Inside Higher Ed: Critiquing, Defending Academic BS
SAN FRANCISCO — A much discussed essay in the journal College Composition and Communication last year was titled “A Kind Word for Bullshit: The Problem of Academic Writing.” In the essay, Philip Eubanks and John D. Schaeffer — both on the English faculty at Northern Illinois University — acknowledge that much writing by professors, especially in the humanities, is seen as bull by many others.
“For many non-academics, academic writing is not just bullshit but bullshit of the worst kind,” they write. “When non-academics call academic writing bullshit, they mean that it uses jargon, words whose meanings are so abstract and vague as to seem unrelated to anyone’s experience. Such jargon seems to contribute nothing to the reader except confusion and serves only to enhance the ethos of the speaker, a strategy that the general public dislikes precisely because they suspect that academics are taken in by it.”
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