This week's Chronicle of Higher Education features a long and insightful piece by University of Michigan law professor William Ian Miller. Miller's subject is academic pomposity, and his article is an excerpt from his promisingly titled forthcoming book, Faking It. You need a subscription to read the whole article, alas. But here are some excerpts that give the general gist and tone of the piece:

Role playing, performing our parts, is what we do; we can hardly blame one another for playing roles. Suppose, however, the role is flavored in such a way that the player can be described as pretentious. We all pretend, but that does not make us pretentious, or even pretenders in a bad sense, or in the way of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Pretension can take the form of adopting a style of something you aspire to be, and may eventually be, but are not yet --Ýthus the grad student who postures as a prof. A variant version has the middling prof posturing as a prof of importance. He differs from the grad student because his case holds no promise of the pretense's ever converging with reality. The third in the series is the prof of importance who postures as a prof of importance.

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So distasteful is the style, given democratic assumptions, why on earth would any American adopt it? Here is one reason that transcends the cultural: I have found over the years that students tend to confuse pomposity with knowledge, nastiness with smarts. Students thus force otherwise indifferently kind and modest teachers into being mean windbags to get the respect they crave. It may be less that pompous power generates toadies than that toadyism generates pompous power.

Pretentious people seem to inhabit the role in a unique way. They are fully immersed, but not in the manner of people who lose themselves in a role out of exuberance, dedication, addiction, or simplicity. One of the peculiar forms of this pretentious style is that though these people never put the role aside, they also never seem to relax into it.

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There is no way to separate the sociological from the moral here. .... Pomposity seems to be an occupational hazard of academics more than of most professions ....

Perhaps it says something about me that I found Miller's attempts to place professorial pretension in a historical and philosophical context less interesting and compelling than I did his rare willingness to simply come right out and say that the professoriate is by nature and by culture a deeply self-impressed, troublingly pedantic lot. Giving the inflated airs of intellectually dishonest academics (for pretension and pomposity are forms of intellectual dishonesty) a history and a context are, I suppose, part of the work of the person who documents it. But at the same time, that work comes dangerously close to sounding like rationalization--particularly when Miller suggests, as he does in the quote above, that it is somehow students' fault when professors fail to treat them with proper respect and fail to inhabit their discipline with proper modesty.

Nevertheless, it's invigorating to see the bloviating that is so common in academe called what it is, and it's doubly so to see that essential act of honesty appearing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. It will take much more than an article to bring Miller's point home to those who most need to grasp it (to those about whom he writes). Academics' peculiar affection for satirical campus fiction shows just how far a conviction of one's inherent superiority to everyone else can go to make even the cruel, slow skewering of a David Lodge, a Richard Russo, or a Malcolm Bradbury feel somehow complimentary; likewise, their blithe ability to dismiss the problem of academe's ideological uniformity as so much conservative whining shows how deep feelings of personal entitlement and contempt for difference run among America's faculties.

One of the biggest reasons why academics are so prone to posturing is that they are not really accountable for what they say. There is an element of the playground bully in the prof who stands before a class of eighteen year-olds alternately pontificating about poetry and politics. Miller's piece calls for an accountability that has been lacking, and, crucially, it makes that call from within the academy. Miller can't be dismissed as an outsider who does not know whereof he speaks. He knows all too well.