Dear Editor:

You should receive many letters protesting Professor Jonathan Katz’s opinion headlined “Dean Macias wrong choice for provost” (Student Life, April 9, 2008). Professor Katz claims to speak for “the faculty” in calling Dean Macias a “bullying autocrat” who has done Washington University “much damage.” Although Professor Katz uses the plural pronoun “we,” he speaks only for himself. I have not previously encountered these harsh opinions of Dean Macias or the chancellor. I expect my faculty colleagues to be astonished, as I was, that anyone would think, let alone print, these claims. Professor Katz refers to recent administrative turmoil in the engineering school, but he fails to note that such turmoil has never happened in Arts & Sciences during Dean Macias’ long service. A high level of faculty collegiality, including many interactions among departments, and strong academic programs mark Dean Macias’ term of leadership in Arts & Sciences. Professor Katz often shares provocative opinions, but I find his opinions more often refuted than supported in faculty discussions. Professor Katz should make clear in his letters that the opinions expressed are uniquely his own.

-Allan Larson
Professor of Biology

Any strike on Iran would be predicated on destroying its nuclear infrastructure (The administration has ignored the contentious 2007 National Intelligence Estimate asserting that Iran has stopped its nuclear program and would not have a nuclear weapon before 2010 to 2015).

Most alarmingly, the administration appears intent on regime change and has, in private talks, compared President Ahmadinejad to Adolf Hitler. The ground forces involved would flow from Azerbaijan (where America established bases after 9/11) in addition to Iraq. Despite intense arguments to the contrary, the Bush administration has decided that the government of Iran must be overthrown in order to preserve regional stability; moreover, as a lame duck president with little control over domestic policy, President Bush has little responsibility to any constituency except history, which he believes will accord him favor.

Though the administration’s rationale shifts as its position becomes untenable, its central focus remains the same: the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program and the overthrow of the Iranian government. The earliest charge, that Iran is a dangerous regime intent on controlling the Middle East, is mentioned less and less often, especially after the 2007 NIE report.

Realizing the weakness of this argument, but still seeking war with Iran, President Bush has accused the government of Iran of aiding terrorists, especially Hezbollah, and arming groups fighting American forces in Iraq.

The last argument is flawed for two reasons. First, those hostile groups only exist because of the American occupation, so it is more accurate to blame the proxy war on ourselves. Second, we have special operations forces engaged in intelligence and proxy operations in Iran, so we are exorcizing Iran for playing the same game in which we are engaged.

Even if we accept that the government of Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons, an attack on Iran would be incredibly counterproductive. For example, President Ahmadinejad derives his popularity from the antagonism of the Bush regime. Having destroyed Iran’s economy, he and his party are increasingly unpopular.

In addition, the Supreme Leader and Council of Guardians, both of which are unelected, actually have greater control over Iranian policy than the President. In other words, President Ahmadinejad, the man portrayed as our greatest enemy, is not as powerful as the Bush administration insists, though our belligerence only strengthens the little power he has.

In addition to solidifying popular anger against the American government, an attack on Iran would destabilize the entire region.

Iran would unleash Hezbollah to attack Israel, and it is possible that Iran would directly attack Israel. In addition, Iran would increase its funding and weapon-provisioning of groups in Iraq.

If the government were to face an existential threat, it could even directly invade Iraq, opening a two-front war and further overextending our forces. Moderate countries which have played key bargaining roles, such as China and Russia, would side with Iran, paralyzing any Security Council action and complicating our relations with most countries. In addition, our efforts to woo the Syrians away from Iran would be for naught.

Finally, a preemptive attack would radicalize the entire region and force moderate governments, such as those of Jordan and Egypt, to reconsider their relationships with America.

An attack would be interpreted as another move to control Middle East oil, and young people everywhere would rally violently against our government. It is, after all, the presence of American troops in the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, which instigated the first wave of Islamic terrorism and our presence in Iraq which created the “terrorists” fighting us there. An invasion of Iran would only create more terrorists.

