Publish or perish is a nationwide academic syndrome, but teaching ability also plays a major role in the hiring of assistant professors, according to a nationwide study released yesterday.

The study, conducted by the Office of Instructional Research and Evaluation (OIRE) at Harvard, indicates that 48 per cent of the departments surveyed placed prime importance upon scholastic ability, while 39 per cent of the departments placed teaching ability first. The remaining 13 per cent did not single out one criterion as being more important than another.

Major Role

Department chairman at Harvard contacted yesterday said that scholastic ability as demonstrated by published works and research still tends to play the major role in the selection of assistant professors at Harvard.

"Usually junior staff don't have teaching experience, so research accomplishment plays the primary role," Dr. J. Woodland Hastings, Chairman of the Biology Department, said yesterday.

All candidates for the assistant professor slot in Biology, however, must present their research in seminar form first and "we are always on the lookout for a blatant lack of communicative ability," Hastings averred.

Scholarly ability takes precedence over teaching ability in the Government and Economics departments as well. "We tend to take a bright but halting fellow over one that speaks well but hasn't written much," Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '54, chairman of the Government department said yesterday.

Karl E. Case, head tutor in the Economics department, said that the emphasis is "much higher on research than on teaching" in the selection of assistant professors in Economics. "Teaching certainly matters, but not nearly so much as research," Case said.

The Psychology and Social Relations department looks for a "hot-shot scholar and a hot-shot teacher," Edward L. Patullo, associate chairman of the department said yesterday.

The OIRE study, which surveyed over 200 colleges and universities, found that departments in the humanities attached the greatest importance to teaching ability, while natural science departments overwhelmingly favored the scholastic in the selection of junior faculty.