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 Chronicle of Higher Education
>From the issue dated July 19, 2002
 

  Ignore Fast-Track Assessments of Scholarly Books at Your Peril
By MARK BAUERLEIN

In May 1999, scholars reacted angrily to a lengthy review of five works on
Native American history in The New York Review of Books. The dispute
highlighted an important fact about academic life in the United States: When
a scholarly book is published, it can undergo a double reception -- a kind
of peer review within academe and, if it is lucky, an assessment in the
mainstream media.

An author's colleagues in the field buy the book, read it, assign it to
their students, review it in the scholarly journals, and refute or borrow
from it in their subsequent work. In the academic world, the book makes its
impact slowly, with some reviews appearing two or three years after
publication.

Alongside that plodding scholarly assessment, however, is a fast-track
system of evaluation: reviews in publications aimed at the general reader.
In the most prominent ones -- the Times Literary Supplement, The New
Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review
-- scholars, essayists, and novelists comment on books within weeks of their
appearance.

At first glance, one might think that having a book reviewed in general
publications with 100,000 or many more readers would delight scholars.
Academics grumble all the time about the public's neglect, the slow pace of
scholarly reviews, and the feeble publicity efforts of university presses.

But the reaction to the 1999 NYRB review suggests a different attitude. The
scholars' letter of protest reflects the frustration that academics feel
when their books end up in the hands of unqualified or uncongenial
reviewers. In this case, the reviewer, Thomas Powers -- a popular historian
known for studies of the CIA and the Nazis' work on a nuclear bomb --
surveyed biographies of Crazy Horse (two books), Red Cloud, and Sitting
Bull, and a book of Plains Indian drawings. His essay included a couple of
silly stereotypes, and some jarring references to Joseph Stalin and the Rev.
Al Sharpton.

Thirty-two scholars -- one of them writing on behalf of a group that
represents more than 150 American tribes -- sent a letter to the NYRB
objecting to the stereotypes. The signers wanted to express their "great
disappointment that the NYRB chose someone with little or no detailed
knowledge of Native American scholarship to write this essay." As the letter
progressed, its language sharpened: "We find it unfortunate and insulting
that he has been asked to review books in our fields." The professors
concluded by urging the editors to assign essays to more-competent
reviewers.

Powers replied in print by pointing out that the stereotypes were not his
but part of the discussion in the books under review, and that his accusers
had leveled charges of incompetence without producing a speck of evidence.
The scholars' complaints amounted to a simple turf dispute, he determined,
with him accused of poaching. His finale: "This is a damned poor way to
conduct a discussion of anything that matters." The editors of the NYRB
appended a brief judgment: "It is hard to take seriously academics who
condemn an independent scholar without making a single substantive criticism
of his work."

The polarity is commonplace. As academics see it, the editors of mainstream
review publications rely on a stable of writers who are more or less
unfamiliar with, or even hostile to, scholarly discourse. The editors, on
the other hand, see academics as a complacent elite, only pretending to be
involved in public issues, blind to their own parochialism -- and unable to
write well.

Scholars are justly indignant when, after spending five years mastering a
subject, five months formulating a thesis, two years writing a manuscript,
and another two years waiting for a press to accept and produce the book,
they read a review of their work by someone who has never done research on
the material -- as when the novelist Zoë Heller took on Marjorie Garber's
Sex and Real Estate in The New Republic (July 3, 2000) -- or by someone who
is bound to hate it -- as when Roger Kimball trashed George Steiner's
Grammars of Creation in The New York Times Book Review (September 2, 2001).

Moreover, when it comes to books by their own contributors, the review
publications often take the opposite approach, tapping the most favorable
critics they can find -- other contributors. In March 1999, the NYRB regular
Anthony Grafton praised a book by the NYRB regular Ingrid Rowland. In
February 2001, Rowland returned the favor, affirming that Grafton's latest
book "delivers satisfaction."

To the first criticism, editors might respond that nonspecialists bring a
fresh perspective to scholarly books, while specialists focus on minor
quibbles. After all, the review publications' audience is the general
public, not academic experts. One also must admit the skill of the reviews
mentioned above. Heller's piece was a pointed exposé of Garber's "bad, sad
book," and Kimball's piece a hilarious deflation of Steiner's
pretentiousness. The question isn't the fitness of the reviewer, editors
would say, but the quality of the review.

