In this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, an editorial by Naomi J. Miller entitled "Following Your Scholarly Passions" suggests that the best way to survive in an academic climate that rewards conformity and punishes originality is, paradoxically, to write about what you love. Miller, an associate professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, succinctly captures the defining problem of making it in academe: "Even as we are working to produce that original dissertation or breathtaking first scholarly book or scientific study, we are subjected to the pressure cooker of academic evaluation, in which a given number of citations or publications with a given university press spells success, and straying too far from the norms spells likely doom .... Realistically, what that means is that the academic system does not foster or encourage truly original work." She goes on to note that this tends to produce graduate students and junior faculty who are less invested in pursuing (or even identifying) what interests them than in leaping aboard the latest trend, and suggests that this is a recipe for personal and professional disaster: "If you ignore your heart and attempt to focus your research instead on hot trends, the pressure of the market can cause you to lose your mind, even your soul." Miller's solution: do what she did. Weave together your passions and your work, and do research on something that speaks to you personally. Miller uses herself as an example, explaining that as a Renaissance scholar who is also the mother of four children, she has written books on Renaissance representations of motherhood, and, more recently, on Shakespeare for children. Her colleagues have mocked her as both a person and a scholar, wondering if, as a mother of four, she might be a member of a cult, and dissuading graduate students from taking her courses because she is not, to their mind, a serious scholar. But that doesn't matter, because she has achieved personal and professional fulfillment by writing about topics that are close to her heart.

The editorial means to be a heartwarming, encouraging piece on intellectual independence, and aims in particular to offer supportive career advice to graduate students and junior faculty in the humanities. But it is actually a chilling indictment of the closedmindedness of the humanities today, with its anti-family mode of feminism and its nasty habit of using students to shore up faculty alliances, one that is all the more heartbreaking for its author's apparent belief that such intolerable treatment by her colleagues--the mockery, the slander, the ostracism--is a fair price for her putative intellectual freedom.