Intentional obscurity

When I was a newspaper editorial page editor I supervised a program called Opinion Shapers in which selected readers were chosen as op-ed columnists for a year. Each of the 13 Opinion Shapers submitted four columns on any subject at three-month intervals during that year. The results were spotty, as you might imagine, but overall the program proved successful and continued for several years, a new panel of columnists each year.

One of the best of these Opinion Shapers was a professor at nearby Ashland University. His columns were insightful, witty and beautifully written. I also wrote a book column for the newspaper and was interested when I was sent a review copy of a book by this same professor published by a university press. Then I was surprised when I found the book to be terribly written gobbledegook. In my review I said I couldn't understand how a man whom I knew to be an excellent writer could write so poorly and then get his book published.

I thought of this when I read a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed (March 20-21, 2021) by James Campbell called "Deconstruction, Identity and the Dying Art of Criticism." Campbell wrote about modern literary criticism, not my professor's field, yet Campbell's comments seem apt. He said that to sound appropriately scholarly, today's scholars must write so that nobody but other scholars can understand them, and even that is apparently not a requirement for publication.

Regarding academic writing, Campbell writes, "No one speaks like this and no ever will."

And, "Since none but a few can understand it, it must be the most elitist literary genre ever known."

There was a time when scholars wrote for the masses, not just for each other. Any literate person might read a piece of literary criticism and understand what was being said. Scholars weren't "talking down" to their readers. That was just the way they wrote. Clarity of expression was considered an academic virtue. Today the recognized virtue is obscurity. If everyone can understand it, there must be something wrong with it.

When I panned that professor's book, I may have been doing him a favor.