Please mind your language when attacking academics

Nick Cohen is wrong to claim that academics don't want to engage with ordinary readers

Nick Cohen ("Sorry, Professor, you're talking nonsense", Comment) makes two basic assertions, both well wide of the mark. First, he suggests that the academic world is not interested in addressing the ordinary intelligent reader. He cites one impenetrable sentence by Professor Judith Butler (failing to mention that she is an academic in California, not the UK). I accept that there is a problem of some academics writing only for each other, but I just don't recognise his assertion that this is the "prevailing academic culture". He pays no attention to the extensive and intensive work done in universities in the UK to impart the art of clear writing.

Second, he asserts that the changes in government financing of first-degree courses are particularly aimed at certain subjects: "The government plans to remove state support from all university arts, humanities and social science courses." Actually, the plans affect all subjects: the public funding that remains is a reduced element for those courses which are more expensive to provide.

Arts, humanities and social sciences have done outstandingly well in recent years in attracting increasing numbers of both home and overseas students. The government's research funding decisions do not suggest a bias against these subjects. Irrespective of what one thinks of the new tuition fee regime, the healthy state of these subjects means that in general they are likely to survive it. The changes and cuts will pose serious problems for some particular departments and subject areas and there are probably also significant issues for UK students seeking to go on to postgraduate studies, but the picture that Nick Cohen paints is a crude caricature.

Professor Sir Adam Roberts

President of the British Academy and emeritus professor of international relations, Oxford University

London SW1

One of Nick Cohen's informants, John Carey, has been exemplary in reaching a wide public; as his successor in the Oxford English faculty, I do not recognise the picture of my own or any contemporary arts faculty as dominated by the minor writings of Judith Butler.

To confine myself to early modernists in my own university, publications have included a book for general readers on how Shakespeare can change your life, a people's history of the English Civil War and a project on Philip Pullman, who has been generous in sharing his interest in Milton with many members of our faculty.

My colleague Simon Palfrey's introduction to Shakespeare seems to be giving Nick Cohen's books a pretty good run for their money, to judge by Amazon's sales rankings (though, as it happens, the allegedly unreadable Judith Butler's Gender Trouble has many more readers than both).

Professor David Norbrook


Nick Cohen wheels in support from Perry Anderson, a former editor of New Left Review, to attack obscurantist academic writing. Here is a footnote from the very same man: "Harvey's reconstruction of a Marxist theory of crises, preceding Brenner's work, can be regarded as the principal alternative to it, one that is conceptually much more systematic, but cast as a categorical structure, without historical instantiation" (from Spectrum, p255). Ivor Morgan


The piece of gobbledegook by Judith Butler could be simply translated as "the Marxist revolution hasn't arrived yet and we have to explain why". But that wouldn't get you a lectureship. Sociology is jam-packed with similar rubbish. With the demise of social mobility has come the shifting of the personnel and perspective in the subject to the right. Thus the concentration on non-controversial approaches such as identity, symbolism and cultural relativism and a convoluted prose style reminiscent of the Bloomsbury lot. They, of course, were all well-heeled and writing just before the beginning of the Great Depression. How ironic that they might be hoisted on their own structuralist hegemony.

Dr James Andrade

St Albans, Herts

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