It seems to me”, says Clive Bloom, emeritus professor of English and American studies at Middlesex University, “that academics are the rudest people on earth.”
Bloom’s first book, The Occult Experience and the New Criticism (1986), was greeted with a review claiming that it “mentions every orifice except the arsehole from whence [it] emerged”. Such “bitchiness”, he believes, comes from many reviewers thinking to themselves: “I wanted to write the book I’m reviewing” or “I’m the expert (but no one has noticed).”
And this, in Bloom’s cheerfully jaundiced view, is part of a wider sense of “resentment and defensiveness” resulting from the fact that most academics “don’t really produce anything that people want”. In extreme cases, this can lead to “hatred of the public and the world generally”. On one occasion, he recalls, his place of employment, at that time Middlesex Polytechnic, was visited by the mayor and mayoress of Haringey, “a small, olive-skinned Greek Cypriot couple, both in their chains of office. We gathered to meet them in the common room. As we stood in line with drinks and nibbles, one colleague turned to me and exclaimed rather too loudly: ‘Oh my God, they’ve invited the cast of EastEnders!’”
It is not difficult to turn up examples of academics being deliberately rude to each other, whether in print or in person, openly or anonymously. Another striking instance is recalled by Deborah Cameron, professor of language and communication at the University of Oxford. Many years ago she was invited by a similarly young and junior feminist academic to give a lecture on a feminist topic at a university in what was then West Berlin.
“I was surprised but initially gratified when the senior members of the department – elderly male professors – turned up,” she recalls. “But after the introduction, when I rose to speak, they all simultaneously opened their newspapers and ostentatiously read them throughout the proceedings.
“I don’t know if this piece of rudeness was directed more towards my German colleague (for having the temerity to invite a guest speaker rather than leaving such things to them), towards me or towards the very idea of feminist scholarship. Probably all of the above. Whatever it was, they wasted over an hour of their own time on the gesture, and, in the process, probably gave the students the impression that I was more important and more radical than anyone had previously supposed.”
The moral of the story, in Cameron’s view, is that “rudeness in the academy backfires more often than not. The most effective put-downs are the courteous, mild-mannered ones.”
Can the same be said about really vicious reviews? A celebrated example is the attempted demolition of On Consciousness, a book by Ted Honderich, Grote professor emeritus of the philosophy of mind and logic at University College London. The review by Colin McGinn, who recently resigned from a professorship at the University of Miami, was published in The Philosophical Review in 2007 and begins: “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad. It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent…Honderich’s understanding of positions he criticises is often weak to nonexistent, though not lacking in chutzpah.”
The review is accompanied by a startling footnote that reads: “The review that appears here is not as I originally wrote it. The editors asked me to ‘soften the tone’ of the original; I have done so, though against my better judgment.”
Unsurprisingly perhaps, the review has generated a good deal of commentary. Yet far from just taking McGinn’s word for it that Honderich’s work is “shoddy, inept, and disastrous”, many have looked at their earlier printed remarks about each other to speculate about whether an “agenda” or past grievances lie behind the review. “Scores of philosophers have emailed me about it saying that [the review] was so extraordinary and self-destructive that I should not have replied,” Honderich told the press in 2007. “That I should have been Olympian and superior about it.”
Bloom found his savage review “so horrible that it was actually funny” and, instead of being downhearted, it left him determined to fight back: “I still use the wording to tell people never to give up and never let the bastards grind you down.”
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