Clueless is as clueless does
Wilson Quarterly editor Steven Lagerfield reviews Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe:
Mr. Graff flirts with the notion that there might be something wrong with today's scholarship that accounts for students' difficulties--things like impenetrable jargon, needless complication and intellectual incoherence, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But it's only a tease. He isn't about to fault his colleagues for their self-indulgence. And he doesn't mention that the modern university's speech codes and political correctness hardly encourage the kind of vigorous debate he prizes.Posted by Dr. Frank at May 28, 2003 10:33 AM | TrackBackIndeed, the university that Mr. Graff describes is a barely recognizable place of "paradigm-smashing, boundary-crossing, high-wire interdisciplinary scholarship." People traffic in "big-picture ideas." As an editor who deals largely with academic writers, I was delighted to learn that "the writing habits of the so-called public intellectual, once the exception to the rule," are now "seeping into academic writing generally." I only wish that the manuscripts I see bore evidence of this trend. I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear people like Mr. Graff propose that university professors play a bigger role in teaching the young how to write.