It is undeniable that attacking and/or invading Iran would have exactly the opposite affect President Bush intends: America would be less safe from terrorists, our forces in Iraq would be in greater danger and international opinion would rally against our hubris.

If, as President Bush fears, Iran’s nuclear weapons lead to World War III, it will be because of our actions, not theirs.

Until Jan. 20, 2009-and then only if John McCain does not win-America represents the greatest threat to stability in the Middle East.

Zachary is a senior in Arts & Sciences and a staff columnist. He can be reached via e-mail at zsteinert@gmail.com.

If the financial turmoil of the past few months taught us anything, it is this: government matters.

In a strong rebuke to libertarian economists and ideologues on the right, our government has demonstrated its role as the foundation of all-market action. Whereas rich bankers and their political puppets clamored for government withdrawal from economic life-”Privatization! No regulation! No taxes!”-these same figures now find themselves being saved by it.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, a business writer for the New York Times, states it best: “Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a puppeteer: the Federal Reserve.”

As most people have pointed out, we do not fully comprehend exactly what transpired in the previous months, so I am not ready to judge the Federal Reserve and our government on the quality of their intervention.

I am not writing to eviscerate President Bush for supporting a bail out of Wall Street but then arguing against interfering with individuals’ mortgages. I am not writing to warn about moral hazard (where people increase their risky behavior knowing they will be bailed out) and I am not writing to lambaste Wall Street for its arrogance, hubris, na’veté, ahistoricism, brashness or stupidity. (I assume bankers are too smart to actually believe their own drivel.)

Though all of these are valid points, my point is that the health of any economic system depends directly on benevolent government intervention.

Here is a brief summary of the events to which I refer.

Americans have enjoyed historically low interest rates throughout this decade, prompting a golden age of corporate profits and a housing boom. Thanks to financial illusions, good marketing and a consumer ethos, millions of Americans were pushed into homes they could only afford if the value of those homes continued to rise. The mortgages on these homes are known as “sub-prime loans,” and they were bundled with other financial products into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).

People thought these loans were safe because ratings agencies gave them the lowest risk ratings possible. Everyone was happy: marginal people got homes and bankers collected huge fees.

Since these mortgages went to marginal customers, not everyone could pay them and defaults increased as house values started to fall. This basically started in the summer of 2007, and panic ensued as bankers realized they did not know the actual value or safety of those loans.

As loan defaults increased, bankers realized that these CDOs were spread everywhere, so everyone, whether involved with hedge funds, investment banks or brokerages stood to lose an unknown amount of money.

These “known” unknown losses have caused bankers to fear giving new loans, which led to the “credit crunch” we always hear about.

It even caused one firm, Bear Stearns, to collapse when its clients feared it did not have enough collateral and started demanding their investments back.

The Federal Reserve and (to a lesser extent) the Treasury Department have been proactive in stemming this financial crisis.

Since October 2007, they have aggressively lowered the key interest rate to its lowest point in years; offered to exchange $400 billion of Treasury securities, considered one of the safest investments in the world, for the risky mortgages; and it both orchestrated JP Morgan’s acquisition of Bear Stearns and provided $30 billion of collateral to facilitate the deal.

In other words, our government has directly interfered with the operation of financial markets, a fact President Bush acknowledged and supported at the March 14 meeting of the Economic Club of New York.

I have mixed feelings about these actions: they have temporarily calmed markets, but the Federal Reserve will soon want for tools if it continues to rely on them.

It is too soon to know whether Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman and a student of the Depression, has saved the day.

My point is that the belief in a free market is a politically expedient ideology abandoned at the earliest convenience.

Free-marketers’ rhetoric revolves around mythological keywords such as fairness, efficiency, meritocracy or equality, but this most recent panic reveals that year-end bonuses and second homes are the real motivators.

