Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - NYTimes.com: Professors, We Need You!

 

 “I don't understand why we scholars should be afraid to share our insight with a wider public in a language that is accessible to that public without undermining the points being made.”

 

meo

 

I share this difficulty too. Academics tend to write for other academics first. They seem to be intent on impressing fellow academics with perplexing phrasing and iconoclastic vocabulary. The best applause many academics think, is the applause of their peers. Rigor tends to be preferred to simplicity. Obfuscation is preferred to clarity. Boggling the mind becomes an objective. The danger with this posture is that expensive labor and time may be expended by academics on low value or even “useless’ work. This may help to explain why not-understood or misunderstood work is characterized as “academic” by many outside the academies. Academics should be worse than concerned about the ease, frequency, and speed with which many of their ideas, thought, and works are unappreciated or even disregarded by non-academics. Is it any surprise therefore that ‘street literature” enjoys wider readership and sometimes better credence than many classic works. The former’s writers sell  more books, are more widely known in society, and are arguably more influential on and determinant of popular culture.  Who, if not for the pressures of academe, would want their work to be appreciated by an not eclectic few and then stored away in a dusty backroom library shelf,  when the same work written in plain prose, will attracting a wide field of readers standing in line, to buy or borrow it and read/use it. In Economics for example, Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations…” and J. M. Keynes’ “The General Theory of…” are a lot more readable than many of today’s so-called standard economics textbooks. Is it time for academics to walk back, if only a little?

 

oa   

From:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Moses Ebe Ochonu
Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 11:39 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - NYTimes.com: Professors, We Need You!

 

Ken and all,

 

I have a slightly different take. Surely, a call for greater intelligibility is not a call to abandon discipline-specific vocabulary or lexicon, is it? Yes, you're right that sometimes the critique of the language of academe is overdone and tendentious. The piece by Kristof is, however, actually quite measured and well-reasoned. He doesn't call for a dumbing down of the insights and knowledges being produced; he calls only for them to be better communicated beyond the incestuous arenas of the academy. I don't know many academics who will not sympathize with that sentiment, or who have not wrestled with anxieties of being (un)intelligible to a wider audience of knowledge consumers beyond the immediate circle of their peers. 

 

The issue assumes a more serious frame when one realizes that, in many cases, what is being celebrated and normalized is not superior insight or ideas with potential for social impact or influence but a obscurantist phraseology, bombast, and esotericism. The equation of insight with hifalutin expression needs to be deconstructed, and it is one of the things that Kristof is signaling and critiquing. These specialized, faddish tongues are often legacies of moments in the history of certain disciplines, not the constitutive, organic vernaculars of the fields. These are often not languages integral to, or inherent in, the disciplinary practices. Linguistic and lexical flexibility and evolution should certainly be one of the referents when we say knowledge is incremental and changing.

 

 I don't understand why we scholars should be afraid to share our insight with a wider public in a language that is accessible to that public without undermining the points being made. Are we saying that these two goals (erudition and communicative reach) are incompatible, or unachievable? If so, that would be a shame, for academics should not run away from challenges but should evolve and confront the problems that restrict their impact and influence in society.

 

By the way, here (below) is a relevant Facebook update I posted sometime last year. Several members of this list actually participated in the discussion that ensued on my wall.

 

 

 

“The politics of difference lives on to rethink the minority not as an identity but as a process of affiliation ... that eschews sovereignty and sees its own selfhood and interests as partial and incipient in relation to the other’s presence.”

--Homi K. Bhabha ( A distinguished Harvard Professor of English and American literature)

What the heck does this jargony babble mean? Exhibit A for why there is such a divide between town and gown, between academic writings and the general reading public. Folks are complaining that academics are increasingly writing for one another, alienating the public with their esoteric ways of writing and presentation, and engaging in incestuous conversations among themselves--conversations that are so abstract they have no bearing on or relevance to the real world. How do the Bhabhas of the academy respond? More jargon, more "academic gibberish" (apologies to Russell Jacoby). We talk and write ourselves out of reckoning outside the academy and we complain when people say we're irrelevant or stuck-up intellectual nutcases. As Saleh Abdu, my undergraduate English professor and one of the best teachers I've ever had, used to say, what's the point of speaking when you deliberately make yourself difficult to be understood? At what point do we just say someone is a bad writer masquerading behind hifalutin phraseology? At what point do we call out those who equate verbosity and inaccessible writing with brilliance?

 

On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 10:16 PM, kenneth harrow <harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

it's hard for me to read this through. nothing we haven't heard forever, since existentialism was born, since post-structuralism was born, since deconstruction was born, since postmodernism was born, since every philosophically grounded body of knowledge was born we have heard this cries to make the language comprehensible to the non-specialist. and anyone who has worked to understand the specialized discourses realizes what is lost when trying to translate the complex into the simple and straightforward. same for psychoanalysis. same for physics, same for every science on earth that developed its own specialized vocabularies in order to meet the intellectual needs of its discipline. medicine; even sports has its own discourse.
that's really what it is all about. no more than that; no snobbism, no elitism, no disdain of anybody. just simply work.
and then this politics that says, the only language that matters is the language of politics.
well...duh (how about making poetry accessible and intelligible? ok, mr. chinweizu, it's you or soyinka all over again) (how about the complexities of rhythm; let's make all rhythms one, something we can all play, all follow. how about making all architecture simple so we can all fix our broken walls, why should we have architects? why should we have thought? we can let politicians think for us. wait....what shall we call their language? the common language for the common man? why should we have more than one language anyway? nothing is harder than learning two languages, nothing is harder than learning a foreign language. africa has 2000 languages, polyrhythms. time to throw out 1,999 of them, and learn to speak the ONE TONGUE of pragmatism: Realism.
enough.)
ken

On 2/16/14 10:17 PM, emeka194real@gmail.com wrote:

>From The New York Times:

Professors, We Need You!

Academics are some of the smartest minds in the world. So why are they making themselves irrelevant?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/kristof-professors-we-need-you.html
Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone provided by Airtel Nigeria.

--

kenneth w. harrow
faculty excellence advocate
professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
619 red cedar road
room C-614 wells hall
east lansing, mi 48824
ph. 517 803 8839
harrow@msu.edu

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---Mohandas Gandhi

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