Here is a quotation from a document I had to discuss with my academic colleagues today:

The school should continue moving forward in its attempt to formalize more structured processes for planning and the allocation of resources. It is important that a more structured planning process involve various constituencies, provide increased opportunities for collaboration across units, communication, and shared governance, and that it should integrate multiple programs and sites into a coherent whole.

I know all these words, but this is so vague that I have no idea what it actually refers to in our particular case. It is intentionally abstract, allowing for multiple interpretations, and in fact we made kind of a party game figuring out how various initiatives we'd already undertaken might fit into it and satisfy it. I'm sure it is left vague and in passive tense for legal reasons, lest we fail to comply with some directive and get sued for the deficiency. In fact, this paragraph isn't an exact quote; I changed the order of several phrases for fear someone might Google it and locate where it came from, and I don't want to get in legal trouble myself.

I take minutes for these meetings. If I report what anyone actually said, my colleagues jump all over me. I have finally learned that the purpose of my minutes is to conceal what we're saying, not reveal it. After 25 years in the newspaper business, my trained instinct is to report what goes on, colorfully and in intelligent detail, and I have to forcibly squelch that impulse in my current administrative role. For a well-trained writer to intentionally write badly - obfuscatingly and in noncommittal terms and passive tense - is really painful.

We write evaluations of our colleagues. It used to be, the writer of an evaluation would construct a narrative pertinent to the facts of the file at hand, but now we are given a recipe for the evaluation, which specifies how many paragraphs it will contain and which issue each paragraph will address. The result reads like a transition-less child's primer with all the small words replaced with long ones, but the fear is that someone suing the school might be able to prove that his or her evaluation was more or less thorough than someone else's.

I read books and book proposals for academic publishers. It seems that every book I read lately at some point mentions Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, or Lyotard, and then launches into a melange of special terminology. These terms all seem to stand for actions or processes that are entirely familiar to us all, but by packing them into proprietary formulae, the author can squeeze the argument into smaller, denser paragraphs in which every word stands for an entire phrase - as though paper were terribly dear, and meanings had to be expressed in the maximally effi cient manner possible. It is amazing to me how often the author wants to prove his or her critical theory credentials in the first chapter, and how often I can simply skip that chapter and find the meat of the subject matter expressed more cogently in chapter 2.

And I watch my poor students, who know what they're trying to say, stumble and stutter and search for the most abstract, most grandiose words, so that they'll sound as pompous and abstract and authoritative as the models that are put in front of them every day. I'll read some circuitous paragraph of five-syllable words they wrote, and ask "What are you trying to say here?," and they'll tell me in simple words, and I'll ask, "Well why didn't you just write THAT?"

ACADEMIA TRAINS YOUNG PEOPLE TO WRITE TURGIDLY AND VAGUELY. And not only young people. Readers of this blog sometimes get upset with me that I seem so anti-academic, that I am always denigrating university culture. I love certain aspects of college life, and I am extremely pro-education, but it has to be acknowledged that academia, as it stands, has a default tendency toward inculcating pomposity in writing and, most of all, a bureaucratic avoidance of personal responsibility. One shouldn't need to reread George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" to realize this. Slate magazine recently had an article on how the SAT teaches high school kids to write badly. Young people, and young faculty, learn how to become part of the bureaucracy, and how to write in such a way that no one is ever personally implicated. It becomes a habit, and a grating one. I am a beautifully-trained, colorful, clear writer surrounded on all sides by execrable prose and forced to occasionally commit turbid paragraphs myself. That's why I've been posting my own scholarly articles on this blog, because in the "peer"-review process my translucent sentences get edited into embarrassing mud. I am thrilled and honored to be in academia, especially given the horrible state of culture in the current outside world, but I have to harangue our students to resist the bureaucratic influences that the college surrounds them with. And the same foul brainwashing that turns students into bad writers turns them into bad composers as well. There's really no alternative to being here - but some of us understand that we have to push back against the prevailing winds to stay intellectually and artistically honest. Anyone who's offended by my saying that is part of the problem.

