If you thought that Morris Zapp, the aggressively ambitious professor in David Lodge’s novel Changing Places, was a sharp operator, then you’ve yet to meet the real thing. Or so Charles Sykes would have us believe. In ProfScam, Sykes argues that today’s professorial entrepreneurs have subordinated the call of higher learning to a lust for self-aggrandizement through meaningless research, obscure publications, and savage campus politicking. They have abandoned teaching and learned to despise undergraduates. This, of course, is just while school is in session. You know the old joke about the four good reasons for becoming an academic: June, July, August, and September. The scandal of the academy, asserts Sykes, is this unique combination of naked ambition and laziness.
Alongside his more general analysis, Sykes reports on specific studies of academe, including a marvelous study of journal publishing in which previously published articles by well-known academics were resubmitted to academic journals under new, unfamiliar names–and rejected. Then there’s the wonderful study undertaken by a researcher who hired an actor to give a seminar on mathematics and human behavior to a group of psychologists; the talk was gibberish, but that did nothing to halt the flow of glowing remarks from the professorial audience. (Although one prof did find it “too intellectual.”)
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Often Sykes is merely cheap. He throws in some comments drawn from student evaluations, which, he tells us, “are seldom given much weight.” Some dissatisfied students from a Yale economics class are deployed to catalog the poverty of their professor’s teaching. Well, I have some experience of this. I once taught a class where student evaluations ranged from “this class is so good it’s hard to believe the instructor is real” to the back-down-to-earth put-down that “this is the most boring class I’ve ever taken.” Combing the evals for a few choice insults is easy–just another exercise in simplistic prof-baiting.
Academia, Sykes correctly argues, is overly concerned with obscure and unimportant topics that are researched purely because they haven’t been researched before–thus making suitable raw material for a PhD. Yet when Sykes encounters critics and scholars who are trying to make sense of mass-media forms like Miami Vice and The A-Team he is unable to resist the cheap shot. How absurd, he suggests, to waste money and intellectual effort on such trivial pursuits. One of his examples of an obviously pointless research project is very telling: “Women’s Shopping: A Sociological Approach.” Well, of course, put women and shopping together and you clearly have a worthless subject for investigation, right? Wrong. Academic work on shopping, fashion, TV, and so forth overcomes the elitism and irrelevance of a great deal of work in the humanities and social sciences and focuses attention on topics that are actually important in the lives of students and people in general. Perhaps much of that work is trivial and stupid (a problem found as well in Sykes’s profession–journalism), but Sykes is way off the mark when he invokes this as support for his thesis. If analyzing the mass culture that pervades the lives of nearly all our students isn’t an effective way to produce research and teaching that is “relevant,” what is?
ProfScam: Professors and the Demise of Higher Education by Charles J. Sykes, Regnery Gateway, $18.95.
