And they call themselves educated

The recent round of shin-kicking between Harvard president Lawrence Summers and Prof. Cornel West ended with two losers. There was a brief moment of general surprise--you mean a college president is willing to question the off-campus dabblings and anemic scholarship of one of his star professors? But then the status quo reasserted itself. Judging by the bland comments finally emanating from Harvard, Mr. West could cut another two or three rap albums and serve as Al Sharpton's next campaign chairman without fearing a reprimand.

Still, the spat had one good effect: It raised a question about what passes for scholarship on campus these days, and it suggested a way of answering it. If any college president across the country called his humanities professors in for a chat, asking them to bring along what they've been producing during their long hours of nonclassroom time, what would end up on the president's desk?

Well, corsets, for one thing. "To read corsets and women's writing," states Washington State University's Wendy Dasler Johnson, "I propose that we engage formal rhetoric as an heuristic, so that through both rhetorical and feminist frames we may read something of how discourse shapes the feminine subject." This lovely sentence appears in "Cultural Rhetorics of Women's Corsets," from the recent issue of Rhetoric Review, one of many scholarly journals where professorial writings appear, padding out résumés for tenure committees and claiming the mantle of scholarship.

Ms. Johnson's article is not atypical. A slog through the library stacks confirms that humanities and social-science periodicals are flush with theory-driven jargon, political posturing and fashionable cant. True, the American Historical Review suffers an occasional outbreak of conventional humanism, like "Religion Makes a Difference: Clerical and Lay Cultures in the Courts of Northern Italy, 1000-1300." But it must share journal space with "The Threads of Class at La Virgen: Misrepresentation and Identity at a Mexican Textile Mill, 1918-1935." And "From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History."

The scholarly periodical called Violence Against Women promises a righteous sense of mission, and it does not disappoint. It features "Boys Against Girls: The Structural and Interpersonal Dimensions of Violent Patriarchal Culture in the Lives of Young Men." And "Control and the Dalkon Shield," which begins with this grabber: "This article differs from other accounts of the Dalkon Shield by establishing a historicized analysis, which deconstructs discourses surrounding it and their effects."

Meanwhile, the University of Texas' Journal of the History of Sexuality offers "Recording the Unspeakable: Masturbation in the Diary of William Drummond, 1657-1659," a trenchant study of a Scotsman with more than time on his hands.

The strange language of such writings comes from French theorists, whose ideas about "narratives," "discourses," "hegemonies" and "silenced voices" have invaded nearly every humanities discipline. The Journal of Appalachian Studies sounds harmless enough. But no. "Community and Resistance in the Lives of Appalachian Girls" appears just after "Narrating Conflict: Women and Coal in Southern West Virginia."
What about Sport History Review? How hijacked can that be? At the top of the table of contents is "Conflicting Femininities: The Discourse on the Female Body and the Physical Education of Girls in National Socialism," which promises to show that "the discourse on the physical education of girls and women is based on theoretical approaches of constructing the gender order." D'oh!

The granddaddy of such theorizing is the Modern Language Association. Its journal, the PMLA, is notorious for its multipage collections of conference-paper titles, such as "Stalking the Disney Mouse: Doing Disney Studies" and "Perpetual States of Sodomy, I: Historical Contexts." True, there are papers devoted to Middle English literature. But not many. Why waste time with fusty research when you can be writing "Obscenity: Concealment, Divulgence and (self-)Censorship" or "Edith Wharton Goes Goth"?

The American Journal of Sociology may be published by the redoubtable University of Chicago, but it is not immune to cultural trends. "Social Capital at Work: Networks and Employment at a Phone Center" sounds close to trivial or silly, but it may provide value. Close by, though, three of Mr. West's colleagues at Harvard spend almost 40 pages on "The Instability of Androgynous Names: The Symbolic Maintenance of Gender Boundaries."

For scholarly sobriety, there's always the Social Psychology Quarterly, on the pages of which two recent researchers reported on "Gender Specific Use of the Domestic Telephone." With guarded conclusiveness, the pair determined that "the duration of telephone calls is affected not only by the receiver's gender but also by variations in topic and relationship."

But is such dogmatism and obscurantism really that pervasive? Here, next to the photocopier--why not try a random test? Ah, it's MIT's Journal of Interdisciplinary History, featuring "Economic Change and Infant Mortality in England, 1580-1837," a worthy and impressive article. And "Re-Enlistment Patterns of Civil War Soldiers," narrow but not arcane.

But what is that volume just beneath? Last October's Text and Performance Quarterly, serving up "Staging Stain Upon the Snow: Performance as a Critical Enfleshment of Whiteness." The abstract begins: "Scholars in the emerging field of critical white studies . . ." Meanwhile, an abandoned volume of Theory and Society opens to "Structure, Agency, and the Nicaraguan Revolution" and "High-Cost Activism and The Worker Household: Interests, Commitment, and the Costs of Revolutionary Activism in a Philippine Plantation Region."

What is going on here? A scandal, really. And drivel, mostly. Millions of dollars exchange hands every fall, between anxious parents and the clerks in college bursar's offices, so that young Jasons or Heathers may sit at the feet of "scholars" who will teach them for a precious few weeks. But the real action in the university isn't teaching: It's the fight for preferment among faculty members, and the coin of the realm is published "scholarship"--even of the most ersatz sort.
When The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier made his way through Cornel West's books a few years ago, he dismissed them as "tedious, slippery, . . . sectarian, humorless, pedantic, and self-endeared." The same words could apply to a depressingly large amount of scholarship in the humanities. Indeed, Mr. Wieseltier's most pointed dismissal of Mr. West could usefully be stamped across much current academic output in a kind of surgeon-general warning: "almost completely worthless."