On Jargon, Academic Writing and Anti-

intellectualism

March 02, 2014 | Annie Paul
Recently I had an experience that left me somewhat annoyed with a writer friend of mine. I had
invited her to dinner along with a visiting academic friend from Duke University. During the
course of the conversation I noticed that the writer, lets name her V, was becoming abusive,
making disparaging remarks about academics in general and needlessly taunting my Duke U
friend, lets call her M, who had offered no discernible provocation. M, who is the embodiment
of civility and goodwill refused to rise to the bait but I decided not to let it pass.
When asked to explain her aggressive comments V started a rant about academics who write
impenetrable prose intelligible only to each other instead of talking in language the masses can
understand and sharing their knowledge with them, a familiar set of complaints that I used to be
partial to myself once but which increasingly I have little time or patience for. I hope in the
course of this post to explain why.
As luck would have it this was only a few weeks before Nicholas Kristof launched into a very
similar rant in The New York Times, in an op-ed called Professors, We Need You! Here is a
quote from that essay:
A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane
unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then
transmitted to the next generation through the publish-or-perish tenure process. Rebels are too
often crushed or driven away
A related problem is that academics seeking tenure must encode their insights into turgid prose.
As a double protection against public consumption, this gobbledygook is then sometimes hidden
in obscure journals or published by university presses whose reputations for soporifics keep
readers at a distance.
As the editor of an obscure journal myself I agree about the often turgid prose Im required to
wade through on a daily basis. But I also agree with Joshua Rothmans response to Kristof in his
essay Why Is Academic Writing So Academic? published in The New Yorker on February 21,
2014.
Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If youre an academic in a writerly
discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of
your workpractically and spirituallyis writing. Many academics think of themselves,
correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by
ordinary standards. Ordinary writingthe kind you read for funseeks to delight (and,
sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. Its
supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its
deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by
one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because its intended for a very
small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, its actually among the
most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, thats because theyre writing for
strangers. With academics, its the reverse.
My own theory is that he [Kristof] got the situation backward. The problem with academia
isnt that professors are, as Kristof wrote, marginalising themselves. Its that the system that
produces and consumes academic knowledge is changing, and, in the process, making academic
work more marginal.
Around the same time I found an article similar to Kristofs in the pages of EPW no less, titled
Said, Mills and Jargon (Feb 22, 2014) in which one Zaheer Baber complained about the
transformation of insightful ideas into opaque, indecipherable sentences through the compulsive
deployment of tortuous jargon. Deploying Edward Said and C. Wright Mills as exemplars of the
simple writing style he believes all academics should aspire to, Baber trashed the notion that
jargon has any place in the social sciences unlike the natural sciences where according to him the
role of jargon is self-evident:
Quite unlike other fields, the use of jargon or technical terms in the natural sciences
contributes to the reduction of ambiguity and facilitates clear communication. For better or for
worse, even though these terms may indeed come across as opaque jargon to those not inhabiting
the same social and cultural world of the scientists, there is a shared understanding of the precise
meaning of technical terms within specific scientific communities.
Scientists deploy jargon and technical terms to avoid ambiguity. In so doing they may indeed be
in denial about the complexities inherent in linguistic representation. However, jargon for natural
scientists allows them to achieve closure about shared meanings around specific concepts.
Technical terms in the natural sciences represent disciplinary consensus over certain issues a
consensus that that is difficult in the humanities and the social sciences. Such is the nature of the
social world that all humans necessarily inhabit.
Here neatly entombed in Babers words lies the problem. There is this widespread but
unreasonable belief that academic study of social and cultural processes should be transparent
and accessible, although the exact same reasons given to justify scientific jargon apply to ALL
fields of academic inquiry. Its the nature of the beast.
