20130829.0824

It has been a little while since I have read anything from the New York Times, including the opinion columns that have tended to attract my attention.  I remedied the lack in some small measure this morning, reading John Kaag's 24 June 2013 article "On Writing with Others" in the online version of the newspaper.

In the article, Kaag discusses the difficulties he faced in beginning to write explicitly collaboratively, going beyond referring to the writings of others and engaging in writing with others as co-author.  The difficulties inhere in writing as a professor of philosophy, he notes, as philosophers are trained to work as individuals and not in collaboration, as distinct from those in the academic sciences, who almost always author papers and books in groups.  Collaborative authorship, though, as with any collaboration, opens fruitful discussions that precede writing and publication, likely leading to better ideas and better-phrased ideas.  More importantly for Kaag, it guarantees that one other person will read what is written, validating the writing in a way that he and many of his colleagues have sought to be validated since childhood.  It is a useful statement on the value of including others in the writing process.

What Kaag says of philosophy can be extended to many of the academic humanities--many of those working in those fields of study are doctors of philosophy, after all.  In many such fields, such as my own literary studies, it is very much the case that the individual effort is what is prized and rewarded; I do not have the texts with me at the moment, so that I cannot refer to them in detail, but I recall a number of articles in Profession and other journals which wrestle with the question of how to evaluate collaborative scholarship in the humanities for purposes of tenure and promotion, which tells me that it is not common practice to write in groups, that doing so is something which is not particularly favored.  I and those like me tend to write alone, sequestering ourselves in offices and libraries, hiding away from the world in the oft-decried ivory tower, pursuing esoteric truths that reveal to those few who care to look some small slice of the nature of humanity hitherto unseen.

I have said, and many others have said, that a large part of the problem facing the academic humanities, a major factor in the common public disdain for them, is the lack of transparency in them.  That those of us working in them do retreat from the world, following the monastic origins of The Work in which we are engaged, allows others to ignore us or to ridicule us; in neither case are we present to be able to answer those accusations leveled at us, usually of irrelevance or inanity.  Kaag is correct, therefore, in asserting that "writing with others might be a first step in writing for others [emphasis mine]," that in writing together those of us in the academic humanities can begin to write in such a way that we not only say what it is that we mean to say, but do so in such a way that others are able to read it and happy to read it---as happy as they are to read anything, which is a different discussion altogether.

My saying so is hardly unique, of course, and my practice does not as much follow what I preach as it ought to do.  I have also said before that if I am a hypocrite, I am in good and abundant company.  If I and others could make of that company a group of collaborative writers, as those in rhetoric and composition seem to be beginning to do quite effectively (witness the increasing occurrence of collaboratively authored journal articles and scholarly books, as well as the increasing numbers of full-time, tenure-track jobs open in composition), we could do a fair bit of good in the world, helping to increase our mutual understanding of one another and presumably thereby opening avenues for the diminution of such conflicts as do so much harm to us all.