In response to the second criticism, one might note that review publications
are no more incestuous than academic journals. Besides, review publications
don't claim to speak for everyone. Great publications of the past, like the
Partisan Review in the '50s, owed their stature to a small circle of
thoughtful contributors. Although some publications can become cliquish --
just read recent issues of Dissent -- the insularity of the contributors
matters less than their intelligence and broad-mindedness.

Editors have their own accusations to make. They prefer books that are
relevant and accessible, but the works they see range from the picayune to
the bloviated. In their mailrooms, university-press review copies pile up
like snow, an avalanche of bad thinking and bad writing whose authors have
spent a lifetime talking only to the like-minded. Even the better efforts
appear designed for a coterie. Editors believe that the humanities grow more
sectarian every year, with Derrideans, gender critics, postcolonialists, and
the rest barely communicating with one another, much less with anyone beyond
the academic walls.

Academics counter that knowledge is advancing faster than ever, and with
theories of culture and history multiplying, scholarly books are bound to
become more arcane. What they lack in reader-friendliness they make up in
rigor. The popular works -- like narrative histories and trade biographies
-- that reach the public and win reviews in Newsweek and the daily New York
Times usually add nothing to what scholars have already said, and they
sometimes contain numerous errors and simplifications (unrecognized by the
reviewer). Scholarly books are more accurate, and support their authors'
claims with citations and footnotes. If editors think that practice
alienates readers, they might try to improve the public's taste by mediating
between it and academe.

The face-off with editors puts academics at a disadvantage. The review
publications have 50 to 1,000 times the circulation of the scholarly
journals. They have far more influence on public discourse than does any
journal; even scholars read them more than they do the flagship quarterlies
of their own fields. Academics want their books reviewed in mainstream
publications, but the editors care little about academic prestige.

The prevailing dynamic -- we want them, they don't care about us -- suggests
that scholars should try to improve their relations with the review
publications. They should drop their pique, and speak as if editor and
scholar were joined in a weighty cultural enterprise, resisting the
onslaught of consumerism, faddism, bigotry, and everything
anti-intellectual.

As a first step, however, professors must understand the relationship
between the review publications and academe.

Of the four most prominent venues for book reviews, the Times Literary
Supplement bears the closest connection to academe. Most of its contributors
are scholars, and university presses produce most of the nonfiction that it
reviews. Although it covers poetry, novels, films, stage productions, and
concerts, too, the TLS is primarily an organ of scholarly opinion.

The magazine has devoted space to minute textual questions, like whether
Shakespeare wrote "Shall I die?" Its willingness to examine recondite
scholarly tracts and concerns is one reason that the literary theorist Terry
Eagleton considers it "one of the towering intellectual achievements of
20th-century Britain" (Times Higher Education Supplement, November 30,
2001), and that after 100 years, it remains the foremost review of learning
in the Anglophone world.

In the centenary issue (January 18, 2002), the editor, Ferdinand Mount,
declared that the paper does not follow any political line, meaning that it
doesn't take stands on campaigns and policies. But in affairs of culture, it
is clear that the TLS maintains a conservative outlook. It has opened its
pages to John Ellis, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Denis Donoghue, David Bromwich,
and other professors known for their hostility to newer trends in the
humanities. Occasionally it prints favorable reviews of leftist,
theoretical, and hip scholarship, like the respectful survey of Susan
Sontag's essays in the April 26, 2002, issue. But those are overshadowed by
articles critical of academic practices and icons, like the strong criticism
of Martin Bernal's Black Athena Writes Back in the April 19, 2002, issue,
and the censorious piece last December by Raymond Tallis on Foucault.

Many hear in the TLS's critiques reactionary sounds: the antitheory note of
the '80s and the anti-cultural-studies note of the '90s. But the target of
criticism isn't this or that idea, politics, or person, but how they are
embraced and expressed. When ideas become dogmatic, when political arguments
slide into poses, when beliefs become affectations -- that is when the TLS
reacts conservatively. It prizes independent intelligence and disparages
discipleship and partisanship.

As it happens, the ease with which the TLS ridicules posturing habits of
mind and speech may provide a line of retort for academics who disagree with
its judgments. Scholars should reply not by defending their faiths, or by
accusing reviewers of misunderstanding them. Instead, they should
demonstrate in their letters to the editor that the TLS has become too
predictable in opposing fads and postures; that certain contributors aren't
antisectarian but anti-intellectual; and that they threaten the TLS's core
identity as a venue of informed opinion.

