Interdisciplinary Writing

These days I hear but infrequently the sourly euphonic maxim that was ubiquitous in my early days in the academic profession: "Publish or perish!" This meant, of course, that for a young professor scholarly publication was the single absolute prerequisite for achieving a permanent academic appointment, alias "getting tenure." The reason I hear it less frequently these days is not that there has been a measurable relaxation of professional expectations. On the contrary, scholarly publication is more than ever a necessary precondition, but it has drifted so far from being a sufficient one that the new maxim has a new conjunction: "Publish and perish".

Professors do indeed spend much time writing, though their genres vary somewhat according to discipline. Humanists write mainly essays and books, usually in brave solitude. Scientists can apparently gang up, 10 of them claiming authorship of the same 10-page paper that may summarize the experimental work of 10 months or 10 years. My scientific friends, both 'natural" and "social," seem to spend agonizing weeks writing "grant proposals," whatever they are. A small number of "creative" types in various fields write poetry, fiction or verbal experiments difficult to classify.

Crossing all disciplinary boundaries are what I shall call the genres of evaluation. Practically all Princeton professors write book reviews, or detailed criticisms of manuscripts submitted for publication, or evaluations of their colleagues' applications for research fellowship or the abovementioned mysterious "grant proposals." But the single literary genre universal to Princeton faculty, and the one often most important to undergraduates, will appear on no professor's annual bibliography. I refer to the letter of recommendation.

Even before the days begin to shorten and the leaves begin to turn the requests for endorsements begin to arrive. My computer lets me know that I wrote 117 of them last year. At 500 words each, that's nearly 60,000 words of encomia, three times what I write in a year's worth of newspaper columns. That's as many words as are in many short "tenure" books, as much as in several senior theses conjoined.

Fortunately most Princeton students are splendid, and certainly worthy of admission to graduate school or whatever. That doesn't make it any easier to write effective letters, but at least the struggle is not with one's conscience but with a level of rhetorical inflation that makes mere grade inflation seem like the good old days. What? You say this man's work is merely "often brilliant"? That woman was only "among the top students in the University?" Ah,

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering teach the rest to sneer.

The bland assertion that Ms. Bloggs habitually walks on water is no longer sufficient. If you are not prepared to certify that she does the Electric Slide on the incoming tide, you probably ought to think twice about taking on the assignment.

Even so it may on rare occasion happen that a referee is presented with a stark and apparently unavoidable choice between, on the one hand, fatally compromising a young person's dreams and, on the other, shameless prevarication. Under such extraordinary circumstances, blessedly infrequent, the best course is probably Jesuitical equivocation and mental reservation. These are techniques more dependent upon what you do not say than on what you do. For instance one very famous professor at a competing institution has been know to initiate a recommendation as follows: "I can perhaps be most efficiently emphatic by saying that I have come to regard Mr. Bloggs less as a student than as a colleague." The odds are on his side that the dean of admission at the Shaistair School of Law doesn't know, as I certainly do, that Professor Famous has nothing but contempt for his colleagues. Others prefer to take refuge in the category of the true-as-far-as-it-goes. "It would be impossible to catalogue this candidate's remarkable qualities in one short letter" — not adding, "Nor, since he has none, in a book as long as 'War and Peace.'" Also strong is the diversionary factoid. "I see from my records that in the spring of 2000 Mr. Bloggs was enrolled in my 'Metaphysics for the Millions', a course that always attracts a number of our finest undergraduates" — suppressing the otiose supplement "along with a much larger number of gut-chasers like Bloggs." John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. His column appears on Mondays. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.