How thick is your skin? Academics, especially young ones feeling the inevitable bouts of insecurity, are occasionally forced to answer this question. A journal rejects your article with a harsh assessment. A seminar participant aggressively gripes about one of your interpretations. An editor lays a heavy hand on your brilliant text.
In these discouraging situations, we have no choice: It's buck up or crack. Bucking up, however, isn't especially difficult in our environment. Academic jabs are delivered with kid gloves, criticisms tempered by civility and encouragement, objections excessively qualified with the politesse integral to most academic discourse. When it comes to criticism, we've got it good on this side of the ivied walls.
You're probably thinking that I've yet to have my proper academic comeuppance. I make this claim, however, from the perspective of a recent writing experience out in "the real world," an experience that not only offers a telling point of comparison, but also left some rather nasty bruises on skin I once considered suitably thickened.
A couple of months ago, right after I landed my first job as a tenure-track professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos, I wrote a column for this site pondering the prospect of balancing academic and popular writing. Turns out I enjoy both, and often find it hard to negotiate these frequently competing interests. Since getting hired, I've dutifully favored the former, miring myself in a book manuscript, getting lost in primary sources, visiting a couple of archives, squeezing an article into a journal, and somehow managing to teach graduate and undergraduate students -- all of the things that a good, young, ambitious assistant professor is supposed to do.
Feeling the need to come up for air, though, I emerged from my scholarly isolation a couple of weeks ago by publishing a moderately anti-Bush opinion article in the Los Angeles Times. In a nutshell, I argued that George Bush's packaging of himself as a neo-frontiersman evokes the legacy of Andrew Jackson, a legacy that conveniently allows the President to act first and justify his actions later. Mild stuff, on the whole.
Or so I thought. The article landed in a media pool and found its way into at least 15 daily newspapers. On the one hand, I admit that I've enjoyed the exposure. It's fun, for example, to hear that my colleague's 80-year old father read the piece to his friends over breakfast at a Louisville, Ky., McDonald's. On the other hand, I completely underestimated the reaction I would receive. Furious letters from obviously well-educated readers around the country have choked my inbox and made me feel, well, a mix of emotions -- but basically like I too am being throttled.
"Dear Assistant Professor McWilliams," wrote a man from Missoula, Mont., "I must say that you have gall." He elaborated, "You're just another leftist loon with too high an opinion of yourself." Who, he wondered, would actually believe the ideas of a professor "at some cow college in San Marcos, Texas"? The letter, as it picked up steam, turned into a tirade of ad hominem invective that made me consider unlisting my phone number (especially as repeated hang-ups started to interrupt our evenings). "You stinking two-bit lowlife terrorist enabler," the man opined. "Are you really that stupid?" he fumed by way of conclusion. No, I thought to myself, sending his note to my brand new "angry letters" file.
Lane's letter was extreme, but not extremely so. Another reader, from my home town of Austin, Tex., characterized my article as "a vile and reprehensible attempt at character assassination," noting how it's "hard for me to believe that we are paying the salary of someone with your dishonesty and lack of integrity to educate our kids." Although he never addressed the substance of my argument, he was still able to draw a conclusion about me as a person. In a word: "disgusting."
Did someone say character assassination? But then there was a correspondent of true brevity, who sent me an e-mail that made the previous one seem downright judicious. "My God," he wrote, "you are an arrogant, pompous, conceited turd. You have the intellectual agility of a small soap dish. Have a nice day." Yeah, sure, I will. And this on my birthday no less. By the way, can someone tell me what it means to be compared to a soap dish?
"They're just lunatic fringers," my wife kept telling me. "Ignore them." I tried, but the letters just kept pouring in. It would have been like ignoring a tidal wave or, more properly, a fire bomb. And it seemed that once my loyal fans got their opinions of me out of their systems, they turned their wrath -- again -- not to my argument, but this time to my profession.
"It's too bad," explained one writer from Atlanta, that "our college campuses are dominated by left-wing elitist professors (and assistant professors)." Another, from Houston, after bestowing God's blessing upon me, insisted that "'intellectuals' of your apparent sort tend to live rather cloistered lives ... surrounded by lefwing [sic] ideologues." Ultimately, though, it reliably came back to me and my supposed psychological problems. The Houston correspondent explained: "You sneer at President Bush ... because you project upon him your own frailties." God bless me indeed.
And naturally, according to my readers, I'm also a Hitler advocate. "I suppose you would slam Bush for going after Hitler if this was 1942," one fan surmised.
How to make sense of this bile? Laugh it off? I wish I could. I suppose, in one sense, I'm feeling the brunt of a newspaper reader's version of road rage -- an intense flash of anger at a writer who cut him off as he cruised in the peaceful flow of his political preconceptions. In another sense, though, I'm deeply dismayed at the intensity of the reaction to an American (and a damned patriotic one, I might add) who dares question authority during a time of war. I was caught off guard, to be sure, at being called "a pathetic creep" in a phone message because of a perfectly legitimate (and in my mind, correct) political opinion. We academics might want to start worrying less about the Patriot Act and more about the people around us.
I hate the fact that I just wrote that last sentence. It does indeed make it seem like I'm cloistered in an ivory tower -- secure, elite, above it all, more rational, smug. The irony, however, is that I've made it a professional goal to bring my understanding of history to the world beyond the university.
So I suppose what gets me the most about this whole ugly episode is the creeping realization that some members of the audience "out there," the people that I've always felt we have a duty as professional historians to reach, want nothing more than their prejudices confirmed, one way or the other. Leave the argumentative politesse, the respectful disagreements, the open-mindedness, and the whole idea of a disinterested dialogue in the seminar room. Tell me what I want to hear, and if you don't, well then, you're a "pathetic creep." It's a challenge I've never considered until now, but it helps explain why so many academics stay in the tower.
Yesterday, as the hate mail file grew, I got an e-mail from the editorial office of the LA Times. Evidently there must have been an administrative mistake because it read, "Thank you for your submission to the Los Angeles Times' Op-Ed page. Unfortunately, we are unable to use your piece."
Sadly, I wish that had been true.
