The Error of Misplaced Disparagment

...Preservation, probably...

...While the professors may cite each other, and their predecessors, if the journalist does not go and see for himself, at least he feels guilty, and some things are more in need of observation than analysis...

...And it is in causing a denial of the existence of this fertile, hopeful midland that the Error of Misplaced Disparagement can become pernicious...

...this is a thought-gap which can only be narrowed by the efforts of both academicians and journalists...

...In the editorial offices of magazines which circulate among the serious or aspiring throughout the country, autumn is a time of burden...

...if not, a few handwritten words from an editorial assistant atop a printed card will, it is hoped, temper the blow and keep the professor on the subscriber list...

...I think the historian doesn't realize the opaqueness of the process...

...The professors, full of hope, have sent forth these pitifully fashioned offspring to make their way in the world, and the sad, heavy envelopes descend on readers' desks...

...The reporter's deadline, in the meantime, had drawn threequarters of an hour closer, and the distinguished expert still had not ventured an extractable point of view, although the deadlines of decision for those who must make events rather than understand them seldom wait for the unextractable...

...A newspaper story is quickly read and thrown away, but a student studies his lecture notes and may make them part of his intellectual outlook...

...Of all the jargons by which we are assaulted from day to day," said Robert Bingham, former managing editor of the Reporter recently, "surely the most oppressive is the academic variety, if only because it is the one that takes itself most seriously...

...I found the entrance, a little door with two lady card-checkers attending it (here books are stolen the way jewels and joy-rides are stolen out there...

...Not only the historian...

...The historian," Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...A reporter may recall the time he had two hours left to finish a story on an issue in the forefront of discussion and decision...

...But perhaps we would do well to encourage a few more hardy wanderers than now exist to thread their way between the lines...

...not many scholarly works in the field of any one of them would share this distinction...

...A distinguished professor at Yale ruefully noted not long ago how many more of his acquaintances spoke to him about his letter to the editor of a newspaper than were even aware of his having previously written two erudite books...

...But others, let it also be said, must encounter and report the actual, brute haphazardness, the intractable messiness, of human endeavor...

...You are from the world of brash and carlish children...

...Thus when a professor of government and a professor of philosophy heard recently that a very able student of theirs had chosen to become a journalist, they lamented in unison, "What a waste...

...To the professor, the printed word has a certain sanctity...

...And an English professor said of a book he was reading that "of course, the author is a journalist, so the book is bound to be unsatisfactory to a serious person...

...And they will remember the time the powers of the press decreed that the newspapers should cover a certain meeting of scholars...

...If there is time, a polite note of regret is sent to the would-be contributor...

...On the other side, I descended into the windowless catacombs of learning to search the rows and rows of distilled labor in solid or once solid covers...

...On the other side are gathered those who sing out defiantly that were it not for the voyaging Platonists, the understanders of things as they are would drown wallowing in their mess of accommodation...

...but so are some colleges...

...The journalist finds the distinction less obvious...

...There are now too often marshalled, on one side, those who claim that only they have been sufficiently tempered by the disappointment of grappling with reality to have useful notions on how to change it...

...The gentle drone of my new vessel continued, taking me further and further away from the quicksand of Vietnam, the wall in Berlin, the intense seething of Manhattan Island's poor...

...Without any doubt, the academic and journalistic realms have, and should have, distinct characteristics...

...At the same time, there are journalists who are way ahead of their academic rivals in creating knowledge worth transmitting...

...And while the professors talk a more and more technical language to a more and more exclusive group of colleagues in the same field, the journalist is one of the few members of modern society to dare to be more than a specialist...

...It is often a ludicrous fact that the men who reach positions of power and decision in their 40s and 50s retain almost unchanged the intellectual framework, the theoretical assumptions, which they acquired in college...

...There was a desk at the end of the row...

...Advances in thinking and learning that are achieved by scholars may hardly influence the adult population unless they are filtered through interested editors and reporters and given the stamp of attention...

...There is a division of interest and function, and a limited amount of mututal criticism may keep the academicians from excessive narrowness, the journalists from excessive vulgarity...

...It is a true supposition that the threshold of regalement is lower around a dry, academic lunchtable than among wet jaded journalists...

...Perhaps, I thought, the hold of a ship was a nearer metaphor, and at that moment the faint sound of a boat whistle on the Hudson overcame the hum of the ventilation...

...The word "journalistic" is taken by them to be synonymous with "sloppy," "hasty," "ill-considered," and "of little value...

...It is their job to do so, and human progress requires that it be done...

...Journalists and professors are often less far apart than they realize...

...The two worlds need each other...

...Some magazines are pure entertainment, some newspapers are fraudulent...

...THINKING ALOUD The Error of Misplaced Disparagement By Virginia Held As a former habitué of journalistic circles recently transplanted to academic quadrangles, I have been led to conclude after a minimum of observation that a unique and non-mysterious error seems to be embedded in the minds of inhabitants of both realms...

...To the editors it seems that all the well-meaning professors in America, working in their little studies, have been busy all summer turning out unuseable articles...