Henry Paulson, the Secretary of Treasury who has been instrumental in these Wall Street rescues, reveals the tension in this rhetoric when he says, “People who speculated and bought investment properties in hot markets should take their losses just like day traders who speculated and bought soaring tech stocks in 2000.” Paulson was the CEO of Goldman Sachs before taking his current job.

Zachary is a senior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at zsteiner@gmail.com.

Despite progress in gender relations over the last 50 years, women still earn less than men, roughly 80 cents to every dollar men earn. This is an improvement, however, as women earned 62 cents to every male dollar in 1979. Unfortunately, this climb seems to have stalled and recent data suggests that the upward trend in female earning power has reached a ceiling.

Economists suggest that the wage gap can be explained primarily by two factors. First, women tend to follow lower-paying degrees and careers such as English and teaching. Though some critics argue that these professions earn less because of their feminine association and not because they perform less valuable services, that argument does not make sense. If true, women would also earn less than men in their same field, but that is not the case.

Second, women have to take time off from work to have babies and raise them. During this period, their husbands continue to earn money and receive promotions. Aside from the immediate costs of having a baby (hospital fees, diapers, extra food, etc.), the mother thus loses the income she would have earned working. The time spent out of the workforce then slows down the pace of promotion and lowers the gains of future wage growth. For women in higher paying fields, this opportunity cost can be very high (i.e. it costs a lot more for a lawyer to have a baby than for a waitress). And if a woman wants more than one child, she may face several years of withdrawal from the workforce. There is a large cost to having children and it explains a significant amount of the persistent wage gap.

I can think of two solutions. The first is to offer paternity leave: If men miss an equal amount of work as women because of their children, then the wage difference should narrow. Since this would come from men having less earning potential (and women more), it is easy to see that many men may not like this idea. In addition, few corporations offer paternity leave. When I asked a Deloitte & Touche USA LLP representative, a firm which prides itself on its generous maternity leave, if it offers paternity leave, the man responded, in surprise: “No. Why would you need that? When you are 28 or 29, we expect you to be pursuing your career.” Men should not be looked down upon for wanting to help raise their newborn child.

Though further off, I think an equally practical answer is a pregnancy machine. Once the woman is pregnant, she would have the option of removing the fertilized egg and leaving it in the care of a machine that recreates the womb experience. After 38 weeks, the new parents could pick up their children at the hospital.

Once we think about the strides in childcare made since the Industrial Revolution, the idea is not as crazy as it initially appears. For most of human history, those we consider children were not viewed as people, as viable beings, until they reached a threshold, often three to five years of age. Not until the creature survived the threat of disease and malnutrition did its parents view it as a child, a human being to which they could become attached. As technology and medicine progressed, we started to view children as viable from the moment they exited the womb, and invested them with the emotional care that is standard today.

But our view of children has been shaped by technological advances, not some ethical progression. Even now, babies born with fewer than 38 weeks of gestation can survive; the youngest birth recorded was at 22 weeks, almost half the anatomical requirement. My point is that technology will one day make babies viable at day zero, and women will have the choice to not go through a standard pregnancy and its requisite economic costs.

I do not know when this will happen, and it probably will not be before we have children. But I am convinced that closing the wage gap requires overcoming the costs of pregnancy, and a machine which obviates the entire process will close any part of the pay gap not due to different choice of professions.

It might seem cold and dystopic to us now, but in the future people may look back on us just as we do on our ancestors: as a society with repressed women and backwards attitudes toward children.

Zachary is a senior in Arts & Sciences and a staff columnist. He can be reached via e-mail at zsteiner@artsci.wustl.edu.

But I am not writing this to talk about Obama appearing at the Edward Jones Dome, I’m writing to talk about him not appearing at Washington University. As an elite university striving to achieve the national recognition we know we deserve, letting Obama speak on campus would have included us in the national discourse.