This is something I remember discussing with the cultural theorist Stuart Hall 10 years ago. You
can google him or check my previous post if youre unfamiliar with his work. Or heres a very
good article about him - Wrestling with an Angel: RIP Stuart Hall. I was talking with Hall about
the anti-intellectual climate in Jamaica (and apparently in many other places) that insists
everything should be couched in accessible language and that somehow unless masses of
people can appreciate what youre saying youre being obfuscatory (Switch to the world of
sports for a minute and youll realise how absurd this demand is. Should Jamaica ask Usain Bolt
to run slower because most people there cant keep up with him?). What Hall had to say is very
pertinent to the critique of academic language made by Baber, Kristof and others. The following
is taken from my 2004 interview with Stuart Hall in Jamaica. The question was the demand for
accessible language in academia.
SH: ...this is a particular danger in the humanities and the social sciences because their
materials are either a literary work or philosophical work or music or in the social sciences its
about human life. Nobody would tell you that you dont need concepts in mathematics or in
physics. Nobody would tell you that. And speaking of jargon, mathematical jargon, mathematical
symbolsyou need to understand them to followin the sciences everybody accepts that you
have to learn the language in order to understand what is being said. But in the humanities and
social sciences they somehow think its just ordinary life, common sense will take you through it
and so this leads to a kind of provincialism, everything must be accessible. Its also a kind of
populism. Do it this way then the masses will come to us. A misplaced populism. Of course one
should respect the people and one should conduct the translation of serious intellectual work
into terms that ordinary people can understand. Of course, that is what teaching is about, thats
what pedagogy is about. Gramsci says pedagogy is intrinsic to the duty of the intellectual, to
make themselves understood to the widest possible audience but only when they themselves
understand something.
AP: Its also the task of informed journalists, their task is to make these ideas accessible, but its
not the task of the intellectual necessarily
SH: Of course it isnt , of course not, its not the job of intellectuals and then theyre often not
very good at making it widely understood so I do recognise that there is a trap of theoreticism to
be avoided but I think that work cannot be seriously done without the benefit of theory and
concepts. And therefore walking that line between the Scylla of theoreticism and the Charybdis
of overpopulism, anti-intellectualism and so on is a difficult road.
It is silly to think that academic concepts used to study human behaviour can or should be
conducted in laymans language. If it were that easy there would be no need for tertiary
education in the social sciences because such knowledge would simply exist in pellucid, crystal
clear language that everyone from the dhobi to the policy-maker could access. To deny the need
for concepts and theory in social and cultural studies is unrealistic. You could use Hall himself as
an example. Celebrated as a great communicator, who fluently spoke to large audiences on a
regular basis during his Open University days, Stuart also wrote dense, difficult prose when he
was in theoretical mode. Try reading his Encoding/Decoding. Now if it were possible to have
transmitted that information in a more accessible way dont you think Stuart Hall would have
done it?
What is missing from the equation is the interpreter caste of highly literate journalists needed to
break down difficult concepts and academic jargon for the public. Where are they? Lets also
admit that in the same way that runners and athletes are trained through rigorous processes of
physical exertion to improve their speed, their strength and their competitiveness, thinkers also
need to be subjected to the mental exertion of conquering difficult concepts, wrestling with
difficult language, and occasionally learning new languages, in order to develop to the full extent
possible. A denial of this is simply rank anti-intellectualism.
Dennis Jones 2 days ago
I don't see any logical reason why study of higher academic subjects translates into writing about
them in 'higher' levels of language. Simple, clear language should be possible, whatever the
subject. Maybe, what I see as a fallacy--that dryness is necessary--is a deep-rooted problem.
Dryness may seem to convey higher learning, but that's as much a fallacy as wearing a tie
conveys class or social standing, rather than a fashion choice. Jargon is dressing: if the salad is
worth eating, it's edible without the dressing; it may lack a certain taste but it's basic balance and
flavour are there. May academics cannot write well in simple terms. They never learned to, or
had the need to do that, thinking that the appeal to higher levels of learning was better heard with
the arcane prose. That may be true, but there are many who could and would understand better if
the language were more in touch with how most people communicate.
Professors, We Need You!
FEB. 15, 2014
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SOME of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university
professors, but most of them just dont matter in todays great debates.
The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: Thats academic. In other words, to be a
scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.