In March 1995, the literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier,
wrote an article on the corpus of Cornel West. His summary judgment appeared
in the second paragraph: The books "are almost completely worthless." Poring
over them in turn, he called them "noisy, tedious, slippery, ... sectarian,
humorless, pedantic, and self-endeared."

Four years later, Martha Nussbaum treated Judith Butler to a critique titled
"America's Emptiest Feminist." On August 20, 2001, Simon Blackburn wrote a
profile of Richard Rorty, "The Professor of Complacence," who seems to
operate "in a political coffeehouse with no very exacting standards of
entry." A month later, Alan Wolfe reviewed the academic book of the year,
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire, calling it a "deeply flawed book,"
written "in prose that insults language."

Other books reviewed in TNR are less controversial, like new translations of
Petronius and a monograph on the 17th-century polymath Peiresc, which give
the publication a studious air. But there is something deliberate, something
ulterior, about the edgier essays. They go beyond evaluations of a new book.
They are assessments of academic notables, and impeachments of the setting
that honors them.

The put-down strategy originates with the journal's literary editor, and it
isn't hard to figure why. Faced with the nonstop rigors of editing a
magazine each week, Wieseltier must reconcile high-mindedness with current
events, bookish interests with the pull of buzz. A Lionel Trilling devotee,
he prefers close reading and a cogent argument, but he wants them rendered
with flair; his reviewers have done their scholarly homework, but they don't
write as professionals addressing Ph.D.'s.

The objects of TNR onslaughts flout the editor's ideals in one way or
another, he believes. Wieseltier sees a clash of intellectual values -- with
clarity, eloquence, and learning on one side, and complacency, cant, and
vanity on the other. The only way for academics to fight back is by adopting
the exegetical methods that he was trained in, and composing letters that
refute specific points in the reviews.

That is a different strategy than the one academics use to counter the
conservatism of the TLS in literary matters. TNR contributors are all over
the political map, from conservative to liberal. But they share a claim of
expertise in the subjects they review. This is what professors should
target: not the cultural attitudes, but the intellectual competence. If TNR
is nasty, well, so what, if it's in defense of intelligence? But if
correspondents can show that reviewers make mistakes, that they quote
selectively, belabor criticisms, and disregard strengths, then it will be
TNR that is discredited, not humanists.

At least The New Republic takes academe seriously enough to criticize it.
The editors of The New York Review of Books believe that academe takes
itself too seriously. They favor nonprofessional comment and worldly opinion
from some of the most famous writers in the United States, like Garry Wills,
Janet Malcolm, Susan Sontag, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Such intellectuals are often smart and always articulate, and they give the
NYRB a cosmopolitan flavor. To be sure, many professors contribute, and the
magazine showcases scholarly books in each issue. But the professors often
apply their knowledge to public affairs rather than to academic issues. Two
years ago, the English professor Elaine Scarry wrote about electromagnetic
interference and the crashes of TWA 800, Swissair 111, and EgyptAir 990.
More recently, the law professor Ronald Dworkin worried about civil
liberties in the terrorist era.

When scholars stick to their disciplinary niche -- Gordon Wood on early U.S.
history, John Searle on cognitive science -- they follow an explanatory
tack, as if they were leading readers into scholarly concerns, but lifting
those concerns out of academic contexts. The contributors who do cover
academic matters -- Andrew Delbanco and Louis Menand, English professors at
Columbia University and the City University of New York, respectively -- are
somewhat alienated from the academic scene. To the NYRB, academe is just one
of many locales of contemporary culture.

That appears less threatening than the attacks of TNR, but in fact it may be
worse. Disciplinary specialization and theoretical idiolects have cut
academics off from the larger culture. When scholarly books appear that do
have public relevance, the NYRB publishes lengthy reviews of them, but
assigns those reviews not to academics but to writers like Larry McMurtry or
professors like Anthony Grafton, who know how to translate scholarly matters
into accessible prose. The implication is that academics may produce
important works of scholarship, but most don't know how to evaluate the
books' broad cultural significance.

