Ok, ok. So this post title has little to do with the actual contents of my post. That being said, I had to point out the passage (p.143, paragraph 2) because in terms of unnecessarily obfuscated academic writing, Sedgwick really gives Frederic “The dialectic of desire is thus…something like a negation of a negation” Jameson a run for his money. Just reading the excerpts from Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet brought me back to some of the denser texts I “read” during the course of my undergraduate education.

I think at some point, most high achieving students have tried to mimic this “style,” and to varying degrees of success. They do it for several overlapping reasons: they think they have to, teachers expect it, and they want to sound “smart.” As I admitted last week, I have certainly turned in my fair share of papers steeped in words like “problematize,” “orientate,” and perhaps most embarassingly, “phenomenological.” It took me most of my college education to figure out that throwing around such words does not in fact make you sound “smart.” It just makes you sound like a show-off, and a boring one at that.

Graff’s assessment of the inaccessibility of academic writing is spot-on. He does a superb job of articulating the “so what” portion of his main thesis. The first several chapters of Clueless in Academe demonstrate in varied ways how disconnection within academia and needlessly arcane texts work to both alienate students and further confine academics to their ivory tower. My issue with Graff’s assessment is not in his articulation of the problem. As with with most academic writing, troubles crop up during the “now what?” portion of the work.

To be fair, I’ve only read half of this book. Perhaps his practical solutions to these problems appear in chapters 8 through 14. I’m only working with what I’ve read so far; but frankly, nothing I’ve read so far has even remotely convinced me that a grand restructuring of academia is either a good idea, or even possible. In fact, the very idea of “the gist business” (138) appalls me. That isn’t to say that academics shouldn’t do a better job of communicating their ideas to their students and non-scholars. Of course they should. But reducing academic discourse to reductive summarization seems to me a step backwards, rather than a step forward.

The other issue I take with Graff’s proposed solutions to “curricular disconnection” relates to his call for a more comparative curriculum. In Graff’s ideal world, scholars would still argue, but respectfully. Teacher swapping would help students form links between competing ideologies and create synergistic “learning communities” (79-80). Having attended a university where certain members of the same department could barely contain their mutual detest for one other (never mind their ambivalence towards students), I just don’t see how this Graff’s dream-world would have any chance of becoming a reality—at least not without a massive restructuring in the tenure system in most large universities.

I hate to be a cynic, and I hate to even describe universities as “businesses,” but let’s not kid ourselves. If universities are in the “business” of anything, it’s luring academic superstars, securing research grants, funding sports programs, squeezing their students dry, and pumping wealthy alumni for cash–and not necessarily in that order. Graff’s suggestions are certainly uplifting, but they assume that professors have the time, power, and incentive to redefine the structure of the academic world.