Neither you nor I is an academic ... if you understand this post!

For a couple of years, the late Denis Dutton, who founded one of my favorite websites ever and one which I religiously check every single day, ran a bad writing contest.  No, you did not write in order to win this championship--I would think that Dutton and his colleagues would have had one hell of a challenge choosing from the bad writing that was in plenty in the academic world.

Consider the following "winner," for instance:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Whereas Renee Zellweger's character in Jerry Maguire famously said, "you had me at hello," chances are pretty good that you did not even read through the "winning" sentence because it had you, I mean had you, at "The move from a structuralist account."

While that sentence, my dear reader, is an extreme, most academic writing is similarly beyond comprehension.  I have always suspected that academics write after a few glasses of wine, and the reviewers and editors read those essays after consuming a few bottles of wine.  There is no way, otherwise, those kind of sentences will ever, ever, end up in print.  Even worse that some even talk that way in conversations and at meetings!

Imagine the horrors when faculty expect students to learn to write like how they do.  Guess what?  That horror happens term after term, in college after college.  Should not surprise, therefore, that at the end of the undergraduate program graduating students come across as even worse off than how they were as mere high school graduates?

The author of this essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education asks, "how many professionals these days, apart from actual academics, write in an academic style?"  Nobody.  Therefore:

The fact that they’re students, and that they’re operating in an academic environment, does not make them academics. Nor will more than a fraction of them go on to become academics, thank goodness. The overwhelming majority won’t be writing academic prose in their professional lives, so why should we be teaching it to them in college, much less high school?

That indoctrination to academic writing is part and parcel of what appears to be the only goal that most faculty have, which is to replicate themselves.  Thus, they actively sell the subjects they teach and try to convert as many students as possible to their own fields of study--the "majors"--and teach students how to think and write the way they do.  Awful.  Simply awful!

I am sure that my colleagues who read my self-evaluation report would not have been pleased with the following sentences (among many others) that I had there:

My approach to teaching has always been about helping students understand the world, and not by any means to impress them with my fluency with the academic jargon, and not to recruit them into majoring or minoring in Geography either. My goal in teaching is to develop in students a commitment to, and an interest in, learning in ways that I hope will also become a lifelong pursuit.

Thus, if ever a student wrote papers with sentences that even remotely resembled that "winning" sentence, my favorite comment on the margin of the paper is this: "what are you trying to say?"

Is it any wonder then that my colleagues do not consider me to be "academic" enough!

ps: one of my exciting moments was when Denis Dutton commented at my blog.  Yes, he did!  I cannot thank him enough for Arts and Letters Daily.