Curmie published his first book review in an academic journal in 1991. In all, I’ve written about 30 reviews on a wide range of topics for about a dozen different publications. In some cases, I was only marginally qualified in the subdiscipline in question. In others, especially more recently, I’ve been a legitimate authority, as well as being a full Professor (or Professor emeritus) rather than a grad student or rather green Assistant Professor.
The process has changed significantly in recent years, the
biggest change being the increased level of editorial scrutiny. A generation or more ago, I’d send in a
review and it would be printed as written.
That was back when I was an early-career scholar, even a graduate
student, often writing about topics on the periphery of my interests and
expertise. My most recent reviews, when
I was a senior scholar writing about subjects in my proverbial wheelhouse, went
through three or four drafts before they were deemed publishable. Note: I didn’t become more ignorant or a
worse writer in the interim.
Some of the changes came indirectly, no doubt, from the
publishers rather than the editors: I received the same stupid comment—to
include the chapter number rather than a descriptor like “longest” or “most
interesting”—from book review editors from two different journals published by
the same firm. Actually, one of those
“corrections” wasn’t from the book review editor himself, but was a snarky
comment from his grad assistant. You can
imagine how much Curmie appreciated being condescended to by a grad
student. Other changes were just kind of
dumb: one editor insisted that I change “whereas” to “while” (“whereas” was the
better term).
But these are the kind of revisions at which one just shakes
one’s head and shrugs. The ones that
actually affect the argument are far more problematic. One author was writing about the production
of a play by a female playwright from the 1950s. There’s no video footage (of course), and if
literally anyone who saw that production is still alive, I think we could forgive
them for not remembering many details.
But the author decried the (alleged) sexism of the male newspaper
reviewers who weren’t impressed with the production. Nothing they said, or at least nothing the
author quoted, struck me as anything but a negative response to a poor
performance.
Remember, they’re not talking about the play as written, but
as performed, so the fact that the text isn’t bad (Curmie has read it) doesn’t
render the criticism of the acting and directing invalid. I said that in what amounted to my first
draft, but was told that I needed to say that the allegations of sexism could
have been true (well, duh!), but weren’t necessarily. In my view, declaring suspicions as fact,
even if there’s some supporting evidence, might cut it as a blog piece, but it
isn’t scholarship. But whatever…
In another review Curmie suggested that the mere fact that
male dramatists wrote plays with specific actresses—their “muses”—in mind for
the leading roles doesn’t mean that those women should share authorship credit
any more than Richard Burbage should get co-authorship credit for Shakespeare’s
plays. I was ultimately able to make
that point, but in a watered-down version.
More recently, Curmie was asked to “tone down” a comment
that several of the authors in what purported to be an interdisciplinary
collection of essays were so committed to discipline-specific jargon,
incredibly complex sentences, and sesquipedalian articulations (see what I did
there?) that readers, even those well-versed in the subject matter—me, for
example—would find those chapters unreasonably difficult to read, and might be
tempted to conclude that the authors were more interested in strutting their
intellectuality than in enlightening the reader.
I stand by the analysis, but the editor was probably right
to ask me to temper the cynicism. I did
so, but I kept the rest in a slightly revised version. She seemed pleased, and told me she’d sent it
off to press. When it appeared in print,
only the comment about jargon remained… and the verb wasn’t changed from plural
to singular. Sigh.
Perhaps the most telling episode was when I said that a book
was extremely poorly edited and proofread.
I’ve never written a book, but I have published several chapters in collections
of scholarly essays. The process varies
a little from publisher to publisher, but for one recent chapter I sent a draft
to the book editor, who made editorial suggestions and proofread, and sent it
back to me. I approved some of the
changes he suggested and made my case for not changing other parts of the
essay. After about three drafts, we both
pronounced ourselves satisfied, and the essay went off to the series editor,
who requested a couple of very minor changes.
And then it went to the publisher.
And then the professional proofreader.
And then back to the publisher.
And then back to me. At least
five different people proofread that chapter, some of us several times.
It’s still almost inevitable that some typo will still sneak
by. Of course, some publishers will
cheat and rely on spellcheck, sometimes without even checking the final product. I once encountered a textbook that intended
to reference the 19th century playwrights Henri Becque and Eugène
Brieux, but rendered their surnames as Bisque and Brie—a nice lunch, perhaps,
but hardly important dramatists.
But this book, published by a prominent academic press, was
ridiculous. There were four and five
typos on a single page, inconsistent formatting so it was impossible to tell
when quoted material began and ended, at least two (that I caught) glaring
malapropisms, and a number of instances of sentences or paragraphs so
convoluted it was literally impossible to tell what was intended. We’re not talking “teh” for “the” or
accidentally omitting the “l” in “public,” here.
I was insistent on making the point that the book was not
yet ready to be published. A lot of the
scholarship was really excellent, but the volume read like a first draft,
neither edited nor proofread. Finally,
the book review editor had to get permission from the journal’s editor-in-chief
(!) for me to go ahead with that commentary.
Certainly Curmie’s more conservative friends and colleagies
will nod knowingly at the response to those comments critiquing lazy feminism,
and they’d be right to do so. But I’d
suggest that these examples are only the tip of the metaphoric iceberg. The other two episodes I cited can’t be attributed
to concerns about feminism or any of the other -isms or phobias that seem to
dominate much of public discourse.
Rather, they strike me as yet another example of the
dumbing-down of scholarship, both that which is expected of students and that
which is expected of professional academics.
The former is a subject for another day.
The latter, sloppy argumentation or lack of professional oversight by
people who are supposed to be good at this stuff, might conceivably be attributed
to nothing more than corporate pressure: if a publishing house sends out a
(free) review copy of a book, they expect undiluted praise or they won’t send
copies to that journal again. Curmie may
be skeptical of all things corporate, but this seems a bit over the top even
for him.
Curmie was just asked to be an outside examiner for a
faculty member at another college who is applying to be promoted to
Professor. One of the things the college
asks is a statement about how COVID affected scholarship in my field. There are a host of indirect influences:
closed libraries, the time drain of teaching simultaneously in person and
online, etc. It’s easy to see how these
factors might affect the quantity of a scholar’s output, but they don’t
(or at least shouldn’t) have any affect on the quality.
Could the need for unmodified positives be grounded in fear
of legal proceedings from the publisher or author? That doesn’t work for me, either. Or is this phenomenon just academe’s version
of “why can’t we all get along?”
Certainly the idea of reasoned debate is fading from our everyday
lives. Those TV shows from a generation
ago—The Capital Gang, The McLaughlin Group, Crossfire, etc.—that often offered
well-articulated arguments from both the left and the right are gone and pretty
much forgotten. News media in general
have devolved into partisan outlets that say little more, as Buffalo
Springfield sang over half a century ago, than “hooray for our side.”
The quest for truth, in academia as in journalism (and, it
goes without saying, in politics), has been supplanted by a different end goal:
it’s not about being right, it’s about being heard, and ultimately about
“winning,” however that might be defined.
Ideologues of all descriptions claim that they’re being non-partisan; I
smile ruefully and repeat my mantra that “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.”
After my most recent book review, I pretty well promised myself I’d never do another one. If I change my mind about that, I’ll still write what I think, and I’ll still argue for the right to criticize as well as to praise. My job is to evaluate the book, to point to both its strengths and its weaknesses so that prospective readers or purchasers can make a more informed decision about whether to read it or buy it. If that makes me a “cold prickly” (apparently the preferred antonym for “warm fuzzy”), so be it.
This is a slightly edited but not fundamentally changed version of what first appeared as a “Curmie’s Conjectures” post on the Ethics Alarms page.
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