V is for Vendetta
by Alan MacEachern
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Illustration: Amanda Woodward
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A couple of years ago I was asked by the University of Prince Edward Island to write a short piece about its founding in the early 1970s. The eventual product was a 9,000-word, 48-page booklet - not my magnum opus, but a nice little effort, I thought, and an always welcome addition to my ISBN life list. Fun, interesting, harmless. Until some time later, when I received an e-mail with the subject line "OPEN LETTER TO PROFESSOR ALAN MACEACHERN REGARDING HIS BOOK ...." E-mails can't explode, so like an idiot I opened it. It was a 13,000-word excoriation of my little volume, offering 98 withering, highly rhetorical questions about my meaning, my motivation, my mental state at what seemed like every sentence along the way.
My correspondent was a professor at a Canadian university. It is not often that an author touches a reader so deeply that they respond with a text 50 percent longer than the original, so I was oddly flattered, and replied immediately, briefly and relatively graciously. Bemusement is the first stage of involvement in an academic feud, apparently, followed by incredulity, irritation, being kind of creeped out, outrage, more outrage, feeling (as in Lucky Jim) like spending the next decade on the nemesis's topic so that you can ultimately position yourself to review the person's work unfavourably, growing acceptance, finding the humour in it all and, finally, bemusement.
There is probably no reason to protect my correspondent's anonymity - the e-mail was continually referred to as an OPEN LETTER, after all, and its author threatened to forward it to anyone who sought an opinion of my book - but I will, just in case that person has had second thoughts. Instead, I'll anagram his or her name somewhere later in this column.
Academic disputes are considered rather silly affairs, more Frasier/Niles than Frazier/Ali. The standard quip, attributed to Henry Kissinger, is that academic politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small. Well yes, Mr. Kissinger, rarely do debates in literary theory spiral into the bombing of Cambodia, you have us there. I really hate the use of the Kissinger line, usually by academics themselves, typically in an effort to stifle academic debate. Attempting to minimize a debate's significance is an unfair rhetorical technique, like inconsistent people's parroting of Emerson's line that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.
What's worse about the too-quick quoting of Kissinger is that it misses what truth there is in the statement. The stakes in academic debate are small in the sense that the participants generally retain their livelihood afterward. But this means that the stakes which do exist are purer, and lie in the principles behind the debate itself. It's not like in politics or kickboxing, where an attack on my opponent is a clear advantage to me. If I offer a negative critique of an academic's ideas, whether in the form of a book review, a grant application assessment, a rejoinder in a departmental meeting or a comment over cocktails, the recipient faces the sting of knowing that the assessment may not be self-motivated. It might actually be honest. No wonder disputes develop.
Believe it or not, kind reader, I myself have participated in any number of such squabbles. I'm more or less okay with that, having decided long ago that if at least 10 percent of people aren't in angry disagreement with me at any given time, I'm not really trying. That doesn't make the disputes themselves easier to deal with, by the way: invariably, it's the wrong 10 percent idiotically misinterpreting the wrong 10 percent of something I've said or written.
But perhaps it's time that I mellow, and take this opportunity to patch things up with those I've sparred with over the years. You know who you are. The fact that you are reading this column after all that we've been through is itself an olive branch of sorts, and I would be a fool not to clutch it. You should know that I have always deeply respected your work and person, and even envied your heightened feeling of self-worth and acute sense of personal entitlement. Know above all that I would never have allowed our difference of opinion to have flowered in the first place if I hadn't first considered you my senior - what, after all, is the sense in having an academic nemesis junior to oneself? One looks weak. (My apologies for only drawing this to your attention now.) I hope that we can move beyond all this, that we can develop a professional relationship which has as its foundation this long-shared, intense feeling for one another. For isn't the opposite of hatred not love, but apathy?
Airborne snot.
Alan MacEachern is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario.
