by Curmie

[This is Jack: I have to insert an introduction here. Curmie’s headline is fine, but it would come under the Ethics Alarms “Is We Getting Dumber?” or “Tales of the Great Stupid” banners if I had composed it. What he is describing is a culture-wide phenomenon that is far more insidious than its effects on scholarly book reviews alone. I also want to salute Curmie for slyly paying homage in his section about typos to one of my own most common and annoying typos. I know it was no coincidence.]

I published my first book review in an academic journal in 1991.  In all, I’ve written about 30 reviews on a wide range of topics for about a dozen different publications.  In some cases, I was only marginally qualified in the subdiscipline in question.  In others, especially more recently, I’ve been a legitimate authority, as well as being a full Professor (or Professor emeritus) rather than a grad student or rather green Assistant Professor.

The process has changed significantly in recent years, the biggest change being the increased level of editorial scrutiny.  A generation or more ago, I’d send in a review and it would be printed as written.  That was back when I was an early-career scholar, at one point even without a terminal degree, often writing about topics on the periphery of my interests and expertise.  My most recent reviews, when I was a senior scholar writing about subjects in my proverbial wheelhouse, went through three or four drafts before they were deemed publishable.  Note: I didn’t become more ignorant or a worse writer in the interim.

Some of the changes came indirectly, no doubt, from the publishers rather than the editors: I received the same stupid comment—to include the chapter number rather than a descriptor like “longest” or “most interesting”—from book review editors from two different journals published by the same firm.  Actually, one of those “corrections” wasn’t from the book review editor himself, but was a snarky comment from his grad assistant.  You can imagine how much I appreciated being condescended to by a grad student.  Other changes were just kind of dumb: one editor insisted that I change “whereas” to “while” (“whereas” was the better term).

But these are the kind of revisions at which one just shakes one’s head and shrugs.  The ones that actually affect the argument are far more problematic.  One author was writing about the production of a play by a female playwright from the 1950s.  There’s no video footage (of course), and if literally anyone who saw that production is still alive, I think we could forgive them for not remembering many details.  But the author decried the (alleged) sexism of the male newspaper reviewers who weren’t impressed with the production.  Nothing they said, or at least nothing the author quoted, struck me as anything but a negative response to a poor performance. 

Remember, they’re not talking about the play as written, but as performed, so the fact that the text isn’t bad (I’ve read it) doesn’t render the criticism of the acting and directing invalid.  I said that in what amounted to my first draft, but was told that I needed to say that the allegations of sexism could have been true (well, duh!), but weren’t necessarily.  In my view, declaring suspicions as fact, even if there’s some supporting evidence, might cut it as a blog piece, but it isn’t scholarship.  But whatever…

In another review I suggested that the mere fact that male dramatists wrote plays with specific actresses—their “muses”—in mind for the leading roles doesn’t mean that those women should share authorship credit any more than Richard Burbage should get co-authorship credit for Shakespeare’s plays.  I was ultimately able to make that point, but in a watered-down version. 

More recently, I was asked to “tone down” a comment that several of the authors in what purported to be an interdisciplinary collection of essays were so committed to discipline-specific jargon, incredibly complex sentences, and sesquipedalian articulations (see what I did there?) that readers, even those well-versed in the subject matter—me, for example—would find those chapters unreasonably difficult read, and might be tempted to conclude that the authors were more interested in strutting their intellectuality than in enlightening the reader. 

I stand by the analysis, but the editor was probably right to ask me to temper the cynicism.  I did so, but I kept the rest in a slightly revised version.  She seemed pleased, and told me she’d sent it off to press.  When it appeared in print, only the comment about jargon remained… and the verb wasn’t changed from plural to singular.  Sigh.

