the output, not the excellence. The other duties of mentoring and service slip into secondary requirements. Middling teaching does not much hurt, and great teaching does not help. Administrative work pleases colleagues, but it does not lead to promotions from within or offers from without. Research is all, or rather, research mass eclipses everything else. In this article, the author contends that a new tenure threshold should be erected, one that insists on a lower, not a higher, level of productivity. The requirement should be reduced to only two substantive, high-quality essays--and conscientious teaching should be rewarded alongside them. Young people will respond accordingly, spending years ensuring that their fifty pages meet higher standards. Humanities labor will no longer be flooded with an annual cascade of theories and interpretations that yield few real benefits to thought in the classroom or taste in society.