Get Smart

In "Here's the Problem With Being So 'Smart'," Jeffrey Williams critiques the "special status and value" that the term smart has assumed in contemporary academic culture. The gist of Williams's essay, which is excerpted, I think, from a longer piece in the minnesota review, is that although smart "purports to be a way to talk about quality in a sea of quantity," it really operates as more of a stylistic marker, a judgment of taste that disguises itself as a judgment of reason. Williams is wary of the phrase, suggesting that it often operates as a sort of buzz word for insiders. I'm sure he's right.

Here's my take: In the ultra-competitive academic marketplace -- where the publication requirements for tenure keep increasing, even though everbody knows there's a surplus of scholarship -- a 'smart' publication is one that is supposed to have a certain cachet. It's a text that everyone is talking about in the faculty lounge and about which everyone has an opinion, regardless if they've read it or not. A 'smart' scholar is not just intelligent, but savvy, sharp, and clever. An agile performer, both on the page and behind the podium.

I'd go so far as to suggest that the phrase denotes a sort of academic hipness or trendiness that everybody bemoans, but is probably inevitable so long as universities become ever more corporatized. (Of course, Harvard was, if I'm not mistaken, the first U.S. corporation, but what I'm referring to is the influx of for-profit values into our institutions of higher education.) It's all very anxiety inducing for those of us just entering the profession. Not only is there enormous pressure to publish "innovative" research early and often, but one is expected to be a performer, projecting a 'smart' image and the promise of being a 'rising star' in one's field.