The obvious way for academics to reassert their competence is to point out
rigid attitudes and scholarly mistakes in reviews. But while such criticisms
may work with the TLS and TNR, with the NYRB they will have to be expressed
with a lighter touch. The NYRB is proudly intellectual, and dismissive of
intramural professionals. Scrupulous refutations will serve only to impress
the editors as, well, academic. To circumvent that prospect, professors must
reply dispassionately, as interested correspondents, and without resentment
or sneer. After Andrew Delbanco wrote an essay on the decay of literary
studies (November 4, 1999), a professor from Irvine, Calif., wrote in,
likening him to a blind pig nosing for truffles. Better to follow Michael
Fried's course. After Roger Shattuck stated in a New Republic review of
Manet's Modernism (March 27, 1997) that he couldn't understand a particular
sentence in Fried's book, although he'd read it over and over, Fried
replied: "He could've called."

The periodical with the weakest link to academic scholarship is The New York
Times Book Review. Trade biographies and books about celebrities, risqué
matters, and current events dominate the selections. The university-press
titles that make it in often address topical or quirky matters, like Sexual
Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill and The Devil's Cloth: A
History of Stripes and Striped Fabric. The few books that are weighed
strenuously as scholarly efforts tend to be those written by authors already
profiled in the paper's Arts & Ideas section or in the Times Magazine.

The Book Review is a middlebrow publication, invoking ideas and tastes but
rarely following through. Now and then it includes a review with hard-edged
wit, like David Brooks's reckoning of Richard Posner's Public Intellectuals.
Brooks concluded that almost all of us, including Posner, make asses of
ourselves some of the time.

Skillful critics like Brooke Allen contribute, as do distinguished
professors like Frank Kermode. But for every pointed analysis, a half-dozen
flat or sketchy exercises start with sentences like "Among the many things
that Sept. 11 will change is our view of the past" (December 9, 2001) or
have teasers like "Rickie Solinger argues that people with less money have
less freedom of choice" (February 3, 2002). They offer glib verdicts, like
that on a new biography of the Mitford sisters: "It's Upstairs Without the
Downstairs"; or on Twain: "He was a man of his time, even as he was ahead of
it" (February 17, 2002).

The Book Review reflects the attitude of the Times toward academe,
especially the humanities. The news articles that the paper runs on
scholarship are facile and personality-driven. The ideas and innovations
that academics gravely pursue, the Times regards as seasonal fashions. When
professors behave badly, the paper covers the event with a tongue-in-cheek
earnestness. The article on the collection of essays on Monica Lewinsky, Our
Monica, Ourselves, had the subtitle, "You knew this was next: Now, it's
Monica 101."

We read the articles and smile or seethe, according to our commitments.
Either way, it is unfortunate that the American paper of record doesn't
reserve space for consistent scholarly discussion, something that academics
might respond to. The Book Review prints too few pieces that engage
scholars, and the occasional one that broaches scholarly issues looks too
random to represent an editorial policy.

The best approach that academics can take is a simple one: to write to the
Times and advocate more scholarly content, then make comparisons to the
competition. While many newspapers have scaled back their book sections by
cutting scholarly reviews, a few, notably the Los Angeles Times, maintain
high critical standards, tapping exacting professors like Russell Jacoby,
Svetlana Alpers, and Benjamin Schwartz. Why not The New York Times, too?

Public talk is always a compromise. Academics win by conceding one point and
scoring two; avoiding war, but gaining ground on one issue and another;
using expertise lightly, not with a club; getting around the editors'
protectiveness with wit; and realizing that academics are just one party to
the dialogue, along with contributors, editors, subscribers, and readers 20
years hence.

The exchanges are often frustrating, and editors will disregard letters,
overedit them, and reply to them with facetiousness and annoyance as much as
with thanks. But the other option -- nonengagement -- is worse. The four
review periodicals (and a hundred others) are the arbiters of intellectual
opinion in the United States, and for professors to ignore that discourse is
to aggravate their isolation from the public sphere. Every year, it seems,
the insularity grows, and if scholarly-book sales and conference audiences
are reliable indicators, academics face a shrinking audience of, precisely,
themselves. Right now, not a single daily or weekly in the country regards
academic work without a fair degree of suspicion, mockery, or boredom. Even
The Chronicle has its satirical moments.

Engaging the reviews is one modest way to reverse the trend. If it fails to
sway readers, engagement benefits the letter writers, drawing them out of
professional settings, invoking wider concerns. Here the forensics of the
department meeting and the field symposium won't do. Let's not approach the
editors as if they were our students and shall profit from our learning. The
process of communication is for our own good.

Mark Bauerlein is a professor of English at Emory University and author of
Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (Encounter Books, 2001).