One reason is the anti-intellectualism in American life, the kind that led Rick Santorum to scold
President Obama as a snob for wanting more kids to go to college, or that led congressional
Republicans to denounce spending on social science research. Yet its not just that America has
marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They have also marginalized themselves.
All the disciplines have become more and more specialized and more and more quantitative,
making them less and less accessible to the general public, notes Anne-Marie Slaughter, a
former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and now the president of the New
America Foundation.
There are plenty of exceptions, of course, including in economics, history and some sciences, in
professional schools like law and business, and, above all, in schools of public policy; for that
matter, we have a law professor in the White House. But, over all, there are, I think, fewer public
intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.
A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane
unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then
transmitted to the next generation through the publish-or-perish tenure process. Rebels are too
often crushed or driven away.
Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research,
said Will McCants, a Middle East specialist at the Brookings Institution. This attitude affects
tenure decisions. If the sine qua non for academic success is peer-reviewed publications, then
academics who waste their time writing for the masses will be penalized.
The latest attempt by academia to wall itself off from the world came when the executive council
of the prestigious International Studies Association proposed that its publication editors be
barred from having personal blogs. The association might as well scream: We want our scholars
to be less influential!
A related problem is that academics seeking tenure must encode their insights into turgid prose.
As a double protection against public consumption, this gobbledygook is then sometimes hidden
in obscure journals or published by university presses whose reputations for soporifics keep
readers at a distance.
Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian who writes for The New Yorker and is an exception to
everything said here, noted the result: a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge
surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose.
As experiments, scholars have periodically submitted meaningless gibberish to scholarly journals
only to have the nonsense respectfully published.
My onetime love, political science, is a particular offender and seems to be trying, in terms of
practical impact, to commit suicide.
Political science Ph.D.s often arent prepared to do real-world analysis, says Ian Bremmer, a
Stanford political science Ph.D. who runs the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm. In the late 1930s
and early 1940s, one-fifth of articles in The American Political Science Review focused on
policy prescriptions; at last count, the share was down to 0.3 percent.
Universities have retreated from area studies, so we have specialists in international theory who
know little that is practical about the world. After the Arab Spring, a study by the Stimson Center
looked back at whether various sectors had foreseen the possibility of upheavals. It found that
scholars were among the most oblivious partly because they relied upon quantitative models
or theoretical constructs that had been useless in predicting unrest.
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Many academic disciplines also reduce their influence by neglecting political diversity.
Sociology, for example, should be central to so many national issues, but it is so dominated by
the left that it is instinctively dismissed by the right.
In contrast, economics is a rare academic field with a significant Republican presence, and that
helps tether economic debates to real-world debates. That may be one reason, along with
empiricism and rigor, why economists (including my colleague in columny, Paul Krugman)
shape debates on issues from health care to education.
Professors today have a growing number of tools available to educate the public, from online
courses to blogs to social media. Yet academics have been slow to cast pearls through Twitter
and Facebook. Likewise, it was TED Talks by nonscholars that made lectures fun to watch (but I
owe a shout-out to the Teaching Companys lectures, which have enlivened our familys car
rides).
I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career and deeply admire the wisdom found
on university campuses. So, professors, dont cloister yourselves like medieval monks we
need you
Why Is Academic Writing So Academic?
Posted by Joshua Rothman
A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my
departments American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for
graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had
coined the term paradigm shift, and I described how this phrase had been used and abused,
much to Kuhns dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People
seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. I dont think youll be able to
publish this in an academic journal, someone said. He thought it was more like something youd
read in a magazine.
Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? Its hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and
mysterious thing. If youre an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English,
philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your workpractically and
spirituallyis writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a
successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by ordinary standards. Ordinary
writingthe kind you read for funseeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct).
Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. Its supposed to be dry but also clever;
faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with
audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other
equally disinterested minds. But, because its intended for a very small audience of hyper-
knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, its actually among the most personal writing
there is. If journalists sound friendly, thats because theyre writing for strangers. With
academics, its the reverse.
