
The Accidental Elitist: Academia is too important to be left to academics - jseliger
https://thebaffler.com/latest/accidental-elitism-alvarez
======
Ultimatt
I'm going to be snobby. There is a vast VAST difference between the humanities
and social sciences and natural sciences with jargon use. There are a shitload
of things no one ever talks about that need a name. Jargon in natural science
is used to speak precisely, but in social science it's invariably used to
speak in general terms. In human geography the words "place" and "space" for
example are quite maddening to a scientist.

In natural science words aren't made up to replace simpler common words about
phenomena most people are aware of. Instead the names for the most part are
very specifically _systematic_ and precise especially in Chemistry. So from a
composite name like "hydrogen dioxide" and "carbon dioxide" you get an idea of
similarity. If everyone spoke about "water" and other dioxides, it's actually
less obvious you're only talking about dioxides.

The worst offenders in natural science are for sure people who work in
taxonomy and phylogenetics. They still demand that everyone understand Latin
and use really ridiculous names for most species. It took me two years to
realise all the things with "carteri" in the name wasn't something meaningful.
It just meant "Carter's", who was the victorian mutton-chop-rocking guy who
discovered them. But the naming of species isn't very systematic in general,
and is frequently whimsical.

A fun example is "Selenochlamys ysbryd" one of the only species to be
designated with a Welsh-Latin fusion name
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_slug#Etymology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_slug#Etymology)
I like that they got away with it, but I doubt anyone got from "ysbryda" the
slug would look "ghostly". I can't even argue with the use of latin, there is
too much stuff to name in just english without it becoming incredibly
confusing. There's only so many ways you can say "brown beetle".

~~~
paperpunk
I can't speak for the natural sciences, but I'm an academic in an engineering
department at a major university in the UK. My main criticism of the article
is that it sort of lets non-humanities off the hook.

I've been sat in seminars in my group (on computer science or engineering
topics) and had the same feelings as the author. People invent jargon to
describe simple ideas and then convince themselves that it's more precise when
it rarely is or, when it is precise, the precision isn't necessary. All it
ends up doing is reducing the impact of the research. But it does help with
the imposter syndrome of being an early-career academic – everyone else is
using all this complicated jargon and you feel a bit like a fraud, so you need
to get to grips with it quickly.

This isn't a problem unique to academia though it might be more severe there.
There's a section on the gov.uk's 'Writing for GOV.UK' [1] article that I
like:

"Government experts often say that because they’re writing technical or
complex content for a specialist audience, they don’t need to use plain
English. This is wrong.

Research [2] shows that higher literacy people prefer plain English because it
allows them to understand the information as quickly as possible.

For example, research [3] into use of specialist legal language in legal
documents found:

\- 80% of people preferred sentences written in clear English - and the more
complex the issue, the greater that preference (eg, 97% preferred ‘among other
things’ over the Latin ‘inter alia’)

\- the more educated the person and the more specialist their knowledge, the
greater their preference for plain English"

[1]: [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-
gov-u...](https://www.gov.uk/guidance/content-design/writing-for-gov-uk)

[2]: [https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/17/guest-post-clarity-is-
kin...](https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/17/guest-post-clarity-is-king-the-
evidence-that-reveals-the-desperate-need-to-re-think-the-way-we-write/)

[3]:
[http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&co...](http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=christopher_trudeau)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Of course people prefer plain, simple English.

But jargon isn't limited to academia. Cults have their own languages, so do
cultural scenes, so do generations. (Ask a teenager for details.)

So do businesses, start-ups, VCs, and so on.

IMO the original article doesn't go far enough. These jargon systems are
identity markers. They're primarily intended to manage status, identify
insiders, and exclude outsiders.

Arguably most academic and technical systems are designed to do this -
including software. There's an argument that sometimes systems are
unconsciously designed to be obscure and hard to use (e.g. Unix) for tribal
reasons, not because they're a good practical solution to a given problem.

That aside, you can excuse jargon in science because it's actually useful.
E.g. You won't get far trying to explain cellular biology by pointing at
things and saying "This bit here. No, not that bit. _This_ bit."

It's less useful in the humanities, because the philosophical and academic
content in the modern humanities is as much an identity marker as the jargon
is.

It's not there to provide creative insight or to wield political power. (It
doesn't score high on either count.) It's there to provide evidence of tribal
membership.

Clearly, if academics then decide they want to talk to the public, they
immediately have a problem, because you can't talk to the public using thought
and language systems that are designed to exclude the public.

This is the first piece I've seen by an academic that understands this.

