CAN ACADEMICS WRITE?

I've always said that a little bit too much is made of "Writing". It's not really something you can learn, like the piano, it's more just smart people saying things in a way that seems appropriate to them.

I finished university as an older student and writing was already something that just came out of me. I kind of saw it like teaching-the-world and would never do it without a desire or need to nurture and uplift anyone who might come across it. So the tendency for academic writing to be a dense matrix of jargon, namedropping, box-ticking, fake-it-til-you-make-it-type-yeah-yeah-yeah-I've-read-that-language, that seemed to either double back on itself and lead nowhere, or skip wildly on and on without ever completing a point (like endless shuffling and tennis ball tossing without the emphatic slam of the serve) was profoundly offputting. The open hatred and suspicion of journalists within academia seemed to be several parts snobbery and jealously, and I remember thinking, as I spent another 15 hours parsing an article with maybe 2 major points, that I had not ever seen an institution more dramatically in need of some capitalist market forces.

I can only surmise from my experience that judging an institution by the personality of its writers - and it should be mentioned here that the other notable thing about academic writing it that it all sounds identical and is therefore cultish and creepy - is wrong. I know for a fact that academics, if they are doing their job properly, are overworked. Capitalist forces have already more than begun in universities, and have not been a positive influence on any sphere of academia. They have not forced teachers to "communicate better" but have simply produced classrooms which are like creches for fee paying internationals, paid-for-research, bloated class numbers, casualisation, less time for research, department closures, corporations on campus, and so on. Then, after my working class indignation subsided, I had to admit that they were right about journalists. For the most part, journalistic commitment to the basics of research and ethics is so degraded that the average article does more damage to civilised discourse than good. Noone is more driven by sensation and outrage; an exhausting fever-pitch of hyperbole being the name of the game.

So I'm stuck in the middle, and unemployed. I see the merits of entering the world of intense research where by nature you are reasoning in ways that the average person cannot, though I think the ability to do this has as much to do with having the time to do so as with intelligence quotient. However, I also think that the capacity to communicate effectively is a kind of love. It shows who you are thinking of and who you care about, and too many elite "thinkers" reveal the answer to this is: only themselves.

This piece appeared as discussion around Can the Academic Write - Part 1 , on The Awl.

#journalism #academia #culturewars #writing