I would love it if every political candidate came to Washington University. As a school that hopes to train future leaders of the world, there is no better way to entice students to involve themselves in their nation’s fate than having our most important citizens give speeches on campus. Clinton, Kucinich, Paul, Dodd, Tancredo, McCain, Gravel, Romney, Thompson, Thompson, Huckabee, Biden, Richardson-let them all come!

As a university with some of the smartest, most creative students and faculty in the world, we deserve to be part of the national discourse on our political future. We cannot hope to have more national recognition-which means higher rankings, better applicant pools, and a larger endowment-if we scurry away from such historical encounters.

Now, let’s be honest. The reasons the administration gave in the Jan. 30 issue of Student Life for not having Obama on campus do not sit well with anyone, even those who think the administration has told the truth. Students have been told that the University would lose its tax-exempt status for having political figures on campus, a claim anyone with a critical mind does not believe. The last time I checked, Emory, Dartmouth, American, University of Denver, Clark College, College of Charleston and any of the other universities which have hosted a presidential candidate are still tax-exempt non-profit institutions. Having speakers on campus does not jeopardize our University’s status as a non-profit; if anything, it reaffirms the exceptional role universities play in our American culture. To claim that the administration was afraid of losing its non-profit status, a claim with no clear basis in actual events, is rude: it dissembles to the students, it assumes we cannot analyze an issue critically and it prevents us from receiving as full an education as possible.

Finally, I am offended that we have been prevented from receiving the education our money deserves and the University has promised to deliver. My parents have not given this university a significant chunk of their life savings for police officers with Segways or maintenance staff’s frivolous projects. No, we expect an education, and integral to an education is exposure to those issues most affecting our lives, such as the presidential election. While speakers about string theory or religion are great, that is not what most students care about. We care (or want to care) about Clinton, McCain, Romney, Obama and the other candidates, but we have not been given this opportunity by the administration. Rob Wild said that Obama couldn’t come because we would have to open our door to all candidates, but that is exactly the point: We want everyone to come.

Instead, the administration comes across as having either of two negative dispositions: patronizing or provincial. Patronizing in that it thinks it can feed its students misleading excuses and try to stymie their political consciousness; provincial because, if not patronizing, then the administration does not actually want the University to assume a presence on the national stage or does not understand how to go about achieving that goal.

If any administrator has read Student Life over the past week, they will realize that my opinion is not unique. But, hoping this issue would disappear, the administration has avoided dialogue with the student body. If nothing else, I hope this letter prompts a response from those who say they act in our best interest.

Washington University needs to be the leader of St. Louis and not succumb to its insular ways. I am honestly, deeply disappointed at the administration’s behavior regarding the Obama campaign and what it says about our priorities. As a senior who has invested so much in the university and has gotten much in return, I still cannot help fear I will leave this university with a sour taste in my mouth.

My friends at other universities have had the opportunities of a lifetime, and I have gotten the daughter of a candidate at a coffee shop.

Zachary is a senior in Arts & Sciences and a staff columnist. He can be reached via e-mail at zsteiner@artsci.wustl.edu.

We live in a society where people expect to excel at whatever they do, receive praise for their work and have importance on a national scale.

I do not know enough about how childrearing practices have changed over the decades, but they are certainly indulgent today. Everyone who plays little league sports receives a plaque or trophy, parents constantly remind their children how special they are, and students feel entitled to good grades and teachers fear giving anything else. As kids, we are all exceptional. Of course, when everyone is exceptional, no one is, but no one wants to burst the bubble. Not only do we want to be astronauts, baseball players or the president, we also expect that to happen.

College’s primary purpose, then, is to set us in our place, a job even more important at elite schools like ours, where everyone was a “superstar” in high school, than at most universities. As students compete for a fixed amount of Latin honors, leadership positions and jobs, the real world intrudes on our childhood fantasy. Grade curves do an excellent job of this.