...It was a little door in the large, stately hall at the library's center...

...And on my days downtown in it, I was caught up in the delicious flux of reality, the turbulent coursing of action, ideas and power of which any academic image is but a pale reflection...

...And yet, the Error of Misplaced Disparagement often blinds them to this need...

...in journalism, there is the same antipathy between the reporter who writes solid, constructive, dull accounts, and the one who entertains and provokes, but distorts to do so...

...wrote after ending his years in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, "tends in retrospect to make the processes of decision far more tidy and rational than they are . . and to impose a pattern on what is actually a swirl if not a chaos...

...Virginia Held, who is now a lecturer in philosophy at Barnard, formerly was on the staff of the Reporter...

...In addition to being less far apart than they sometimes think, the fact is that the two communities have much to give each other...

...It is an error which leads those in whom it resides to feel a diffuse but pervasive condescension for members of the opposite community, with, of course, intermingling traces of love-hate ambivalence...

...Instances of mutual disparagement can be multiplied indefinitely...

...Recognition in either camp of merit in the other will require a narrowing of the present emotional gulf between them...

...the only sound was the gentle, steady purring of the ventilating mechanism...

...I thought of Alice whose little door led to a garden after she had become small enough to enter it...

...But they seldom acknowledge that the reporter's deadline may excuse similar limitations...

...On their side of the city, the professors are fond of regaling their colleagues with stories of girl "researchers" and eager green newsmen...

...Yet the dreary treatise of an academic expert may do for a group of non-specialists something akin to what the journalistic book does for the professors...

...He may impose his half-thought-out views on captive students, but he does not put something into print until he is on surer ground...

...It is an error which causes distortion of vision, intemperance of outlook, impairment of motor activity, and, sometimes, a weakening of will and wit...

...When a journalist writes a book on an important subject and gains some attention in the press, an academic economist, political scientist, and literary scholar may sit around a table denouncing its shortcomings and bewailing the derelictions of journalism...

...Too much compatibility might be a mistake...

...All teachers, for instance, know something of deadlines...

...And day after day the events of day to day happenings receded into the distance as tens, hundreds, thousands of years became the units of measurement of the glorious, tragic, pathetic, magnificent, halting, relentless voyage of man in history, man making his way in the treacherous sea, using his head and the stars...

...But the fact is that because the book is in the public domain, the three specialists have something in common to talk about...

...Within either camp, there are conflicts similar to the one which divides them...

...But there are times when defenses should be mounted in behalf of the productive middle ground...

...Daily they confront the inevitable classes for which they must construct imperfect lectures on the basis of finite quantities of reading and reflection...

...He telephoned a distinguished authority for an opinion and a quotation, and the learned professor began to cite books, articles, chapters, and publication dates, expounding on the complications and ramifications of the issue...

...Several more tries, brought me to what I was looking for: 106/AR 4 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society...

...After hearing papers disclosing new findings by a score of intellectual luminaries, the attending professors opened their newspapers with anticipation the next day and discovered an elaborate recapitulation, with only minor inaccuracies, of the lunch menu...

...Many editors assume that professors can write in nothing but academese, that quality of content can never compensate for lack of stylistic distinction, and condemn their envelopes' contents a prior...

...But I maintained connections with the garish, disordered world of news-events...

...Switching on a light, I found myself in the wrong row...

...Next to' the businessman, the journalist ranks at the very bottom of the professor's totem, and journalism becomes the source of the scholar's examples of the depths to which we who participate in the learned disciplines' search for truth do not sink...

...Indeed, at the extremes of news-business shoddiness and professorial irrelevance, there is a commanding need for well-placed derision...

...The professors, in turn, daily launch scorns of their own...

...In the academy, there is the antipathy between the climber who panders to the tastes of the mob, and the scholar who imparts his wisdom to fewer and fewer devotees...

...After verifying my right to the inquiry he looked at me with imperious incredulity: "You haven't been in the stacks yet...

...The routine work of both journalists and professors is largely educational: to transmit what is known by some to a larger number...

...I sat down beside the enlightened cone, alone in this quiet sepulcher...

...I remember well my first re-encounter as an insider with the particular atmosphere of a university following a decade in what is sometimes known there as "the real world.' Having looked up the number of a certain book in the vast multiplicity of card-file bureaus in the reference section of Columbia University's Butler Library, I inquired of a stern gentleman librarian where to find it...

...Another will recall being asked by a budding reporter with eager intensity and posed microphone, "Are you for responsibility...

...At the same time, individuals in both spheres occasionally create works of originality and worth...

...A posse of harried reporters covering Latin America may groan together about the burden of having had to plod through such a treatise, but it may give them a common framework of theories to test, or a background without which they might founder...

...A professor will report that a Life researcher, armed with chic make-up, fashion-plate dress, and clean notebook, descended upon him and commanded: "Tell me about the American Revolution...

...I lit the light, which shed only a narrow cone of illumination on the desk beneath, and wondered at the purpose served by this non-disturbance of the darkness of other books, other searchers...

...Academicians, by nature, see design, intention and order where there is accident, inadvertence, and confusion...