Reflecting on Invisible Adjunct's recent bout of reader-induced crankiness, Margaret Soltan makes some trenchant observations about how closely some academics resemble internet trolls:

Years ago I took part in a summer seminar for English professors. I came to call one of the participants The Lighthouse. A punishingly doctrinaire feminist, The Lighthouse would swivel her eyes from one discussant to the next the way the lights of a lighthouse circle a harbor. All utterances were subject to her harsh surveillance, and when she spotted heterodoxy she came down on you like a ton of bricks.

That trigger-happy hyper-irritability has become pretty endemic in the profession, which is why everybodyís busy not stepping on anyoneís toes. Reason not the need to be offended; rather count the ways: race, class, and gender, to be sure, but ooh la la... body size, disability, accent, piercings, age, sexual orientation, nationality... The act of taking personal offense - rather than accepting in a calm way sometimes harsh but nonetheless impersonal criticism of ideas you may cherish - has become the way humanities professors deflect actual argument about something. Oneís identity trumps any subject.

Being petulantly offended as a way of shutting someone up whose ideas confuse or challenge you is an act of passive personalizing; deciding to go on the attack is often a gesture of active personalizing of the other. Thus IA complains that sheís tempted to shut down her site not because of forceful but non-personalized disagreements from readers, but rather because of ìanother type of response altogether: the kind of comment that seems to take issue with the very existence of this weblog. This type of comment generally combines wholesale dismissal of the site and its purpose with heavy-duty psychologizing about the motives of anyone who would run, and of anyone who would participate in, a site called Invisible Adjunct.î

As Vladimir Nabokov was among the earliest to complain, being psychologized by other people is maddening for two reasons:

1. The content of the analysis is numbingly stupid.

2. The act of psychologizing another intends to be superior, intimidating, and chilling of further discourse.

All thoughtful reflective people doubt their own motives, question their intellectual clarity and their moral virtue, have a certain healthy degree of dislike for themselves, see themselves as sort of cheap and ridiculous in a lot of ways, etc. Youíd have to be strong as an ox - someone like Christopher Hitchens or Andrew Sullivan, say - to sustain all the damage that wounding, searching words from the blogosphere that target very precisely your self-doubts and self-dislikes can do to you. You want to retain your vulnerability, your openness to being wrong or small-minded or whatever; you also want to assert the privilege of making some moral judgments, despite your own lack of moral perfection. The claim of others that because you are such and such a type of person (the act of psychologizing you, that is) you cannot make moral statements, or that you are condemned to false moralizing, can have a powerfully undermining effect on your confidence in your own perceptions. Itís your very seriousness, your very willingness to consider that you may be wrong or out of line, that Palcontents recognize and exploit terribly.

Perhaps that's an overstatement, but there are many, many days when what I read about academe and what I live within it make it seem otherwise. Just one of the many reasons I'm looking for nonacademic work.