Academic Bullshit: Members Only

My primary problem with academic bullshit is that it encourages membership into only an exclusive club.  Philip Eubanks and John Schaeffer point out the reason why most people hate specifically academic bullshit but tolerate all kinds of other bullshit in everyday life.  People have trouble with academic writing because "it uses jargon, words whose meaning are so abstract and vague as to seem unrelated to anyone's experience.  Such jargon seems to contribute nothing to the reader except confusion and only serves to enhance the ethos of the speaker" (381).  To the everyday reader, it seems like writers purposely use obscure words and difficult sentence structure just to make themselves look better or smarter.  Eubanks and Scaeffer go on to explain that the academic culture encourages exactly that -- the use of bullshit to appear qualified to gain admittance into an academic circle of specialists.

"Academic writing... is seldom meant for an average audience; it addresses an audience of specialists, ... [and] aims to qualify the author for membership into a group of specialists" (382).  The purpose of most academic writing is primarily to give the author an "in" to an exclusive club.  Are we still in junior high, folks?  The people in academia are happy to keep membership exclusive.  If their colleagues can understand them, and most importantly, be impressed by their bullshit writing, then they think they have done their job.  In contrast to the current academic culture, I think that knowledge should be a public, accessible entity.  Sure, academic specialists can understand the jargon and obscure pretentious language, but I (and most other readers) get lost in the first paragraph.  This keeps knowledge exclusive.  I think academic circles need to open up the discussion to outside thought.  Although it is important to value and showcase the thoughts of proven specialists, what harm is being done in making the discussion accessible to a layperson?  Perhaps it would break the incestuous tendencies of many academic fields and encourage the introduction of new ideas. 

Eubanks and Schaeffer eventually throw their hands in the air and concede to the culture of accepting bullshit in academic writing.  They attempt to convince us that there is "a productive sort of bullshit:  bullshit that ultimately produces better thought and better selves."  They compromise, giving in to the legacy of inaccessible academic writing, even going so far as to praise it by saying that "bullshit is inevitable when people are tempting to write well" (387).  The authors perpetuate the belief that good writing sounds like good writing and must sound like bullshit as well.