~~~
justin66
> Clearly, if academics then decide they want to talk to the public, they
> immediately have a problem, because you can't talk to the public using
> thought and language systems that are designed to exclude the public.

> This is the first piece I've seen by an academic that understands this.

Understanding of this is implicit in every book an academic writes for a
general audience.

------
rini17
The elephant in the room is that humanities have zero predictive power. And
reaction to unexpected results is markedly different, too. If the eclipse did
not happen exactly as predicted, hard sciences would (mostly) excitedly
scramble to understand how and why. If Trump gets elected...you get stuff like
this article "oh my what kind of person we are in this Trump era".

~~~
osullivj
There are generally accepted scientific theories that have zero predictive
power. The theory of evolution is a great explanation of how we got here. But
it can't predict what's next.

~~~
jhbadger
That's not true at all. Yes, you can say that the theory of evolution can't
predict what man will be like in the year One Million or other pop culture
ideas of how evolution works, but you can make the same claim about physics --
you can't predict what a given particle will be doing then either.

But there is lots of predictive power in evolutionary theory. The core of
modern evolutionary theory is population genetics which is as mathematical as
physics and can make predictions of whether certain alleles will increase or
decrease in a population, for example.

------
mcguire
" _Then, halfway through the panel, it hits me: this is awful. The redeeming
insights are just so few and far between, stranded between deserts of lame,
forced conference humor and straightforward, even banal points dressed up in
comically unnecessary jargon._ "

Welcome to the land of adulthood, where everything is like this.

There's an old joke about the American hiker in Japan going to the inn in a
small village in the evening and asking for a room. The innkeeper says in
Japanese, "you wouldn't like it here, we have Japanese bathrooms." The hiker
replies in Japanese that he has been in Japan for months and would be fine.
They go back and forth a couple of times until the hiker in frustration says,
in English, "Why can't I just get a place to sleep?" The innkeeper replies,
"Because you don't speak Japanese," and slams the door.

Anyway, this kind of behavior is everywhere, especially in any field that does
not look difficult. Yes, I have a PhD in computer science. No, I don't fix PCs
all day.

The bottom line is that the author is part of the problem. The article is
excessively erudite and verbose. He's clearly not talking to anyone outside of
his field. He misrepresents the state of the "other side" to make points.
(Quick, call up the ghost of William F. Buckley and ask him about the state of
the American right.) And he is not saying anything new.

------
DataWorker
The problem is an inability to synthesize knowledge from outside disciplines.
The piece itself is proof. No consideration of the economic factors or
sociological factors at play. Just inward focus and self examination unaided
by the very applicable knowledge provided by other domains of study.

I strongly suspect this will all prove to be a self correcting problem. The
solution may be closer than many realize.

~~~
stinkytaco
What do you mean by "self correcting"? What do you speculate the solution
might be?

------
roceasta
I find it almost incredible that while the motivated autodidact can learn
almost any theoretical topic for almost no money via the internet we
simultaneously have millions of students getting into heavy debt at
university. (Also into heavy drinking, exam pressure, mental illness, radical
indoctrination, etc.)

~~~
rleigh
There's a difference between learning a topic yourself and learning it at a
university: the university gives you a certificate at the end to say you did
it, which other people recognise as having value.

There are also things that you gain by studying and working with others:
discussion, exposure to different perspectives and points of view. Inspiration
by experts in the field. These all have value. Whether they are worth the cost
is a separate question.