We learn that not all of us are geniuses, amazing athletes, young poet laureates or students able to outwit teachers. Though grade inflation negates this leveling effect to an extent by giving too many people a 3.5, employers and graduate schools finish the job. Not everyone can be at Goldman Sachs, the State Department or Harvard Law.

Unfortunately, college appears to represent the exception to our right to exceptionality. Moreover, two recent phenomena have made us expect, more than ever, to become famous: reality television and YouTube.

Reality television gives everyone the opportunity to live at a national scale and make one’s face known to a national audience. Whereas actors and actresses require some modicum of skill and luck, reality television constantly races to the bottom. As we become inured to increasing levels of outbursts, disgusting feats, and stupidity, we expect higher levels of it. This gives us people forming primitive island societies (“Survivor”), being buried in insects (“Fear Factor”), revealing incriminating truths in front of those who they will hurt (“Moment of Truth”), comparing intelligence to that of a fifth grader (“Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?”) or letting anonymous men rank their bodies (“Battle of the Bods”). Of course, anyone can try out for these shows, and the lucky ones are those deemed craziest, most disgusting, stupidest, or hottest by the producers, which the contestants clearly do not mind. After all, if you are the lowest common denominator, you get the reward: your face on television and a chance at a big cash prize.

Whereas television executives can pretend to maintain some modicum of decency and taste, any base standards still left are irrelevant on YouTube. “Broadcast Yourself,” YouTube’s motto, makes its goal clear: with only an Internet connection, anyone can make an attempt at celebrity. Have a deep voice and can convince people you are a poet? Then you are Tay Zonday, and you get a Dr. Pepper commercial after 14 million people watch your YouTube video. Do you and your friends lip sync to bad songs while dancing? Then 20 million people might watch your video.

In 1,000 years, when historians look back on our civilization, they might recognize August 24, 2007 as America’s nadir. On that day, Miss Teen South Carolina became famous for fulfilling America’s favorite cliché, the dumb blonde. Her incoherent sentence about why Americans cannot find themselves on a map included such eloquent turns of phrase as “U.S. Americans. like, such as, as in . the Iraq and everywhere like such as .” in only 30 seconds. Twenty-two million Americans have viewed a clip of this performance on YouTube. For her embarrassing stupidity, Lauren Upton, as she is known, was interviewed by People Magazine, was a featured guest on “The Today Show”, was invited to the MTV Video Music Awards and now models for Donald Trump. For not knowing English or having a single original thought, she became famous overnight.

This is our society: we seek to be exceptional through our ignorance and baseness. If you are a brilliant physicist, a courageous lawyer or a selfless politician, you rarely merit attention. On the other hand, if you are a ditz or a jock, sexy or stupid, then you just might become famous.

Zachary is a senior in Arts & Sciences and staff columnist. He can be reached via e-mail at zsteinert@gmail.com.

It is morally indefensible that a miniscule segment of the electorate disproportionally influences the race for president because some state legislatures declare it so. The current structure of the American primaries disenfranchises most Americans.

Those states which vote before Super Tuesday (the day, February 5 this year, when states representing over half of national delegates will vote) narrow the field of candidates left for which everyone else can vote. After a disappointing showing in Iowa, Senators Chris Dodd, D-Conn. and Joe Biden, D-Del. removed themselves from the race. Governor Bill Richardson did the same after New Hampshire. Dennis Kucinich, still running (and recounting in New Hampshire), has such low poll numbers that networks consistently bar him from debates. What was a field of eight candidates (sorry Tom Vilsack) has narrowed to three, with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton really considered the only viable candidates.

For Republicans, the situation remains more fluid since four serious candidates (of an original field of eight, including Alan Keyes) could still secure the nomination.

Voters in Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Florida have cemented Mike Huckabee (Bill Clinton with a Bible), Mitt Romney (the candidate who makes John Kerry look like he has conviction), John McCain (the anti-establishment establishment man who could win it all) and Rudy Giuliani (a dash of Romney with a pound of 9/11) as their party’s leading candidates. Ron Paul, who received more votes in New Hampshire and Michigan than Giuliani and seems to be the only candidate to have actually read the 9/11 commission report, has been the primary victim of this cycle’s frontloading.

