Yesterday I wrote in general terms about junk English in academe, and I suggested toward the end of the blog that the junk English of the English professor may be read as a sign of just how bad the problem is. Junk English in an ad or even a political speech doesn't surprise us. We expect to see the language butchered by the E-Z grammar of product slogans and the airy malapropisms of syntactically-challenged politicians; we may even revel in our contempt for the linguistic aridity of American culture. But our expectations and our revelry depend on our largely unexamined belief that English is alive and well somewhere, that while rampant consumerism and soundbite punditry may degrade the language, the language is nonetheless respected, honored, and preserved in our schools.

The English teacher--and especially the English professor--is envisioned as the person who may be relied on to practice and to preach the virtues of good English. I bump up against this belief--this essential trust tinged with awe--whenever I tell someone I am an English teacher (I don't identify myself to strangers as an English professor--I would crumple under the weight of my own pretension if I did). When confronted with the fact that they have just unwittingly asked an English teacher what she does for a living, cab drivers, hairdressers, and repairmen all spontaneously say the same thing: "Oh my (or "Oh, wow," or "Oh, shit") -- I'd better watch my English." They are serious, and self-consciously abashed. Sometimes they ask me questions about grammar and usage. Relatives do the same, even ones who once changed my diapers and who are well acquainted with my tic-like tendency to punctuate my sentences with the word "like." I guess that like doesn't diminish their fear that I'll catch them like dangling a participle or something.

My point is this: the junking of English in mainstream American culture, and the luxurious outrage we feel when we notice junk English in others, both take shape against the backdrop of an educational system that is assumed to be intact. People who junk English, we say, could use the language well if they wanted to. And this is because proper English is being taught in schools. English teachers have got that part of our general cultural degeneration covered. They know how to speak and write, and they pass that knowledge on to their students (or at least to those students who listen). But do English teachers know and respect good English? Can they speak and write clearly? And do they pass that knowledge on to their students? No, no, and no. There are exceptions, of course, but as a rule I must confess that we English teachers don't have much of a clue what we are doing. We'll tell you we do, and we'll mostly get away with it because we can fake it pretty well. But as a group, we are a pretty sorry bunch.

I take as exhibit A the writing of some of the most respected English professors around. Here's a sentence from Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture: "If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to "normalize" formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality." Bhabha was at the University of Chicago when he created this stunning monument to obfuscation; on the strength of it and many, many others like it, he was recently lured away from the Windy City by Harvard, whose English department is now enjoying the fruits of his enunciatory modality. Bhabha actually won a prize for this sentence. But don't let that distract you. Go to the literary criticism section of your local megabookstore and start pulling books randomly off the shelves. You'll see he is not alone. He has many followers, and there are many scholars vying for his position as winner of the annual Bad Writing Contest.

Granted, not all English professors admire Bhabhaesque prose. When Stanford's Marjorie Perloff heard that Harvard had hired him, she told The New York Times that she was "dismayed" by their decision, and added that "he doesn't have anything to say." But the Perloffs of the profession are the exceptions, and they do not set the trends that have so much power over graduate students and junior faculty, whose careers depend on their ability to grapple effectively with prose like Bhabha's and even to imitate it. I once asked a group of graduate students to name critics whose writing style they particularly admired. Most, when pressed, couldn't name any. There were critics whose ideas they admired, but style was another thing. This was telling. But even more telling was one student's reverence for Homi Bhabha's style. She was luminous with awe as she spoke of how beautiful it was, and how much it inspired her. Writing like Bhabha's sets the terms for people entering the profession of English, whose training involves immersing themselves in the jargony, unclear, ungrammatical, and self-impressed prose of those who are the reigning gods of the discipline: Judith Butler (also a Bad Writing winner), Gayatri Spivak, Slavoj Zizek, Lacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and on, and on, and on.

Invariably, the pressure to conform and the desire to measure up crystallizes, in the minds of the profession's youngest and least secure members--its Ph.D. students and its junior faculty--in a painfully awkward, disturbingly opaque imitation of the stars' obscurantist style. The difference is that while the Bhabhas and the Butlers can offer some sort of theoretical rationale for their style, their imitators frequently cannot. Judith Butler writes like hell because to her mind, Adorno tells her to. The Ph.D. student who writes like Butler writes like hell because Butler does. The Ph.D. student is not likely to be able to articulate a clear reason for writing as she does, beyond the fact that the most successful people in her field do it. And she is also unlikely to be able to recast her ideas in clean, clear prose, for two simple, terrible reasons. One, she isn't sure what her ideas are (nor is she really sure what Butler's are). And two, she does not know how to write anything but obscure, awful prose. Her professors have never told her she needed to do anything about her writing. And while she can write a fair thank you letter and a pretty clear diary entry, she is at a complete loss to communicate clearly in her professional capacity for the simple reason that she has never had to.

Exhibit B: this same Ph.D. student earns her stipend teaching freshman writing. Her entire identity as a Ph.D. student is predicated on abandoning an ideal of transparency. She distrusts clear communication, seeing it as a means of naturalizing ideology. She is, as such, a bit at odds with the project of the freshman writing seminar. Between her professional disdain for clarity and her lack of knowledge about what constitutes clear, correct expression, she is peculiarly unfit for the job she is supposed to do. She is also peculiarly contemptuous of the job itself. And so her courses spend more time introducing students to issues she thinks they should be informed about than helping them acquire the tools they need to express themselves clearly on whatever issues they decide matter to them. She spends a great deal of time teaching them how to decide whether a given text is racist, for example, or explaining how one might decode the sexist messages of advertisements, or trying to enlighten her students about the prevalence of ideology and discursive structures of power. They write their papers on these topics, and they do it in the gender-neutral language she demands. They are then graded according to whether, at age eighteen, they adequately mimic the governing gestures and presuppositions of the multiculturalist poststructuralism that is practiced by the critics their teacher admires, and that she avidly and earnestly mimics herself. Meanwhile, her students learn how to parrot a fashionable style of "politicized" thought in lieu of learning how to think and write clearly. They emerge from her class well versed in the twists and turns of identity politics, able to fling about words like "complicit," "deconstruct," and "institutionalization," able to write run-ons whose insights thrill their T.A., capable of thought so deep that it blinds their teacher to the subject-verb agreement disaster that occurs when that thought is written down; blithely unaware that there is a difference between effect and affect, and that that and which are not interchangeable. They emerge, in other words, as expert practitioners of junk English.

In future blogs, I'll deal more directly with the patterns I outline here, and I'll look particularly at the syllabi and course descriptions of some top-ranked English departments. Their content, and their shaky grammar, speak powerfully to my argument here. For now, you will have to content yourself with the imaginary possibilities supplied by two courses that will be taught next fall at an elite Ivy League university: a freshman writing seminar purporting to teach composition by way of a reading of Dr Jekell and Mr. Hyde, and an undergraduate seminar in literary theory that includes, among its scions, one "Homi Babha." With spelling like this, who needs English teachers? I believe in English, and I believe in teaching. But I wonder at moments like this whether the language not might be better off without us.