Small Is Beautiful

When Lingua Franca, a plucky review of academic life, abruptly ceased publication in 2001, its readers were left stranded, but who else noticed? Los Angeles may have a book festival and New York may be book country, but few citizens read periodicals devoted to cultural and intellectual matters. Americans, who routinely fork over 30 bucks for a month of television, just as routinely resist paying even a part of that for a year’s subscription to a serious magazine. The numbers reflect the dollars. Television programs get bumped if they draw only millions of viewers. But cultural magazines partake of another world.

A basic category in the National Magazine Awards is for periodicals with circulation “under 200,000.” The term “under” should be emphasized. Many serious periodicals have circulations under 25,000. I used to write for a magazine whose circulation was 1,200. We joked that an American city of 200,000 people might have one subscriber; Chicago’s readers could gather for a meal.

Yet small (if not beautiful) may be important. Small magazines play big roles. Their impact cannot be measured in numbers. No one would calculate the significance of the 1930s Partisan Review by its circulation figures; the same could be said of earlier journals like the Lively Arts or the Masses. Such magazines are passed around; they are commented upon. They serve as places for authors to try out ideas and for readers to find new writers. Invisible on the surface, the small journals are the intellectual arteries of the body politic.

Enter Lingua Franca. In 1990 a former professor of French literature at Yale, Jeffrey Kittay, had the inspired idea to put out a “review of academic life.” The academic establishment supports, of course, many professional magazines and one plump weekly newspaper, the Chronicle of Higher Education, directed mainly to administrators. Kittay realized these periodicals omitted the snap and crackle of academic life: the gossip, the lawsuits, the academic stars and their critics, the trends and counter-trends. He sought to publish a smart and brash journal that would capture the campus sizzle.

In “Quick Studies,” Alexander Star, the editor of Lingua Franca for six of its 11 years, has assembled a representative sampling for the millions of Americans who never subscribed or saw a copy, since the journal never broke the 15,000 circulation barrier. He notes in his introduction that the time was ripe for an irreverent academic journal. Campuses were riven by arguments about the “cultural wars,” political correctness, speech codes, multiculturalism, affirmative action, postmodernism and the like.

Lingua Franca came out fighting with well-written forays that frequently stepped on toes or, at least, raised eyebrows, most famously with the brilliant hoax by Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist. When the opaque pretentiousness of humanist academics irritated the straight-shooting Sokal, he submitted to a cutting-edge cultural studies journal an article of patent nonsense, dense but filled with fashionable references and phrases. Social Text, and its theoretical bigwigs, took the bait and published the piece--titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”--only to be stunned by the next issue of Lingua Franca, in which Sokal confessed he had hoodwinked the editors.

The Sokal brouhaha brought to the fore disputes about recent turns in humanist disciplines, mainly the rise of postmodernism and cultural studies, to which Star devotes the first section of this collection. He includes the pathetic response by the editors of Social Text, as well as another confession, of an “ex-literary critic” who admits that the arid prose and rote politics served up by literary theorists (including himself) killed his love of literature.

Several of the pieces review the jargon of the new academics. To be sure, the phenomenon of English professors who cannot write English is not new, but it has been elevated into a militant program by cultural studies exponents. Its leading figures often appeal to German philosophy to justify their inability to link subject, verb and object; they maintain that the language of humanism must be ungainly to be deep. Lucidity equals superficiality.

Star includes an angry letter by Judith Butler, a UC Berkeley professor of rhetoric, who had been awarded first prize in a “worst writing “ contest. Butler accuses Lingua Franca of cheap and tawdry journalism. Jim Miller, a New School dean, explores the issues in an essay that is almost too magnanimous, “Is Bad Writing Necessary?” The question can be answered simply: No. But this is not to say good writing must be simple-minded.

Lingua Franca ranged far and wide; it took up everything from the troubled relationship between Milan Kundera and his translators to academics as court witnesses and the mysterious murder of a University of Chicago professor. For its readers, every issue offered goodies: news about books and academic life, often featuring a central profile.

Star signals a long essay on Jane Gallop as a Lingua Franca model. Gallop, a feminist professor, was accused of sexual harassment by several female students. Like the other piece in this collection on sexual harassment, the article borders on the surreal. Gallop’s decision not to write a letter of recommendation caused a student to lodge a complaint of harassment. In the lingo of “sexual harassment,” Gallop’s refusal demonstrated an intolerable “power differential.” The university seriously investigated the charge, although it was finally dismissed.

Though Lingua Franca’s profiles were frequently entertaining, and sometimes illuminating, Star may have inadvertently played into the hands of critics who called the journal a People magazine for professors. Often numbingly detailed, the profiles succeeded each other even as the ideas receded. One learns, for instance, that Gallop touched the chair of a student with a bare foot but nothing of her intellectual contribution, except that she was a “famous” feminist scholar.

Profiles like these begin to feed off the American obsession with fame. We revel in details about the famous, the almost famous or the wannabes, but what are the issues? To be sure, Lingua Franca ran challenging pieces, for instance an essay on the highly regarded literary critic Paul de Man who hid his anti-Semitic past. Yet such pieces became scarcer, and it is perhaps indicative that Star leaves that article out of this collection.

What killed Lingua Franca? Several explanations might be offered. For academics, the magazine lacked status. To be published in it brought no credit inasmuch as it was regarded as lowly journalism. To be covered by it was a dubious honor, because you could be not only celebrated but besmirched.

The journal was passed along but few professors wanted to be caught with their name on the subscription label. Lingua Franca existed like Playboy among the Boy Scouts, well-circulated and thumbed but rarely purchased. Moreover, probably as a response to Lingua Franca, the Chronicle of Higher Education added more cultural and intellectual coverage, as did the New York Times.

Finally, Lingua Franca exposed the open secret about small journals of culture and opinion in contemporary America. For all their repute, with one or two exceptions, they do not make a cent.

The New Republics, Harper’s, the Nations, and, of course, the Lingua Francas require dedicated souls with deep pockets to pay their bills. After 11 years, a backer of Lingua Franca decided enough was enough and pulled out. Nearly 280 million Americans did not notice, but some of us mourned its demise.