While all states voting before Super Tuesday have created this problem, Iowa and New Hampshire, which went first and second, highlight the biased nature of our national primaries. Iowa has three million residents (30th most in America) and is 91% white. New Hampshire has 1.2 million residents (46th in America) and is 97% white. America has 300 million residents and is 74% white. In other words, Iowa and New Hampshire have 1.5% of American’s population and are much more homogenous, but their preferences cut the field of candidates in half.

Of course, one cannot forget the role of our hyperbolic media, which takes every small change and proclaims it monumental. For example, everyone talked about Hillary Clinton being out of the race after coming in second in Iowa. She received 14 delegates to Obama’s 15, yet a candidate needs 2,025 delegates to win. One delegate almost cost Clinton, whom the same people exalted as invincible months earlier, the election.

A cold white state and a colder, whiter one have enormously limited the options of tens of millions of other voters.

There is no perfect voting system (except for dictatorship), but we can find one better than this one. A (probably beguiling) alternative is to have all the primaries on one day. A bad side effect: this would increase the pressure on candidates to run big-money campaigns, probably limiting competition.

Alternatively, approximately half of eligible voters could vote on one day, the other half soon after; this would still favor moneyed candidates. Or, voting could be organized around regions; this would still discriminate for voters with interests, like farm subsidies, tied to specific regions. (Whatever happens, the federal government must mandate it so that states cannot game the system to their advantage.)

The point is that one can easily envision alternatives to our broken system which do not privilege a miniscule, homogenous group over the rest of America.

I, for one, was going to vote for Bill Richardson and will now cast a ballot for Obama.

Opinion polls interpret this as support, but it is really frustration at the lack of a better candidate.

Zachary is a senior in Arts & Sciences and a staff columnist. He can be reached via e-mail at zsteinert@gmail.com.

Open any major national newspaper, and the majority of articles deal with government politics. Being in the middle of a war, every day is dominated by casualty figures, reports about bombings, military deployments, and the like. These casualty numbers are provided by the Department of Defense. Information about a bombing-its size, location, who was behind it-is provided by the same people. Ditto for military deployments. The point is that when we read about Afghanistan and Iraq (or troops in Korea or Germany), this does not consist of original facts and analysis on the part of these newspapers. These “stories” are Department of Defense talking points fit into article format. This regurgitory nature of news is reflected in articles’ structures, which usually consist of an introductory paragraph followed by quotes from random “esteemed” individuals. Articles rarely break this template, making the transcriber’s (a.k.a. the journalist) task nothing more than attending the right briefings and calling the right people to have neat numbers and brief quotes to plug in.

This parroting is true for more than just military news. When there is a major crime, like the D.C. sniper attacks of 2002, the news consists of government spokespeople, usually law enforcement officers, relaying information to the gathered media people. This then gets uncritically broadcast on Fox News or run in the New York Times.

But the spokesperson holds a very powerful position as the gatekeeper of information (who is also controlled by other individuals), and it is only what that person says which is reported. There is hardly ever effort to look past the press conference for more information; the reporters have the quotes to fill the blanks in their templates. For example, the recent assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto should raise numerous suspicions, but all that was printed and broadcast was information from the Pakistani government, a source even more dubious than our own. It does not take a mental giant to doubt the government of Pakistan’s reports that the attackers were two suicide bombers, “Islamic fundamentalists,” but the only news given was from spokesmen for the Pakistani government. There was no critical analysis, at least not from any major American news outlets.

