I’m going to disagree strongly, Orson. Here’s why.

1) If you read an upbeat profile piece about some up-and-coming scholars or about some allegedly exciting work in an existing academic field, and you disagree in specific with the profile, a specific critical response should have one of two attributes, preferably both. You should either know something specific about the scholars in question or the field, or if you don’t know very much but are wary about the profile, you should surround your response with some degree of modesty and reserve, perhaps even a touch of kindness.

Let’s say I read a positive profile in Discover Magazine of some evolutionary psychologists whose work I’m very skeptical about. I could write a blog post in response because: a) I’ve somewhat familiar with the work in question based on direct reading; b) I’ve read some scholarly criticisms of that work; c) I’m familiar with some of the alternative scholarly frameworks for dealing with the same issues and ideas.

If none of those things were true–say, I was just suspicious because the profile seemed improbably positive and I hear some bad things from people I trust about the field of evolutionary psychology–the only thing that would be appropriate to focus on would be the article itself. E.g., that I prefer a more balanced approach even in profiles, that there must surely be some critics somewhere worth including.

That Bauerlein doesn’t enter this conversation with a roughly similar view is bad because these strike me as baseline expectations not just for academics but for journalists, essayists, opinion writers. The seriousness and intensity of an attack imposes a proportionally more and more heavy weight for knowing your shit. The more flip or lightweight your understanding of something you’re attacking is, the less entitled you are to massive amounts of sound and fury. We all sneer at things we think we don’t like, sometimes in blogs or other writing–but saying, “This should be abolished, these young scholars are worthless, this work is so horrible that not only will I not read it, it should never be read by anyone”? That’s serious business, and should be especially serious business for a scholar who rarely misses an opportunity to complain about how his students and colleagues have no commitment to rigor and know nothing of the actual content of texts. If Bauerlein were Pierre Bayard, he might have a principled case to make that not reading things is ok. He’s not.

2) This is also serious business for anyone who is a teacher. I don’t care if you’re a stern teacher or a permissive one, a taskmaster or a gentle friend: public cruelty, brag and abuse directed at students who are doing hard work within an established tradition of inquiry is never acceptable, particularly not for scoring some cheap points while mugging to the peanut gallery. Yes, it’s going to happen somewhere out there in that great big bubbling stew we call the Internet, but it shouldn’t happen anywhere that we value, care about or participate in. A teacher who is indifferent to that kind of behavior is like a doctor indifferent to an unlicensed back-alley quack performing unhygienic surgery.