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COMMENTS:

Jame Pritchett says: An excellent and well-deserved critique. For me, the key is the lack of responsibility. My pet peeve is the need to cite other people to support every point you make, as if you can't stand behind your own views. I've been fortunate to avoid submission to peer-reviewed journals for many years. I've written a couple of things by invitation and have gotten away with prose that doesn't fit the academic profile. By the time they get the piece delivered, space has already been allotted for it and it's too late to reject. Posting directly to your blog is also a great option. I mean, if you have tenure already, I see almost nothing but problems with publishing through scholarly journals: bad style, low circulation, delayed release, poor access for people outside of university libraries.

Bob Gilmore says: Yep, here too. Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard (especially Deleuze) have absolutely conquered musical academia. They're referred to far more often than any musicologist, possibly apart from Adorno. I've read bits of all of them, some in detail, but for the life of me I can't understand why people think they're so urgently important. Some good and important ideas, of course, but plenty of at best arguable, unsubstantiated and/or irrelevant assertions, as well. And the influence of their ideas in general has been to pull the discussion of music as far away as possible from the actual dots, as though looking in detail at scores was an irrelevant anachronism. In my experience, especially when read in English, the primary effect of much Deleuze-speak has been to baffle and intimidate. That seems to be a large part of the appeal of this stuff.

Arthur says: The point about bad writing is well taken, but, otherwise, the post and some of the responses are another typical, annoying complaint from those who think that, somehow, plain language and direct speaking is plain and direct and that, somehow, complicated issues in institutional contexts can be addressed in simple, reductive prose. There is nonsuch thing as neutral writing. Behind every simple and direct sentence in say, The New York Post or People Magazine, there is a load of politics, predisposition and obfuscation. Even tweets can be obtuse. There is no universal communicative use of language. Style choice is a form of meaning. Unfortunately, Orwell's type of lucidity can equally be used by freedom fighters and demagogues. A lot of speechmaking in the recent moronic government shutdown was clear as a bell. And, at the same time, a total offense to any conception of truth, validity, and honesty one may have.
To "report what goes on, and colorfully and in intelligent detail," is what Kyle did brilliantly for all the years I read his Voice columns, but that very criteria is not for the New York Times editors and readers. One reader's sense of "colorful" is another's example of ambiguity. It should go without saying a great amount of "traditional" writing about music is not very colorful and dense with technical jargon, indirect assumptions, allusions to theory and sources commonly known by specialists. (Musical notation can be, incidentally, pretty ambiguous itself.)
Word of the day: "discourse." It means that for every community of speakers or writers, there are presumptions, implied values, specialized usages, contextual references, political overtones, accepted stylizations and idiosyncratic uses. The quotation above seems to me the opening sentences about a subject and context the intended readers know well. It is probably the result of some other conversations or exchanges about the same subject and meant to elicit specific responses to the topic. It vagueness opens up a space for particulars.
As for writers like Foucault, about forty years ago the work (sometimes called post-structuralist) emerged and they intentionally engaging in a type of extended, complex, highly coded philosophically aestheticized discourse in order to overturn the dominant institutional writing/language of the day which, though it might have been totally "clear" on the surface, was implicitly dismissive, authoritarian and intellectually muddled, not to mention sexist, racist and derived from dubious sources. More or less, borrowing from Foucault, a number of music scholars (sic) demonstrated the shortcomings of canonical music writing.
The writers mentioned - Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze - are theorists or what Anglo-Americans call philosophers and their intent, generally, is to elaborate an aesthetics which includes the arts and music. They inevitably use some inventive approaches and novel terminology (by analogy, think of Freudian concepts). That they are ineptly read and taught and held up as models for writing is not their problem. They - an others - would not even be taken seriously if they did not have something to say.
KG replies: Well, of course this is not to criticize Foucault, Lyotard, and Deleuze. I haven't read the latter two at all. I've read come critical theory by Foucault and Eco, and found it interesting, but also thought that they were mainly coming up with terminologies for phenomena of whose existence no artistically sensitive person was already in doubt. Even so, I wouldn't criticize them on that account. But what I find in most scholarly music writing is that these writers are tucked into the edges of the discourse, almost as add-ons, and what the writer is actually trying to say would be so much clearer without all the special terminology. I think the difference between necessarily difficult and subtle writing on one hand, and pompous or bureaucratic writing, is always clear. And I've always been inspired by Buckminster Fuller's contention that the principles of quantum mechanics could be explained in terms understandable by a six-year-old.

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