In 2005, it was revealed that the Department of Education had paid Armstrong Williams $240,000 to speak favorably about President Bush’s education policies. It was later revealed that several columnists were also on the dole for two years. This was nothing more than buying news, which is hardly different than propaganda. It is more dangerous, however, because of the pretense of independence. While these media people have since been fired, it is difficult to believe that this practice has stopped; if anything, it is probably just more covert.

This is not to say that our media outlets are exactly parallel to media directly run by a state. Periodically, newspapers and broadcasts do reveal independent news which alters the political landscape; the Pentagon Papers, classified government documents detailing the government’s duplicity throughout the Vietnam War which were leaked to the New York Times, are one such example. The coverage of Hurricane Katrina, which demonstrated how cronyism and classism directly influenced our government’s incompetence, is another example; the subsequently quick national response to the California fires this summer shows how the media can positively influence government action.

Nonetheless, examples like those above are the unfortunate exception, a grand irony because it is these events from which media people construct their myths of independence and critical analysis. When our media relies on the government for its stories and the attached data, it becomes a mockery and a greater menace than true state-run media outlets. At least in Venezuela it is known that the news is state-dictated. In America, we maintain the illusion of separation between government and media outlets.

Our myths make us ignorant of the distortions we are being fed.

Zachary is a senior in Arts & Sciences. He can be reached via e-mail at zsteinert@gmail.com.

Humor works by blowing up truth to make fun of it; the crowd at the speech roared. A cute self-deprecation, the one-liner is much truer than the laughter suggests. The social “sciences” and the humanities-the disciplines which do not deploy mathematics to reach conclusions-are categorized by an arms race of verbosity and jargon technicality which obfuscates the argument an author makes. This has two negative effects: first, making a thesis less clear counteracts the purpose of technical language, which is to clarify ambiguity; second, it further restricts one’s appeal to an incestuous audience, limiting the impact of the author’s points. Academic language, far from being elucidating, often obscures the author’s thesis.

Moreover, this seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon, at least in the social sciences. Comparing the turn of the century luminaries-Weber, Durkheim, Veblen, Boas, Mead-and those from mid-century-Hayek, Schumpeter, Galbraith, Geertz, White-to contemporaries, one is struck by the (relative) clarity of their language. Gayatri Spivak, a comparative literature professor at Columbia University, exemplifies this problem (though she is by no means the only offender). Her most famous article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is nearly incomprehensible the first time through: her meandering, disjointed prose is interspersed with jargon sentences such as: “This parasubjective matrix, cross-hatched with heterogeneity, ushers in the unnamed Subject [.] The race for the ‘last instance’ is now between economics and power.” The article concludes with a clear answer: “The subaltern cannot speak.” For some reason, this requires forty-six pages of dense wanderings which, as far as my classmates and I can tell, may be tangentially relevant. Professors often kvetch about writing for small audiences, but language like Spivak’s above, which is only slightly more elaborate than her peers’, is self-limiting. When language obscures rather than illuminates, only those with a vested interest in the author’s message will devote the time and frustration to understand the author.

My cursory hypothesis is that this jargon-filled meandering, so complex so as to be understood only by a select few (and maybe even just by the author himself), reflects an academic arms race: in an increasingly competitive job market, the ability to deploy a wide-range theory and its related vocabulary sets one apart from other tenure-chasers, often regardless of the clarity of the resulting prose. Though this seems most prevalent in critical theory because it comes across as an attempt to apply independently verifiable analytical rigor (akin to that of the hard sciences) to fields which resist, by the ambiguity of qualitative description, such approaches, it is also a problem in fields such as economics and political science which rely on mathematics as the differentiating barometer. Nonetheless, the qualitative disciplines-anthropology, history, English, philosophy, parts of political science-suffer the most from this jargon arms race. Instead of competing on clarity, most academics have surged in the other direction, differentiating themselves based on the complexity of their explanations. While this might be good for tenure, it reduces the overall reach (impact) of professors’ often important insights.

Zachary is a senior in Arts & Sciences he can be reached via e-mail at zsteinert@gmail.com.