Perhaps the most telling episode was when I said that a book was extremely poorly edited and proofread.  I’ve never written a book, but I have published several chapters in collections of scholarly essays.  The process varies a little from publisher to publisher, but for one recent chapter I sent a draft to the book editor, who made editorial suggestions and proofread, and sent it back to me.  I approved some of the changes he suggested and made my case for not changing other parts of the essay.  After about three drafts, we both pronounced ourselves satisfied, and the essay went off to the series editor, who requested a couple of very minor changes.  And then it went to the publisher.  And then the professional proofreader.  And then back to the publisher.  And then back to me.  At least five different people proofread that chapter, some of us several times.

It’s still almost inevitable that some typo will still sneak by.  Of course, some publishers will cheat and rely on spellcheck, sometimes without even checking the final product.  I once encountered a textbook that intended to reference the 19^th century playwrights Henri Becque and Eugène Brieux, but rendered their surnames as Bisque and Brie—a nice lunch, perhaps, but hardly important dramatists.

But this book, published by a prominent academic press, was ridiculous.  There were four and five typos on a single page, inconsistent formatting so it was impossible to tell when quoted material began and ended, at least two (that I caught) glaring malapropisms, and a number of instances of sentences or paragraphs so convoluted it was literally impossible to tell what was intended.  We’re not talking “teh” for “the” or accidentally omitting the “l” in “public,” here.

I was insistent on making the point that the book was not yet ready to be published.  A lot of the scholarship was really excellent, but the volume read like a first draft, neither edited nor proofread.  Finally, the book review editor had to get permission from the journal’s editor-in-chief (!) for me to go ahead with that commentary.

So what’s going on, here?  I can offer no firm conclusions, only speculations… “conjectures,” to coin a phrase. 

Certainly both the host of this blog and a number of the regular commenters will nod knowingly at the response to those comments critiquing lazy feminism, and they’d be right to do so.  But I’d suggest that these examples are only the tip of the metaphoric iceberg.  The other two episodes I cited can’t be attributed to concerns about feminism or any of the other -isms or phobias that seem to dominate much of public discourse.

Rather, they strike me as yet another example of the dumbing-down of scholarship, both that which is expected of students and that which is expected of professional academics.  The former is a subject for another day.  The latter, sloppy argumentation or lack of professional oversight by people who are supposed to be good at this stuff, might conceivably be attributed to nothing more than corporate pressure: if a publishing house sends out a (free) review copy of a book, they expect undiluted praise or they won’t send copies to that journal again.  I may be skeptical of all things corporate, but this seems a bit over the top even for me.

I was just asked to be an outside examiner for a faculty member at another college who is applying to be promoted to Professor.  One of the things the college asks is a statement about how COVID affected scholarship in my field.  There are a host of indirect influences: closed libraries, the time drain of teaching simultaneously in person and online, etc.  It’s easy to see how these factors might affect the quantity of a scholar’s output, but they don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have any affect on the quality.

Could the need for unmodified positives be grounded in fear of legal proceedings from the publisher or author?  That doesn’t work for me, either.  Or is this phenomenon just academe’s version of “why can’t we all get along?”  Certainly the idea of reasoned debate is fading from our everyday lives.  Those TV shows from a generation ago—The Capital Gang, The McLaughlin Group, Crossfire, etc.—that often offered well-articulated arguments from both the left and the right are gone and pretty much forgotten.  News media in general have devolved into partisan outlets that say little more, as Buffalo Springfield sang nearly half a century ago, than “hooray for our side.”

The quest for truth, in academia as in journalism (and, it goes without saying, in politics), has been supplanted by a different end goal: it’s not about being right, it’s about being heard, and ultimately about “winning,” however that might be defined.  Ideologues of all descriptions claim that they’re being non-partisan; I smile ruefully and repeat my mantra that “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.”

After my most recent book review, I pretty well promised myself I’d never do another one.  If I change my mind about that, I’ll still write what I think, and I’ll still argue for the right to criticize as well as to praise.  My job is to evaluate the book, to point to both its strengths and its weaknesses so that prospective readers or purchasers can make a more informed decision about whether to read it or buy it.  If that makes me a “cold prickly” (apparently the preferred antonym for “warm fuzzy”), so be it.