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Clarification for Book Review
Cary Nelson, Stephen Watt
To the Editor:In the course of his witty but unsympathetic review of our recent book, Academic Keywords, in the November–December issue, Michael Kaufman makes two assumptions, one implicit and one explicit, that we feel obliged to correct.He accuses our anonymous sources of cowardice for not urging us to print their names. Perhaps Kaufman assumes they are tenured faculty. In fact, most of our sources are secretaries, administrative aides, academic professionals, part-time or adjunct faculty, and graduate students. They have no job security, and they took considerable risk in providing us with documents that could easily be traced to them. In some cases, our informants were so vulnerable that we developed a second, protected source for the same document. Kaufman’s accusation against them is unwarranted and unfair.
Kaufman explicitly faults us for using "undocumented anecdotal material" in many of the essays. But information from interviews is a standard research resource. He mentions the "superstars" entry, for which every story has a second source; he cites the "moonlighting" entry, based on events at the University of Illinois, for which we have confirmation from several faculty members. In fact, the most extensive use of "anecdotal" evidence is in the essay on sexual harassment, first published in a shorter version in Academe. Not only did we develop at least one additional source for each of these stories; we also identified every individual, victims and perpetrators, involved in the sometimes harrowing events described. Indeed, narratives in such cases are typically identified as "victim testimony," not "undocumented anecdotal material." Cary Nelson
(English)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Stephen Watt
(English)
Indiana University
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