Adams House Journal of Social Sciences

Before I start my tantrum about the quality of Harvard course writing, let me first say that all the papers in the May issue of the Adams House Journal of the Social Sciences are thoroughly competent, if dull.

Joseph Kadane has a careful article explaining what the prisoner's dilemma in game theory means in the Cold War. Richard Bulliet's use of Cennino Cennini to show that the renaissance artist was neither a Bohemian nor a "Renaissance Man" is persuasive. Martin Feldstein's senior honors thesis in Economics is about allocating federal money for medical research, and it displays a thoroughness and a tenacity that lead me to think Mr. Feldstein a good man to have on your side in an argument. And finally, John Campbell's essay on different interpretations of the McCarthy era is breezy and informative, though not in the least original.

Reading all these learned and badly written papers in a sitting has brought on my tantrum, which is really just a simple case of grader's gout. Such is my curmudgeonly state, that if I see one more sentence of the "evaluating conceptologically valid methodologies in the light of historical analysis, on the one hand as it were, and on the other, in meshing frames of reference, so to speak" variety, then I shall take the name of Talcott Parsons in vain.

I'm parodying scholarspeak, of course. Nobody in the Journal is that wretched. But in my present dour mood it seems all too plausible that courses at Harvard have broken intelligent students like those in the Journal of the habit of writing English. With the exception of Mr. Campbell's piece, which is written in an engaging mixture of tough-guy journalese and scholarspeak, all the contributions to the May Journal share an identical set of mannerisms which I take to be the rotund and doggedly impersonal tone of the properly house-broken scholar.

Scholarspeak is easy to pick up. Anyone can master its few mechanical rules. Use the passive voice whenever possible, keep sentences and paragraphs long, verbs neutral and even drab, and nouns abstract. Load your sentences up with these abstract nouns until they're just about ready to break. But above all, of course, keep the tone dry and pompous.

An introductory editorial partially explains why this issue is badly written. The editorial briefly mourns the passing of the intelligent layman, and informs it readers that the Journal was founded to present a new figure, the historical successor to the now extinct layman. This new figure, as one might have suspected, is "the fledgling scholar deserving a wider audience for his best work than simply the brilliant grader--in a word, the Harvard undergraduate." One would not have anticipated, however, the ugly name the Journal slaps on this new beast: "the intelligent specialist non-specialist." Small wonder that these beings have lapsed into scholarspeak--no doubt out of sheer ontological terror.

Concentrating on such dry fare as course papers, it seems to me, means abandoning a premise that the late Dan Frost operated on when he started the Journal: that most courses and tutorials at Harvard present stylized, narrow, and sectarian approaches to their material, and that a publication like the Journal ought to give students a chance to transcend the limitations of course writing. What the capable papers in the May issue--with the possible exception of Campbell's--badly lack is freshness, the freshness that comes when people stop thinking about external requirements and write about things they're truly interested in.