Recently, I published an essay on my platform explaining my approach to writing (How I Write and Why). I just finished grading essays for the several classes I teach, and this caused me to reflect on that essay and my own writing. I sometimes worry that students might read essays on Freedom and Reason and wonder why, if I require them to use a requisite number of peer-reviewed scholarly sources—academic journals, university press books—do my essays contain no parenthetical citations, no works cited page (which is not always true, but for the most is)?
My first answer is simple: if I don’t teach students the rules, they won’t learn them—and if they don’t learn the rules, they can’t break them later with sophistication. Teaching academic writing is like teaching music: first comes theory and practice, then improvisation. I ask students to engage with scholarly discourse not because that’s the end goal, but because it’s the foundation. Only by internalizing the conventions—citation, evidence, structured argument—can they later transcend them if they find a space safe enough to do that (who knows if such spaces will continue to exist). I do want them to transcend these conventions. I want them to have opinions—their own opinions—and convention can, and often is, be stifling.
These days, my own work blends critical structure with topical responsiveness. I write quickly about complex, ongoing events, drawing on general knowledge, analytical habit, and a career’s worth of scholarly grounding. But I couldn’t do this—and certainly couldn’t teach others to do it—without first having acquired the discipline of academic writing. One learns the form so that, in time, he can bend it with purpose. Indeed, I cannot teach this. One only learns to do this over time. And I didn’t learn the form until graduate school. I’m giving students a big head start!
But even as I say that, I know it’s more complicated than that. One of the frustrating ironies of teaching today is that, to prepare students for success in graduate school, I must teach them to write in a style I personally find tedious and pretentious. The thicket of citations, the ritualistic referencing of theoretical frameworks, the constant nods to academic trends—these have become the currency of scholarly legitimacy.
In that same recent essay, I noted how different the writing of mid-twentieth-century sociologists feels. Their prose is direct, idea-driven, and strikingly light on citation when viewed through today’s eyes. These were serious scholars—Robert Merton, C. Wright Mills, Gresham Sykes—writing from deep knowledge with deserved confidence, not attempting to prove their intellectual bonafides with every paragraph by festooning their essays with shoutouts to their community.
The academic landscape has changed. Today, even accomplished scholars often cite the work of others more to appear academic than to advance ideas. The form of academic writing has become a kind of credential in itself. The ranking of the journal in which one’s work appears, etc. And too often, the more academic the writing appears, the less substantive it actually is. Those older works outshine the ideological and jargon-laden scholarship being produced today. One knows this because these ideas endure as the true science to the discipline, whereas the new stuff is used to rationalize ideology.
This was Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s critique offered in the preface to their 1966 Monopoly Capital (1966). In that preface, they expressed strong dissatisfaction with the state of modern academia. Conformity and ideological bias in academic institutions, especially in economics, were largely shaped by the needs and interests of capitalist societies. Rather than seeking objective truth or critically examining capitalism, academia often served to justify and sustain the status quo. The organic intellectual engaged in the suppression of critical thought by marginalizing or excluding radical ideas from mainstream academic discourse, often by only citing their side, a form of intellectual repression that stifled meaningful analysis and debate.
(Baran and Sweezy also criticized the increasing compartmentalization and specialization in the social sciences, which discourages holistic, systemic analysis of society and the economy—especially analyses that challenged capitalist structures. This echoed the critique C. Wright Mills made of “abstracted empiricism” in his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination. His criticism was directed at trends in mid-twentieth century American sociology, particularly the dominance of highly quantitative, methodologically rigid research that he believed had lost sight of the broader purpose and potential of sociological inquiry. His main target was understood to be Paul Lazarsfeld, who headed the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, where he focused on consumer behavior and public opinion, funded by corporate or government sponsors. For their part, Baran and Sweezy were especially critical of neoclassical economics, which they correctly saw as abstract, unrealistic, and ideologically committed to free-market capitalism, and thus an intellectual tool used to obscure the real dynamics of monopoly capitalism and class struggle, but I digress.)
Still, I have to teach students the rules: the citation formats, the tone, the rhetorical signaling. I have to think of those who will go on to graduate school. I want them to be prepared—to give them an edge. Graduate school is an audition before a room of the deeply indoctrinated and ironically conventional functionaries. And if my students can survive that, if they can master the constraints without being mastered by them, then maybe they’ll earn the authority to break free—to write with clarity, with conviction, and with real intellectual power.
Finally, sorry to throw shade at other academics (and this is hardly all of them), but we have to admit that part of the problem is that not everyone has good ideas or a keen analytical mind. Anyone can adopt the academic style—the citations, the jargon, the reverent name-dropping—and produce work that looks like serious scholarship. Form often disguises the absence of substance. A mediocre thinker can sound profound through mimicry. At the same time, institutions corrupted by mediocrity diminish real profundity. Given the ubiquity of progressive thought and technocratic practice in higher education, it feels like an intractable problem. And with the rise of artificial intelligence, I’m not sure that even academia can be refugee for truly breakthrough ideas.
freedom and reason 