Heavy drinking and radical indoctrination are optional; you can skip all that.
Exam and other pressure from deadlines can be bad, but it can also be a
powerful motivator to pull your finger out and get stuff done.

~~~
roceasta
Sure. But bear in mind that all these benefits existed in the 60s, 70s and
80s, before the higher education bubble. When there was no web and little or
no student debt. Yet there are _more_ people in higher education now.

 _Heavy drinking and radical indoctrination are optional_

They're notionally optional but don't underestimate the effects of social
pressure.

In fact, conformity prevails strongly on the academic as well as the social
side of university life. People _talk_ about discussion and perspectives but
in practice they want and expect accredited professionals to conform and to
believe the same things. We don't generally want our doctors, for instance, to
be original and creative. (Whereas, by contrast, _we_ can have real discussion
here.)

Students want to know whether a given topic will be in the exam or not, and
what the right answer is. In the arts/humanities, where fashions tend to
prevail, they try hard to give approved answers in original or disguised form.
I suppose this isn't surprising, historically speaking. The first universities
were religious institutions founded to train priests, to inculcate doctrinal
uniformity, stamp out heresies, and so on.

If we judge the rationality of institutions by whether they meet the problems
they purport to address then by that standard universities are pretty
irrational. In fact I think one of the main functions they serve isn't
mentioned very much: getting the kids to leave home.

------
wisty
I feel a lot of the purpose of jargon in academia is simply to avoid
disagreements. It's easy to agree with a metaphor, because you can interpret
it however you like.

------
clarkevans
What do we expect of humanities academics? Keeping in mind that even if you
make to tenure, you might have a $70-90K job in urban places where you cannot
afford to own a house. Indeed, the failure rate of getting tenure or to full
professor is very high: academia is much like a startup in this regard, you
can work for a decade and if you don't get traction... you're no longer a
market participant.

...

This article reads like someone starting a career who is musing about the
stereotypes and flaws he presumes exist in his chosen profession and how his
career relates to the broader world. Is Maximillian asking that that
academics, especially those in the humanities, participate more in the
political world? Surely, this is a double-edged sword: as soon as they present
their ideas and knowledge forcefully in a political setting based upon their
study of history, they are labeled as political. Can you be an effective
advocate for change if you are labeled political?

So, what do we ask humanities professors do?

Outreach. Acedemics give talks at museums or libraries; they and help curators
with fixing incorrect labels. They do their very best to wrap their hard-won
knowledge in accessible terms. They write beautiful, amazing books that
inspire people and spread ideas. But frankly, not everyone has an idea or
insight that's generally applicable and worthy enough to have general public
visibility.

Service. Acedemics often have part time jobs doing all sorts of service roles
such as assisting undergraduates with their careers, participating in a
broader administrative organization called a University, incrementally
advancing their field, doing peer review, and the like. This takes time,
because working with people and ideas takes time.

Research. We ask academics to be fountains of knowledge in their tiny itty-
bitty field, to know each other in their field, and to maintain and advance
the state of understanding. This means constant reading of what almost
everyone in their field writes. They might even coalesce thought in the field,
condense knowledge, and express this clearly to specialists and non-
specialists alike.

Education. We expect academics to teach, and teach well. For the most part, in
humanities, we expect them to use their field as an example play ground for
students to learn to think deeply, reason about problems, express themselves
logically and coherently, etc. This is challenging work, especially when so
many students come to college ill-prepared with basic problems in thought
formulation and expression. Yet, they do it. What warms an academics heart is
when they get a letter, some 2-3 years or 10 years later where someone says:
"you helped me learn to me think, and that has made all the difference in my
life".

Do all academics do all of these perfectly? Probably not. However, for a high
(or even medium) double-digit salary for a life's dedication to a field and
education, what do we expect them to be? superheros?

------
scythe
>There’s a huge difference, for instance, between defending academic jargon as
such and defending academic jargon as the typical academic so often uses it.
There’s likewise a huge difference between justifying jargon when it is
absolutely necessary (when all other available terms simply do not account for
the depth or specificity of the thing you’re addressing) and pretending that
jargon is always justified when academics use it. And there’s a huge
difference between jargon as a necessarily difficult tool required for the
academic work of tackling difficult concepts, and jargon as something used by
tools simply to prove they’re academics.

What I find so amusing about this paragraph is that the word "jargon" is, in
this context, jargon. It is not explained when jargon is necessary, or when it
isn't, or what kinds of discussions would make it necessary. In fact, it is
probably ideal to be familiar with the use of some sort of jargon, and with
contexts in which it is necessary and unnecessary, in order to really make
sense of what the author means here.

And something important got left out, which is: jargon is often _easy_. Easy
like reaching into the bag of chocolate-peanut clusters rather than making
some actual food. Jargon has two primary functions: it increases the number of
things you can talk about _specifically_ and it removes the emotional impact
of talking about those things. The cognitive-somatic empathy impact of "blunt
trauma to the genital region" is less wince-inducing than "kick in the nuts".
Using jargon puts a Latinate wall between you and any difficult emotions that
you might have about the subject that you're discussing.

But there is another purpose of jargon, too, in which it comes closer to that
other famous tool of the academic, the formalism. Language is fluid and the
meaning of words changes, but in order for the academic canon to remain useful
