This might interest some.

Just Another Leftist Loon
By JAMES E. MCWILLIAMS
http://chronicle.com/jobs/2004/01/2004010801c.htm

How thick is your skin? Academics, especially young ones feeling the
inevitable bouts of insecurity, are occasionally forced to answer this
question. A journal rejects your article with a harsh assessment. A seminar
participant aggressively gripes about one of your interpretations. An editor
lays a heavy hand on your brilliant text.

In these discouraging situations, we have no choice: It's buck up or crack.
Bucking up, however, isn't especially difficult in our environment. Academic
jabs are delivered with kid gloves, criticisms tempered by civility and
encouragement, objections excessively qualified with the politesse integral
to most academic discourse. When it comes to criticism, we've got it good on
this side of the ivied walls.

You're probably thinking that I've yet to have my proper academic
comeuppance. I make this claim, however, from the perspective of a recent
writing experience out in "the real world," an experience that not only
offers a telling point of comparison, but also left some rather nasty
bruises on skin I once considered suitably thickened.

A couple of months ago, right after I landed my first job as a tenure-track
professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos, I wrote a
column for this site pondering the prospect of balancing academic and
popular writing. Turns out I enjoy both, and often find it hard to negotiate
these frequently competing interests. Since getting hired, I've dutifully
favored the former, miring myself in a book manuscript, getting lost in
primary sources, visiting a couple of archives, squeezing an article into a
journal, and somehow managing to teach graduate and undergraduate
students -- all of the things that a good, young, ambitious assistant
professor is supposed to do.

Feeling the need to come up for air, though, I emerged from my scholarly
isolation a couple of weeks ago by publishing a moderately anti-Bush opinion
article in the Los Angeles Times. In a nutshell, I argued that George Bush's
packaging of himself as a neo-frontiersman evokes the legacy of Andrew
Jackson, a legacy that conveniently allows the President to act first and
justify his actions later. Mild stuff, on the whole.

Or so I thought. The article landed in a media pool and found its way into
at least 15 daily newspapers. On the one hand, I admit that I've enjoyed the
exposure. It's fun, for example, to hear that my colleague's 80-year old
father read the piece to his friends over breakfast at a Louisville, Ky.,
McDonald's. On the other hand, I completely underestimated the reaction I
would receive. Furious letters from obviously well-educated readers around
the country have choked my inbox and made me feel, well, a mix of
emotions -- but basically like I too am being throttled.

"Dear Assistant Professor McWilliams," wrote a man from Missoula, Mont., "I
must say that you have gall." He elaborated, "You're just another leftist
loon with too high an opinion of yourself." Who, he wondered, would actually
believe the ideas of a professor "at some cow college in San Marcos, Texas"?
The letter, as it picked up steam, turned into a tirade of ad hominem
invective that made me consider unlisting my phone number (especially as
repeated hang-ups started to interrupt our evenings). "You stinking two-bit
lowlife terrorist enabler," the man opined. "Are you really that stupid?" he
fumed by way of conclusion. No, I thought to myself, sending his note to my
brand new "angry letters" file.

Lane's letter was extreme, but not extremely so. Another reader, from my
home town of Austin, Tex., characterized my article as "a vile and
reprehensible attempt at character assassination," noting how it's "hard for
me to believe that we are paying the salary of someone with your dishonesty
and lack of integrity to educate our kids." Although he never addressed the
substance of my argument, he was still able to draw a conclusion about me as
a person. In a word: "disgusting."

Did someone say character assassination? But then there was a correspondent
of true brevity, who sent me an e-mail that made the previous one seem
downright judicious. "My God," he wrote, "you are an arrogant, pompous,
conceited turd. You have the intellectual agility of a small soap dish. Have
a nice day." Yeah, sure, I will. And this on my birthday no less. By the
way, can someone tell me what it means to be compared to a soap dish?

"They're just lunatic fringers," my wife kept telling me. "Ignore them." I
tried, but the letters just kept pouring in. It would have been like
ignoring a tidal wave or, more properly, a fire bomb. And it seemed that
once my loyal fans got their opinions of me out of their systems, they
turned their wrath -- again -- not to my argument, but this time to my
profession.

"It's too bad," explained one writer from Atlanta, that "our college
campuses are dominated by left-wing elitist professors (and assistant
professors)." Another, from Houston, after bestowing God's blessing upon me,
insisted that "'intellectuals' of your apparent sort tend to live rather
cloistered lives ... surrounded by lefwing [sic] ideologues." Ultimately,
though, it reliably came back to me and my supposed psychological problems.
The Houston correspondent explained: "You sneer at President Bush ...
because you project upon him your own frailties." God bless me indeed.

And naturally, according to my readers, I'm also a Hitler advocate. "I
suppose you would slam Bush for going after Hitler if this was 1942," one
fan surmised.

How to make sense of this bile? Laugh it off? I wish I could. I suppose, in
one sense, I'm feeling the brunt of a newspaper reader's version of road
rage -- an intense flash of anger at a writer who cut him off as he cruised
in the peaceful flow of his political preconceptions. In another sense,
though, I'm deeply dismayed at the intensity of the reaction to an American
(and a damned patriotic one, I might add) who dares question authority
during a time of war. I was caught off guard, to be sure, at being called "a
pathetic creep" in a phone message because of a perfectly legitimate (and in
my mind, correct) political opinion. We academics might want to start
worrying less about the Patriot Act and more about the people around us.

I hate the fact that I just wrote that last sentence. It does indeed make it
seem like I'm cloistered in an ivory tower -- secure, elite, above it all,
more rational, smug. The irony, however, is that I've made it a professional
goal to bring my understanding of history to the world beyond the
university.

So I suppose what gets me the most about this whole ugly episode is the
creeping realization that some members of the audience "out there," the
people that I've always felt we have a duty as professional historians to
reach, want nothing more than their prejudices confirmed, one way or the
other. Leave the argumentative politesse, the respectful disagreements, the
open-mindedness, and the whole idea of a disinterested dialogue in the
seminar room. Tell me what I want to hear, and if you don't, well then,
you're a "pathetic creep." It's a challenge I've never considered until now,
but it helps explain why so many academics stay in the tower.

Yesterday, as the hate mail file grew, I got an e-mail from the editorial
office of the LA Times. Evidently there must have been an administrative
mistake because it read, "Thank you for your submission to the Los Angeles
Times' Op-Ed page. Unfortunately, we are unable to use your piece."

Sadly, I wish that had been true.



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James E. McWilliams is a new assistant professor of history at Texas State
University at San Marcos.

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