Professors didnt sit down and decide to make academic writing this way, any more than
journalists sat down and decided to invent listicles. Academic writing is the way it is because its
part of a system. Professors live inside that system and have made peace with it. But every now
and then, someone from outside the system swoops in to blame professors for the writing style
that theyve inherited. This week, it was Nicholas Kristof, who set off a rancorous debate about
academic writing with a column, in the Times, called Professors, We Need You! The academic
world, Kristof argued, is in thrall to a culture of exclusivity that glorifies arcane
unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience; as a result, there are fewer public
intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.
The response from the professoriate was swift, severe, accurate, and thoughtful. A Twitter
hashtag, #engagedacademics, sprung up, as if to refute Kristofs claim that professors dont use
enough social media. Professors pointed out that the brainiest part of the blogosphere is
overflowing with contributions from academics; that, as teachers, professors already have an
important audience in their students; and that the Times itself frequently benefits from
professorial ingenuity, which the paper often reports as news. (A number of the stories in the
Sunday Review section, in which Kristofs article appeared, were written by professors.) To a
degree, some of the responses, though convincingly argued, inadvertently bolstered Kristofs
case because of the style in which they were written: fractious, humorless, self-serious, and
defensively nerdy. As writers, few of Kristofs interlocutors had his pithy, winning ease. And
yet, if they didnt win with a knock-out blow, the professors won on points. They showed that
there was something outdated, and perhaps solipsistic, in Kristofs yearning for a new crop of
sixties-style public intellectuals.
As a one-time academic, I spent most of the week rooting for the profs. But I have a lot of
sympathy for Kristof, too. I think his hearts in the right place. (His column ended on a wistful
note: I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career.) My own theory is that he got
the situation backward. The problem with academia isnt that professors are, as Kristof wrote,
marginalizing themselves. Its that the system that produces and consumes academic
knowledge is changing, and, in the process, making academic work more marginal.
It may be that being a journalist makes it unusually hard for Kristof to see whats going on in
academia. Thats because journalism, which is in the midst of its own transformation, is moving
in a populist direction. There are more writers than ever before, writing for more outlets,
including on their own blogs, Web sites, and Twitter streams. The pressure on established
journalists is to generate traffic. New and clever forms of content are springing up all the time
GIFs, videos, interactives, and so on. Dissenters may publish op-eds encouraging journalists to
abandon their culture of populism and write fewer listicles, but changes in the culture of
journalism are, at best, only a part of the story. Just as important, if not more so, are economic
and technological developments having to do with subscription models, revenue streams, apps,
and devices.
In academia, by contrast, all the forces are pushing things the other way, toward insularity. As in
journalism, good jobs are scarcebut, unlike in journalism, professors are their own audience.
This means that, since the liberal-arts job market peaked, in the mid-seventies, the audience for
academic work has been shrinking. Increasingly, to build a successful academic career you must
serially impress very small groups of people (departmental colleagues, journal and book editors,
tenure committees). Often, an academic writer is trying to fill a niche. Now, the niches are
getting smaller. Academics may write for large audiences on their blogs or as journalists. But
when it comes to their academic writing, and to the research that underpins itto the main
activities, in other words, of academic lifethey have no choice but to aim for very small
targets. Writing a first book, you may have in mind particular professors on a tenure committee;
miss that mark and you may not have a job. Academics know which audiencesand, sometimes,
which audience membersmatter.
It wont do any good, in short, to ask professors to become more populist. Academic writing and
research may be knotty and strange, remote and insular, technical and specialized, forbidding and
clannishbut thats because academia has become that way, too. Todays academic work,
excellent though it may be, is the product of a shrinking system. Its a tightly-packed, super-
competitive jungle in there. The most important part of Kristofs argument was, it seemed to me,
buried in the blog post that he wrote to accompany his column. When I was a kid, he wrote,
the Kennedy administration had its brain trust of Harvard faculty members, and university
professors were often vital public intellectuals. But the sixties, when the baby boom led to a
huge expansion in university enrollments, was also a time when it was easier to be a professor. If
academic writing is to become expansive again, academia will probably have to expand first.
Photograph by Martine Franck/Magnum.