Dense readings far too common

One of my professors once chided my class by saying that students these days just don't read enough.

Then I opened up my bulkpack, only to find it riddled with sentences such as: "Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism."

The above quote, from Roger Griffin -- the world expert on fascism -- epitomizes a common affliction among academics: brilliant minds unable to communicate effectively.

Convoluted, incomprehensible prose has become far too fashionable in academia, and readers everywhere are the unequivocal losers. So I have a simple request for professors everywhere: Please, for the sake of learning, make sure what you put in your bulkpack is comprehensible before you put it in.

Don't get me wrong -- I am not at all opposed to using a dictionary or learning new words while reading a challenging article. On the contrary, I enjoy doing so.

But there's a difference between not understanding a word and not understanding a whole sentence, not to mention a whole article, simply because its poorly written and convoluted prose makes it so incomprehensible.

Take the following example: "The move from a structuralist account ... marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

Right.

The above monstrosity, crafted by professor Judith Butler of the University of California at Berkeley, won the top prize in the Philosophy and Literature journal's 1999 Bad Writing Contest.

I'm sure that professor Butler had a good point to make. But truth gets lost in the jargon. Hence, despite having spent many hours in class discussing professor Griffin's definition of fascism, if you asked me to explain it to you, my best guess would surely misrepresent what she meant to say. And you might pass it down to your friend, and so on, until somewhere down the line it would turn out that, according to Griffin, fascism is communism in disguise.

Even worse, this kind of vapid prose often gets passed off as a work of genius. Why? Because it sounds really smart and profound -- so it must be. In 1996, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, exposed the folly of this thinking by submitting a paper for publication in Social Text, a postmodern cultural studies journal. The paper was a complete hoax made up of high-flown, dense academic prose that literally made no sense.

Sokal said he wanted to see if the editors would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions."

Sure enough, the editors published it and couldn't even begin to wipe the egg of their faces when Sokal exposed the hoax.

My favorite line from the Sokal paper was: "Analogous topological structures arise in quantum gravity, but inasmuch as the manifolds involved are multidimensional rather than two-dimensional, higher homology groups play a role as well."

Pure genius!

But sentences like these aren't just incomprehensible -- they're also irresponsible, if not detrimental to the process of learning. Imagine a whole article from one of your bulk packs written in Butler's prose. Would you even bother reading it? It's a lose-lose situation: If you do, you likely won't get much out of it, and if you don't, then you're missing out on a potential learning experience. And --- of course -- God kills a kitten every time a student doesn't read a bulkpack article. So either way, the students lose, as do the cats.

Albert Einstein once said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler."

Let's follow his advice. I hope that in the future more professors will use class feedback on the helpfulness of readings to weed out incomprehensible prose. In the meanwhile, though, academia should realize that the "clear, concise writing" requirement for which we are so often penalized in our papers is, in fact, a two-way street.

Cezary Podkul is a junior philosophy major from Franklin Park, Ill. Return of the Salad appears on Tuesdays.

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