Nearly 10 years ago, I began writing for The Chronicle under the pen name of Thomas H. Benton. My first column, “Leaving the City for the Small-Town College Life,” appeared in December 2001. I had recently relocated from Cambridge, Mass., to Holland, Mich., to become an assistant professor of English at Hope College, a medium-sized, church-affiliated, residential campus.
It wasn’t the kind of position I had been trained to fill, since my degree was in American civilization. However, I did have a lot of teaching experience as a graduate fellow and an adjunct at a variety of institutions. It was a significant plus that I had attended a Roman Catholic liberal-arts college, demonstrating that I had a religious background.
I really didn’t know what I was getting into, and there was some incredulity among my graduate-school colleagues: The Midwest? A church-affiliated college? You’ll be teaching so many classes that you won’t have time for publication. Why do that?
The short answer was, “It’s a tenure-track job.” But I also liked the region and the people I had met at the college. I was a supporter, in an ecumenical way, of their spiritual mission. In many respects, the college was the opposite of the culture of graduate school: earnest instead of ironic, more collegial than competitive, and imbued with a sense of purpose that amounted to more than individual ambition. The position emphasized teaching but there was also support for scholarly writing.
My growing family could live well in the Midwest: We replaced our tiny apartment with a six-acre farm. I could drive to work in 15 minutes; no traffic or parking problems. At a small college, I could play a larger role in faculty governance and maybe even build a program (something I’ve started to do). I would have fewer colleagues in my field, but my relationships with them probably would be stronger. Also, I did not want to have anything to do with recruiting and training graduate students for tenure-track jobs that were fewer and fewer in number. I wanted to focus on undergraduate education in the humanities, even if that meant becoming more of a generalist.
Still, the choice was so against what I had been trained to value in graduate school that I could do it only with a sense of defiance: It almost seemed to me that I had to burn most of my bridges to academe as I had known it. I didn’t have many bridges left, anyway, after a couple years of activist work and writing for The Chronicle—under my real name—on the accelerating shift from tenure-track jobs to part-time, nontenured teaching positions. I had been told many times that writing and speaking about that issue was “career suicide.” I believed that I would spend the rest of my life in western Michigan, if I managed to earn tenure, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that prospect.
So when I was invited to write a column about the transition from graduate school to the tenure track, I chose a pen name, and Thomas Hart Benton seemed like a rough analogue for my situation. He was a painter who left the art scene of New York in the 1930s to pursue his vision of American Regionalism from a teaching position in the Midwest. I identified him with populism, labor activism, and the spirit of the New Deal, but I also liked his defiance of the right-thinking, snobby conformity of the East Coast art scene, which, for me, corresponded to the dominance of high theory in academe in the 1990s. I wasn’t trying to make any connection with Benton’s namesake, the 19th-century senator from Missouri who was an architect of Manifest Destiny.
I didn’t expect the original column to turn into a series, but it attracted enough attention that The Chronicle was willing to continue it, and so “Thomas H. Benton” gradually became a regular contributor.
Within about three years—and well before I went up for tenure—my colleagues at Hope College deduced my identity from the accumulation of internal clues in my columns. At the graduation ceremonies that year, the president greeted me by my pen name, “Good to see you, ‘Thomas Benton.’” Others started to do likewise: The cat was out of the bag.
There was no longer any reason to maintain the pseudonym, but one: It was more familiar to the paper’s readers than my real name. So my byline remained “Thomas H. Benton,” but I started revealing my actual name at the bottom of the column in a way that’s similar to Ms. Mentor’s advice columns, “channeled” by Emily Toth.
That practice caused some confusion for new readers, and I began receiving mail asking why my byline was still a pseudonym when my real name was revealed at the end of the essay. Each time I narrated the story that you have just read. If the column managed to survive long enough, I hoped that I eventually could drop the pen name and integrate my two identities.
That time has arrived, since I generally am cited now as “Benton/Pannapacker.” The bylines have become about equally recognizable, and there’s really no point in continuing both of them. So it’s time to say “goodbye” to “Thomas H. Benton” with some concluding thoughts about the pros and cons of pen names, since that’s remained a practice for some Chronicle authors.
There are advantages. A pseudonym can give you a persona that’s more colorful and engaging than your professional self.
Pretending to be Benton has allowed me to become much harder-hitting in my columns: I adopted some aspects of his voice from reading the real Benton’s manifesto, An Artist in America, on which the title of my series was based. After a while, that voice began to influence all of my writing, probably for the better.
Of course, writing anything that touches on your job, education, or family life is always risky, especially when you write under your own name. There is a strong temptation to triangulate your observations through the eyes of the people you write about, and that can lead you to become overly cautious and to avoid saying anything controversial. (In a seminar I teach on opinion journalism, we call that “making bold claims about how much the author loves sunshine and puppies.”) You are constantly torn between wanting to please people—and protect yourself—and the need to be as plainspoken with your readers as possible.
Radical honesty—even when it is misguided—is what makes a column worth reading; it is a kind of dangerous stunt. You know the author is taking a risk and probably will crash, like Evel Knievel, breaking every bone in his professional body. I try to do that every month, for the delight of my readers.
A pen name can give you the freedom to develop a new voice, tutored by the reactions of your readers, who are more effective, collectively, than any seminar on writing. As the comments sections of columns now show, an army of critics stands ready to point out an author’s mistakes and shortcomings.
On the other hand, if you manage to maintain your secret identity for very long—and the public criticism is very harsh—you may increasingly become fearful about being discovered. You’ll lie awake analyzing the cryptic remarks of your colleagues. Over the long term—even if you are vigilant about omitting any clues in your writing—your real identity probably will be revealed by your subject matter and style. (Yes, Henry Adams, I am thinking of you!) Inevitably you may confide in a few friends, and the news will spread: Everyone likes to share a secret.
Was it Robespierre who said, “Get me three private letters, and I can condemn any man”? First-person column writing can be even more damning than personal letters in the wrong hands.
Regardless of the content of your writing, “hiding behind a pen name” is often seen as a failure of integrity—an unwillingness to stand behind your claims. Pseudonymous writing may have a long and distinguished history, including Voltaire, Mark Twain, and George Orwell, among others. But in academe, using a pen name can be regarded as professional misconduct. Moreover, there is a general view that journalistic writing doesn’t “count” in academe. At best, such writing is a troubling distraction from the work of publishing peer-reviewed articles and scholarly monographs, which relatively few will read.
So what can you do once your identity is revealed? Soldier on as damaged goods? Leave the profession and start a new career as a journalist (as if that’s easy or advisable)? Or embrace your new identity and try to build a reputation as a provocative commentator on the academic scene—among your other duties—and begin the slow transition away from your journalistic birth name, perhaps in stages, as I have tried to do?
I am sure it will be a long time before I can put “Thomas H. Benton” behind me, and I am not sure that I want to. Benton was a persona, an intensified version of myself; it was based on my real experiences in a heightened, sometimes hyperbolic way. But Benton was still me—even more than many things I’ve published under my scholarly persona.
Someone once gave me a framed copy of the 1934 issue Time magazine with Benton’s self-portrait on the cover, and it hangs in my office. It’s part of my professional history, and I am happy to be accountable for all of that history. I suppose I’ll always be “Thomas H. Benton,” even though this is the last time I will use that name.
