If academe is like a village, it’s a voluntarily segregated community. Most residents stay in their disciplinary neighborhoods and work where the surroundings are comfortable and familiar. Recently, however, I left my humanities neighborhood for an unlikely destination: A foray into journalism took me to the community of condensed-matter physics. I needed to talk to laboratory scientists about their work, and the prospect was intimidating.
I was reporting on a scandal involving allegedly fabricated data in some influential superconductivity experiments at Bell Labs. A blue-ribbon panel of the elder statesmen of physics was investigating, and I was investigating the investigation. Although I’m more scientifically literate than the average English professor, superconductivity research is, shall we say, rather technical. I get the concepts, but fall short of understanding anything beyond them by, oh, approximately one bachelor’s degree in physics.
So imagine my surprise at how easy my interview subjects made it for me. Just about everybody I called took time to talk to me at length. Interview subjects ranging from assistant professors to Nobel Prize winners were shockingly courteous as I peered into an embarrassing event in their field. One of the first scientists I spoke to, a highly decorated nanochemist, confessed in the most forthright way that he felt he had been duped. It turned out that his candor was typical.
But these physicists were more than helpful. They were downright friendly. They often had to stop to explain concepts that were elementary to them, but obscure to me. Though they were talking down to me, they made generous efforts to make it look like they weren’t. I attribute that good feeling not to my own charms or journalistic skill, but rather to a sense of genuine collegiality toward a stranger in town.
That collegiality extends to physicists’ dealings with their own. One physicist told me: “The process of doing physics involves a lot of communication. It’s highly interactive and collaborative. Even theorists don’t write on their own.” Indeed, all of the physicists working in a given subfield usually know each other.
What about competition? When there’s a well-defined scientific milestone, there’s usually a race to reach it. The competition can take years, and, while it’s usually cordial, it is a race. For example, about a dozen laboratory groups each worked for over 10 years to demonstrate a quantum phenomenon called the Bose-Einstein condensation effect. The first group to reach the finish line won the 2001 Nobel Prize for physics. But direct competition is infrequent in practice. More typically, there’s room for everyone. Rare is the physics subfield that gets completely played out, and considerable rewards can come to scientists who build on an initial discovery by someone else.
Getting funds, on the other hand, is a zero-sum game. Money is the lifeline of the research scientist, and there’s only a certain amount of it available in a given area. The answer seems to be that physicists (and others in the hard sciences) have a strong faith in the peer-review system. More important, they trust in the evaluative process that underlies it. Physicists told me that peer review in the sciences has an ethical code built into it. There can be personality conflicts, of course, but the scientists share the belief that the peer-review system can deliver trustworthy assessments of their work. That enables them to relax and treat each other with respect.
The peer-review system in the humanities and social sciences inspires no such confidence. Humanists pursue vastly different goals, even within the same field, and their work is inherently subjective. Consequently, judgment is bound to lack some of the concreteness that attends scientific peer review. Glitches in the peer-review system in physics are rare enough to make news -- like the story I wrote about. Humanities peer review gets attacked all the time. Edmund F. Byrne, an emeritus professor of philosophy and philanthropic studies at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis, recently wrote in The Journal of Information Ethics that peer review is so riddled with bias that “anyone committed to such democratic values as fundamental fairness, equal opportunity, and equal respect should have ethical concerns about the process.” A physicist reading Byrne’s article might wonder what on earth he is talking about.
It’s no coincidence that “softer” fields are notable for their social hierarchies. One of my former graduate students described a typical conference encounter: “the glance at the name tag and the look away -- ‘Oh, you’re nobody.’” A few years ago at a party, I approached a well-known member of my field, with whom I shared a mutual friend. He didn’t even bother to reply after I introduced myself. I can still see his dismissive glance.
I must confess that I’ve been guilty of such status consciousness myself. I recall with shame how, after one of my presentations, I realized that the person congratulating me wasn’t an anonymous admirer (I’d been treating him with unconscious condescension), but rather the author of a book I admired. I think he heard the grinding of gears as I lurched into a more generous tone. He’s been cool to me since, which is no more than I deserve.
This is more than impoliteness. It’s unfriendliness. Naturally, it’s no absolute rule. I’ve certainly encountered generosity from colleagues over the years, but I find it significant that almost every humanist I’ve spoken to can easily summon up recollections of mean-spirited treatment at the hands of our own scholarly community.
Such intramural unpleasantness is “a special result of status anxiety,” Clare Eby, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut and a scholar of Thorstein Veblen (who, a century ago, analyzed status consciousness), recently told me. “What we do isn’t valued by our students, the world at large, or even within the university,” she said. Surely there’s something to that. Humanists have long been engaged in a rear-guard action against students who want to know, “How is this going to help me get a job?” The public-sector debates over academic responsibility routinely target humanists, many of whom find themselves caricatured as radical leftists engaged in a seditious rebellion against Western culture.
Setting up humanists as straw men for the fall of the Western world is as easy as shooting literati in a barrel. But that ease may result more from the form than the content of humanists’ beliefs. In the humanities, scholars usually do their research alone. Scientists, on the other hand, are trained to work in groups. Little wonder, then, that the humanities now features a full-blown academic celebrity culture. In order for celebrities to exist, people have to be willing to look up as well as down -- and looking both ways can promote insecurity.
There’s also a certain kind of anxiety that attends the study of the lives and works of others. One communications professor explained that to me with a scientific metaphor: “Humanists are continually chafing over the fact that they are but pilgrims at the shrine of art, and they find it difficult to forgive not only the artists, whom they diminish by splaying them across the literary glass slide, but also their fellow scrutinizers the next microscope over.” The same could apply to a biographer, or any scholars whose work places them in the position of acolyte.
Then there’s the issue of the specialist’s relationship with the general public. One of the editors I worked with on my physics assignment told me repeatedly that she wanted my article to explain “how some of the smartest people in the world got hoodwinked.” The smartest people in the world? Perhaps. But the point is that you rarely hear a historian or a literary critic described that way. The technical work of experimental physicists is inherently unapproachable, except by other physicists. It’s the job of a popularizer to simplify it and open it up, and physicists know that.
The work of a historian is to tell stories. The work of a literary critic is to interpret them. It’s inherently approachable -- until recently. The last two generations have seen the pursuits of humanists take on their own quasi-scientific aspects, complete with highly technical jargon. Attempts to popularize have often been met with the special hostility that attends defense of hierarchy -- consider the philosopher Judith Butler’s assertion on the op-ed page of The New York Times that her ideas were so complex they couldn’t be expressed in a way that regular people might understand.
The story of the Bell Labs physics scandal initially intrigued me because I thought it might turn out to be a scientific version of the culture wars, with scientists coming under attack from groups that help finance them. It didn’t turn out that way. The data turned out to be faked, the perpetrator was fired, and the ripples from the scandal were contained within the physics world. But humanists have long been embroiled in their own conflicts with the society that finances them -- and one of the reasons lies in the way that we raise roadblocks and bar the world from entering our neighborhood. That’s the opposite of what we ought to be doing, and it’s all the more shameful because humanists are in an unusual and enviable position: The nature of our work makes it easy to open our doors and share that work. We can start doing so in the simplest way: by being nicer.
Leonard Cassuto is an associate professor of English at Fordham University. His science reporting, which recently appeared on Salon.com, was selected for inclusion in the forthcoming Best American Science Writing 2003 (Ecco Press).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 34, Page B5