for centuries, it has to stay somewhat the same. Jargon is supposed to fulfill
the need for language that doesn't change. That's why, when academic jargon
like "microaggression" \-- a term which has appeared in papers since 1989 (
[https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/3424662/Micr...](https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/3424662/Microaggression.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1504168265&Signature=cCqcSv%2BM9KHuuTxw274CCUdMMYQ%3D&response-
content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DLaw_as_microaggression.pdf) ) --
becomes common in social parlance, it also stops _being jargon_ , because it
is no longer tied to its original meaning. To be brief (and somewhat wrong)
jargon tries to be prescriptive, whereas real language is descriptive. And
because language which is no longer jargon cannot be _correctly_ used as
though it were, having fluency in an academic field does not imply being able
to communicate with ordinary people about it. In order to have conversations
in colloquial language you have to _learn_ to use colloquial language, which
is a separate skill-set from what the academic is expected by their job title
to accomplish.

So if you try to fix this communication problem by turning the jargon switch
on and off:

>It goes without saying we are implicitly celebrating a kind of technocratic
anti-politics, though, when we contribute to making the discussion of politics
intelligible only to a select few. If Trump’s election didn’t teach us that
this kind of thing is a death wish, nothing will.

well, maybe you should be beaten over the head with a copy of _On Certainty_.

Is the discussion intelligible only to a select few? No, if it were, it would
be physics, and there are very few popular conspiracy theories about physics.
Except for that one funded by billionaires, but that's a different problem.
There are lots of popular conspiracy theories about sociology, and that's
because it isn't that they hear you talking and don't get any ideas out of it,
it's that they hear you talking and they think you're some kind of monster
because of it. That doesn't happen when we're discussing wavefunctions.

And that's because this:

>The perpetual conceit of academics in the humanities is that translating
their work into a more accessible vernacular will “dumb down” what are
necessarily complex subjects. Important stuff will be lost. Behind this
conceit, though, is an implicit presumption from just about every academic
that they could perform this kind of translation if pressed to. It has been
one of the great sources of my disillusionment with academia to realize that a
staggering majority of jargonauts, when pressed, actually can’t.

doesn't happen because academics don't really understand the subject they're
talking about, it happens because they don't understand the language they're
trying to translate it into. So I would certainly agree that

>It requires that one goes and does the painstaking work of learning languages
that express and condition the worldviews of their speakers, that are encoded
with specific logical systems and empowered by cultural conventions, which
must also be learned and practiced. It requires daily efforts to understand
how this cultural material works for smaller and larger publics as well as
repeated attempts to construct workable critical stances out of that very
material.

but ordinary language is not by its naturally fluid nature an appropriate
foundation for critical theory. Rather the task of communicating in ordinary
language must be approached in and of itself. I think there's another question
of whether the researchers themselves should be tasked with this, or a
separate group of people, who may not exist.

Yet it is probably not at all comforting to academics, a generally self-
assured culture, to suggest that they can't fix politics alone. In a more
harmonious culture, perhaps journalists would bridge this chasm, but today,
they seem more interested in dredging it.

PS:

>[the right was] shifting people’s sentiments in such a way that they’ll even
support things that are fundamentally bad for them.

The words "fundamentally bad" link to a book about tax cuts in Kansas.
Problem: while the whole rest of the essay focused on sociology, this book is
about economics. Problem 2: Kansas's tax-reform experiment did not actually
pass because of wide popular support. In fact, libertarian economics doesn't
actually poll very well on its own (look at all the love for free trade
agreements in 2016), it just happens to be attached to the banner of the
Republican Party. If you want to be _convincing_ , it helps not to be wrong in
the ways that even laypeople can recognize.

Does my postscripted objection make sense? The context is a sentence about the
right convincing people to vote for things that are bad for them in an essay
about sociology; the example is something people _didn 't vote for_ which was
_implemented_ by the right and which was bad _economics_. I don't think that's
a big deal in isolation, but consider the choice the author made, by using
this example over any other example, in the context of my first paragraph.
There are many things the right _really_ convinced people to vote for that
could be bad for them, such as building a goddamn wall on the Mexican border
or repealing a law that everyone was suddenly in favor of when you call it by
its original name, and yet the author -- _while decrying jargon_ \-- chose an
example which is unfamiliar and uncontroversial. Easy. Chocolate-peanut
clusters.

>What makes a subject difficult to understand — if it is significant,
important — is not that some special instruction about abstruse things is
necessary to understand it. Rather it is the contrast between the
understanding of the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this
the very things that are most obvious can become the most difficult to
understand. What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of
the will.

------
nafey
A part of me believes that academics fulfill the role of priests in ancient
cultures. They have highly developed sophisticated incantations which are not
intended to be meaningful but to build a facade of control and portray an
illusion of almost prophetic insight to the general public.

~~~
vecter
What are academics controlling?

~~~
fennecfoxen
Indoctrination of the people who use the education system, of course.

 _(Specifics and the ultimate impact are left as an exercise to the reader.)_

~~~
collyw
Actually listening to Jordan Peterson talking about some humanities subjects
(gender studies for example), there may be some truth in this.

------
cerealbad
the things i know are not as certain as i am.

universities teach myth and research profit.

"Here they lie."

