Back in the 1970s, when I was an art professor at California State University at Northridge, I had a colleague who absolutely would not say anything about anybody that he wouldn't say to that person's face.
Since this is an essay against anonymity, I'll name him: Marvin Harden, the African-American artist. (Back then, Harden made really elegant pencil drawings floating on large sheets of the finest paper, and had a solo show of them at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Last year, he had a retrospective at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.)
Harden originally came to Los Angeles in the late 1950s, from segregated Austin, Tex., to play wide receiver at the University of California at Los Angeles; understandably, he was a tough, no-nonsense guy. His to-your-face policy seemed awfully rigid to me -- no water-cooler gossip from him -- and it must have been awfully difficult to maintain, since Harden liked to speak truth to power.
But I certainly admired his stance, and still do. Harden's policy has helped me form my diluted version of it: As an art critic, I try mightily not to spout one opinion of an artist's work in print and quite another in conversation.
And I also put my own name on whatever I write for publication -- the exception being when I use the moniker "SlowBadHands" (as in, "I may be slow, but I've got bad hands") while wasting my time posting comments on sports blogs.
I understand why Valerie Plame might want to use a pseudonym, or why Larry Summers probably should have used one, but I don't understand why so many academics, even when writing fluffy little "casuals," think they have to use them. The practice is particularly common in The Chronicle's Careers section, with articles that are neither scandalous personal confessions nor heroic acts of whistle-blowing.
I'm sitting here with, for instances, three Careers columns. The first, dated November 30, 2007, is "The Meaning of Risk," by the fictive "Isabella Rogers" (secondary headline: "A Ph.D. charts her history through academe by the kind of motorcycle she drove"). Rogers, the author's credit tell us, is an assistant professor of humanities at a state university.
The second column, from the November 23, 2007, issue, is "In the Spirit of Collaboration," by the fictive "Martin Sanders" (secondary headline: "Who knew that working together to raise the profile of a half-forgotten author could be so much fun?") Sanders is an associate professor of English at a university in the East.
The third, from the November 16, 2007, issue, is "Life at BSU," by the fictive "Graham Bennett," an assistant professor of English at "a research university in the South" (secondary headline: "Amid administrative cheerleading about institutional excellence, a professor just wishes the faucets would work").
None of those pieces rant against Islam, reveal conspiracies inside the Bush White House, finger a college president for embezzling, tell a tale of sexual harassment, or reveal grade changes for football players. In short, none of them seem to require an author's pseudonym for any other reason than the author's being -- not to put too fine a point on it -- chicken.
Forget, for a moment, the minor misfires: WASP-y pseudonyms that reinforce an outdated faculty stereotype (why not "Jacob Goldberg" or "Akiri Muhammed"?) and citations of institutions so vague they might as well say "a college somewhere in the U.S.A." The writers all admit to, or complain about, fairly small beans.
OK, this Bennett fellow is somewhat savage about the disparity between his university's "abstract mission statement and the material requirements of the teachers and scholars for whom the mission is a mandate," and that might cheese off the dean if the author's -- and the university's -- cover is blown. But hundreds, maybe thousands, of public-school teachers put their behinds on the line every semester when they stand up at public meetings and say that there's not enough chalk in the classrooms.
Even garnished with moans about e-mail breakdowns and a tardy travel reimbursement, Bennett's bill of particulars adds up to only the mildest episode of Dilbert.
And what -- assuming that The Chronicle's Careers section harbors any reformer's ambitions -- is going to prod this shrouded "research university in the South" to pony up for working faucets (another of Bennett's complaints) if not being called to account by name in The Chronicle? So readers learn that some unnamed university, located somewhere in the vast territory below the Mason-Dixon Line, is chintzy with its physical plant. So what?
You say that Bennett is an assistant professor, and presumably untenured, so he has good reason to hide his identity. Certainly, he's at increased risk of not being granted tenure on account of embarrassing his institution in print.
But I would counter:
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If his other qualifications are up to snuff, a denial of tenure traceable to kvetching in The Chronicle about the lack of a classroom DVD player should have lawyers for the American Association of University Professors licking their chops.
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Does Bennett really want to work at a place where complaints about the office supplies are punished with termination?
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It's my experience from teaching without tenure in a few places (the University of Texas at Austin, University of Southern California, Hofstra University) and with tenure in a couple of others (CSU Northridge and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) that junior faculty members who say they're only being good little apparatchiks until they're liberated by tenure will remain the same Uriah Heeps after they get it. And junior faculty members who skulk around issuing their gripes anonymously before they get tenure aren't likely to stand up and be counted after they get it.
Rogers is likewise an assistant professor, but why a tenderly comic essay about her momentary longing to be once again a "chick biker" requires a pseudonym is a mystery -- at least to me -- as deep as that of the Mary Celeste. Readers, in fact, have no way of knowing if Rogers hasn't presented them with a nice little bit of fiction (her notes getting sucked up into the undercarriage of a Buick is almost too delicious an incident).
The author's real name on the piece would indicate someone who didn't fear her story might not check out.
If Sanders, on the other hand, is as tenured as "associate professor" implies, then he has no excuse whatsoever. So he and his buddies found some snidery in the personal jottings of the writer they were researching, so they had to be shushed by a librarian. Again, so what?
In all three of the essays, the authors' malfeasance -- being accident-prone on a motorcycle, complaining about inadequate teaching equipment, and confessing to scholarly snickering -- hardly seems risky enough to need a pseudonym. Besides, a whole lot of journalistic color and narrative viscera have been lost because the authors refuse to put their names on essays they've written for publication.
I'm beginning to suspect that somewhere up on Michigan's northern peninsula, there's a University of Anonymity, where authors in the Protected Professor program are placed after they've had plastic surgery and been outfitted with new tweed jackets or black pantsuits.
The tragedy, of course, is that the relocated faculty member must forever teach only generic survey courses, lest students suss out their particular research topics and identities, and out them to roving hit squads of vengeful provosts.
Academe has enough trouble with its public image as -- to many -- a terrarium for fragile, frightened creatures who can't "make it in the real world," without its members exacerbating the situation by hiding behind pseudonyms when they feel like getting rueful.
Dear professors: Sign your real names to what you write.
