Academic Standards

author. The Horowitz staffers tasked with compiling this stinker simply trolled online campus catalogs to yield course descriptions using such democracy-undermining terms as “justice,” “inequality,” “race,” and ”feminism,” then wrote lame descriptions characterizing the syllabi as part of a plot to deprive William Gates and Dick Cheney of their hard-earned profits. Once I got the concept, I briefly held the flickering hope that I could read it ironically—as in, “hey, what a bunch of good classes I wish I’d been able to take in college.” Wrong. The relentless, narrow-minded prose thoroughly poisoned any hope of snarky thoughtcrime. Even if you were one of the twits sympathetic to the political angle of this failed hit job, the concrete brutalism of its formal properties would crush your spirit in a few pages—like read-ing a year’s worth of your daily horoscopes straight

through, or a cookbook cover to cover.

Academic Standards

Nicholas Brown

University of Illinois at Chicago

Most academic books are bad. Nearly all of them. I doubt if the situation is particularly worse than at any other time. But there is something else I view as troubling: good books with bad proof-reading and useless indexes. With a bad book, bad proofreading doesn’t matter particularly, and a bad index doesn’t matter at all. But what troubles me is that editors are publishing good books, books that will be cited for years and decades, as though they will be read once and left on the train. With a new author, perhaps the time investment isn’t worth do-ing things right, though this indicates a telling lack of confidence in the material. But books by estab-lished authorities continue to emerge with distracting numbers of typos and lax fact checking—this is at least selfish, since it condemns the rest of us to end-less [sic]s—and pointless onomastic indexes. As to that index, this is the digital age, I imagine an editor objecting, who needs it? To which I reply: make your full text available online and searchable (mangle the text any way you like, just give me the page number!) and I withdraw the complaint.