To insist, as I have, that conversation is central to the life of the mind and then to fail to act upon this claim would be at best a serious lapse in judgment. I have accordingly framed a series of questions that my friends and colleagues, all of them named in the Acknowledgments, have actually raised about the analysis and arguments I have thus far advanced. Most of these questions involve practical matters, and they arise from doubts about the desirability of some consequences of my general recommendations or about the feasibility of realizing any one of them. Other questions, however, pose difficulties for some of my basic assumptions. None of them invites an easy “answer”; I have therefore responded to all of them with a set of considerations designed to advance our thinking, not to settle the issues that they raise once and for all. However well intended and even persuasive the alternative account of the academic vocation might be, its effect is likely to be unfortunate. Will it not give aid and comfort to the mediocrities on all college and university faculties, since it will seem to warrant their lack of scholarly publication by legitimating all sorts of other activities as worthy of academic respect? The inadvertent promotion of mediocrity would indeed be unfortunate, but so too would be the acceptance of the implicit equation that the question draws between academic mediocrity and lack of scholarly publication. There may well be an empirical correlation between these two things, but there should not be, for that reason, a strong conceptual link presumed between them. The explanation for the often alleged statistical correlation between mediocrity and low scholarly “productivity” has less relation to the intrinsic connections between scholarship and teaching than to sloth, the vice that leads both to poor teaching and to a lack of publication. It may be that the apprehension that gives rise to the present question involves the conflation of two sets of distinctions into one. One set is qualitative, the other generic; one embraces the excellent, the good, the mediocre, and the bad; the other embraces the academic monograph, the book review, the essay, the textbook, the critique of a colleague’s manuscript, the written lecture, in brief all inscribed instances of pedagogy.
Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind