No question is more central to our identity as scholars than the question of what counts as scholarship. The boundaries around the scholarly enterprise must, of course, be drawn generously. We even benefit if they are drawn somewhat ambiguously. However, we can not fail to draw boundaries somewhere if we are to assert any sort of collective identity. Surely the meaning of scholarship evaporates if we are unwilling to entertain the notion that some things are not scholarship. And if we are to draw a line, where? What are the minimal requirements for something to count as scholarship? What will we accept and reject?

These questions surfaced for many communication scholars when they read the January, 1997 issue of Text and Performance Quarterly (vol. 17, no. 1). The journal contained several experimental articles that struck raw nerves across the discipline. Highly charged messages surged across the discipline's largest electronic mailing list and a panel was hurriedly organized for the next national conference. When we step back from the battles over a few controversial articles, however, we recognize that the fires they fuel are part of a broader conflagration in the meaning of scholarship in the postmodern age. There is nothing singular about the experimentation in Text and Performance Quarterly. Indeed the simultaneous vitality of the arts, humanities, and sciences in the late 20^th Century has encouraged scholars to test the edges of established scholarly forms and methods as never before. Some see these new explorations as the result of a philosophic "turn" in the nature of scholarship, while others dismiss the most avant garde of the postmodern, postcolonial, and cultural studies as academic fads made possible only by the financial subsidies of the more established sciences and social sciences. Whatever their origin, these new forms do encourage us to address the question of what we are willing to count as scholarship. That may be their most lasting contribution.

We are, I believe, best served as an intellectual community when there are counterbalances, however weak, to the proliferation of scholarly forms. Although experiments that blur the lines between disciplines are desirable, some experiments will be more successful than others. Therefore we must also develop a critical stance from which we may evaluate our experiments. We may evaluate along several lines, but the most basic question must be: Is this scholarship? Many fine things may count as great art, fine literature, even good journalism, and still not be counted as scholarship. So where are we to draw the line? My own reflections on these questions lead me to pose several minimal standards for what might be counted as scholarship. My goal is less a definitive statement and more an invitation for dialogue.

Scholarship does more than evoke feelings.

One of the most striking defenses for the Text and Performance Quarterly pieces (particularly a controversial one entitled "Sextext") was that they were scholarship because they were "evocative." As I started to explore the world of the new experimental forms, especially those in the area of "personal ethnography," I found that this was not an isolated defense. Over and over one reads of "evocative possibilities." Scholarly value is attributed to a work simply because its personal narratives evoke powerful emotional responses. It may seek to elicit feelings of loss or dislocation. Sometimes, the narrative aims at evoking sympathy or pity. In other cases, the narrative seems designed to shock or offend. Sometimes such discourse is defended on the grounds that it is a transgressive challenge to a hegemonic oppressor. This sounds good, or at least it is a fashionable thing to say, but it is worth asking if that alone makes it scholarship?

The problem, of course, is that nearly everything is evocative in some way. Being evocative is a laudable quality for artistic expression, for political speech, and, yes, even, for scholarship. But it is not a defining quality for scholarship. I question whether we should call it scholarship even when the narrative evokes something akin to an empathic appreciation of the other’s emotional experience. Again, such an appreciation would be a sufficient goal for a poem or some other artistic form, but it seems to me that scholars have always attempted to do something more. Scholarship, it seems to me, deals not so much with direct emotional experience as with our attempt to reflect upon and understand our experiences. Thus, one minimum criterion for scholarship is that it goes beyond the simple elicitation of feeling.

Scholarship goes beyond self-justification.

The motives of scholars are rarely pure. No less than others, we are driven by lust, envy, pride, and other dark energies. Most forms of scholarship develop traditions and procedures that simultaneously acknowledge and guard against such motives. In the words of an old Hebrew proverb: "Out of the envy of scholars, wisdom grows."

Thus we can value Bernoulli’s achievements in hydrodynamics during the 1700’s without having to deal with the fact that they were driven in part by a long conflict with a petulant, jealous father who, at one point, attempted to steal his son’s greatest work (see Guillen, 1995, for an accessible account of Bernoulli’s trials and triumphs). In our own century we can glean some insight from Foucault’s work without pausing too long to wonder how his intense concern with power and surveillance might be related to the fact that his personal sexual tastes put him outside social norms and, on occasion, outside the law. In each case, there is a distance between substantive argument and personal motive. The substantive argument can be evaluated without reference to the personal motives of its originator.

But what are we to do when the scholarly form itself is unabashedly personal and reflexive? What are we to make of a book like Jane Gallop’s (1997) Feminist accused of sexual harassment? In it, she attempts to use her own experiences as a vantage point from which to critique and expand feminist notions of sexual conduct. Yet the book is also a transparent, painful attempt by Prof. Gallop to justify having sex with a succession of undergraduate and graduate students. She claims that her behavior is consistent with her role as a teacher and a feminist. The problem is that the reader can never quite get beyond the fact that she is trying to justify an obvious violation of both good judgment and university policy. When she exclaims that her sexual preference is "graduate students," it is difficult to focus on a substantive argument about feminist theory. And when she dismisses the concept of a feminist sexual harasser is a contradiction in terms, it is easy to question whether there is much to her position beyond the obvious attempt to justify her actions. In short, she is trapped in a form that prevents her from separating personal motives and broader argument. As a result, our reaction to her arguments turns on whether we agree with her personal motives. The Gallop case is a dramatic, but hardly isolated, example of how the new forms seduce people into thinking that self-justification counts as scholarship. One may certainly be justified by scholarship, but the scholarship of self-justification is no scholarship at all.

Scholarship transcends group advocacy.

Groups as well as individuals, of course, push their agenda in the name of scholarship. Scholarship may certainly have the effect of supporting a group’s goals, but it is suspect when it has the goal of advocating a group’s interests. Salman Rushdie (1997) expressed the danger this way:

The co-option of scholarship into political posture poses an additional threat. As I noted in a previous piece (Parks, 1994), casting one’s work as the voice of a group leaves it vulnerable to rejection on the basis of group identity. Thus, to take the stance that women speak "in a different voice" and to advocate methods that are supposedly unique to that voice, not only locks women into a limited conception of their own communicative abilities, but makes it easy to reject the work on the basis of not applying to men. There is no more chilling example of the corrosive effects of political advocacy on scholarship than the case of Albert Einstein and the Nazis. During the 1930’s the Nazis pressured German universities to stop teaching Einstein’s theories on the grounds that they were "Jewish physics." One of the true believers, physicist Philipp Lenard, claimed that science "is racial and conditioned by blood" (See Guillen, 1995). Upon realizing how thoroughly German physics had been captured by the Nazi political agenda, Einstein wrote his famous letter to Roosevelt in the late summer of 1939 proposing the construction of a nuclear bomb.

Surely this is an extreme case, but do we need to look very far to find less extreme examples of exactly the same logic? No. What about those who claim that science is male and paternalistic? What about those who claim special voices for special groups? What about those who demand that only members of a group get to talk about it? Those who make these claims are entering an intellectual minefield. Better, I think, to separate scholarship and political advocacy. Scholarship may provide links in a sequence of political argument, but scholarship run by political argument is fraught with too many risks. A group may benefit from scholarship, but scholarship with the explicit agenda of serving the goals of a group is automatically suspect.

Scholarship makes appeals beyond personal experience.

Many of the new scholarly forms privilege the personal experiences of their authors. These include some types of feminist methodology and personal or authoethnography. These methodological experiments may yet yield something of value, but I think there is also cause for concern. Consider the case for autoethnography as an example. It usually begins with the observation that, in Crawford’s (1996) words, "…ethnography becomes autoethnographic because the ethnographer is unavoidably in the ethnography in one way or another." We might grant this, but still decide that the phrase "one way or another" is a critical one. That is, it matters how one positions herself or himself, what tools one uses or fails to use to acknowledge or reach beyond personal experience. As the noted British historian A.L. Rowse (1972) observed, "though one cannot jump out of one’s skin, one can to a certain extent think oneself out of one’s skin." But for Crawford, as most other advocates of "the new ethnography" there is "no choice and no escape." Apparently it is futile to try to delimit or transcend personal experience. So we might as well just give in. Indeed we should celebrate it.

The immediate problem with this view, of course, is that it completely denies two of the traditional goals of ethnographic work. Anthropologist David Jacobson (1991) in his book Reading Ethnography, observes that, while the new reflexive ethnographies may function relatively well as tools for discovery, they are incapable of serving as tools for verification and analysis. They provide description, even thick description in the Geertzian sense, but they possess no mechanism for comparative judgment. Nor are they successful as tools for analysis in the sense that social anthropologist Meyer Fortes ([1953], 1970) talked about it. Analysis goes beyond description by breaking up the empirical sequence of social relations and grouping them "in categories of general import"—in other words, it draws on theoretic concepts to make sense of descriptions in a broader way. And indeed we see little attention to verification and analysis in autoethnography, sociopoetics, and the other new reflexive forms. In Ellis and Bochner’s (1996) Composing Ethnography, for example, most of the readings are either very personal descriptions of experience or metatheoretic essays about the nature of ethnography itself. There is no interest in analysis in the broader scholarly sense.

Again, I wish to make my position clear. I do believe that personal experience has a place in scholarship. But it is a starting point, not an end point. As Jacobson (1991, p. 117) demonstrates, the more reflexive passages in recent anthropological field studies usually "make sense only in reference to or in the context of the ethnographer’s more conventional ethnography." Political scientist Aaron Wildavsky (1993, p. 166) put it this way:

In his Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera (1996) introduces us to Bibi whose desire is to write a book. Bibi has no idea of how to go about her project, but believes that she should write a book about "the world as she sees it." Bibi’s desire typifies what Kundera calls "graphomania"—the mania for writing books. He observes:

Let us not delude ourselves by pretending, as does Barthes (1972), that the text is created solely in the reading and not by the author’s intent. Of course, readers interpret the text. That much is obvious. But it should be equally obvious that readers generally assume that the author had something in mind. Often I want to know what it is. Indeed I want authors to have confronted the questions I pose above before they request my precious time as reader or listener. As the poet, James Russell Lowell said, "Blessed are they who have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it."

Scholarship utilizes theory in non-cosmetic ways.

When I first articulated some of these ideas at a conference last year, I accompanied them with a bawdy little poem I had written. It was a not very subtle allegory in which statistical data analysis was cast in sexual terms. But mostly it was a bawdy little poem that I shall not repeat here. At the time, it provided me with a foil for my other points. Surely, I noted, those who wished to advocate the most permissive of scholarly boundaries would have to defend my little ditty as scholarship as well. After all, did it not make extensive use of technical statistical terms? Did it not draw upon deeper scientific values and presuppositions such as parsimony and replication?

The problem, of course, was that the technical terminology and theoretic allusions did not drive the commentary. They were merely chimera, added mostly for my amusement. By the same token, one might question whether the various concepts and theories referenced in some of the new methodologies are actually called upon to perform any intellectual work. In some cases, they appear to have been included simply to show membership in an academic or social movement. Citation patterns and conceptual discussions become more like school songs than real tools for analysis. They do nothing other than create a patina of scholarship. Theoretic concepts are tools in real scholarship, not cosmetics.

The tendency to confuse cosmetic and real uses of theoretic concepts, of course, makes it possible for people who know nothing about an area to create the chimera of scholarship. Allan Sokal’s now legendary undressing of the editors of Social Text could not have occurred if the editors had known anything about physics or if they had been able to use their own concepts at anything beyond the cliché level (For a brief account of the Sokal affair, see http://www.daily.umn.edu/daily/1997/04/14/news/sokal/).

Obviously the use of higher order concepts takes many forms. As a working scientist I am most familiar with the uses of concepts in science, but that is hardly the only model. Not long ago, I was struck with just how varied the uses of theoretic concepts might be when I came across a lecture given in 1946 by H.W. Garrod, then already one of the elders of the classics department at Oxford. The lecture was titled "Scholarship: Its meaning and value." In it Garrod, in one of those wonderfully open phrases, said that true scholarship was always "conscious of relation to a previous art." I am still thinking about this definition. I am not certain of all of its implications, but I am rather certain that one could not have a "conscious relation to a previous art" without using a theoretic tradition in a lively, genuinely engaging way.

Scholarship admits to reasoned criticism:

Mark Edmundson, who teaches English at the University of Virginia and is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine (1997), recently observed that: "cultural studies programs rarely work because no matter what you propose by way of analysis things tend to bolt downhill toward an uncritical discussion of students’ tastes, into what they like and do not like."

Much the same state of affairs often exists, I would venture, in discussions among faculty and graduate students. They, too, often disintegrate into conflicting expressions of personal taste. This is a natural consequence of the postmodern turn. After all, if no narratives are privileged, how are we to adjudicate conflicting claims? How are we to evaluate the claims of the "new ethnographies"? They certain make claims—implicit though they may be. How are we to judge? Because they are creatures of a single individual’s unique experience, one can not challenge them with others’ experiences. The retort would simply be, "well, we have different experiences." Not much to work with there. Or, one could argue that the autoethnographer had deluded himself or herself. But that might not get very far either. The autoethnographer can simply say, "Hey, you were not there. I know what I experienced." Therapy may be about the only vehicle for challenging such claims (T.B. Farrell, personal communication, November 21, 1997). Thus, short of raising very personal questions about the mental health of the autoethnographer, challenges inevitably grind to a logical dead end. I could continue this line of demonstration, but the point is that we should be suspicious of any academic form that simultaneously makes knowledge claims and resists reasoned critique.

There is one additional problem with methodologies that depend so heavily on personal narrative. It is impolite, even dangerous, to criticize them. After all, we are not simply challenging ideas or observations, but in many cases the very identity of the author. It would be almost impossible to say anything critical about these new forms without seeming to attack the author’s personhood. To make matters even worse, a deceitful autoethnographer can take advantage of this situation. She or he can attempt to discredit the critic, not by substantively engaging critic’s arguments, but rather by telling stories about how it feels to be victimized. And when the autoethnographer claims to represent a marginalized group, she or he may use accusations of sexism or racism to silence even the most reasonable of critics. The discourse soon spirals off into a vicious rhetoric of mutual victimization. It is no wonder, then, that there has been so little criticism of new academic forms like sociopoetics, autoethnography, and feminist methodology. The forms themselves preclude reasoned criticism and, because of that, we should be hesitant to treat them as legitimate scholarship.

Summary

I am certainly not suggesting that the fruits of intellectual and artistic labor are wasted unless they culminate in scholarship. They may be tremendously valuable as works of art, as journalism, as political manifestos, as novels, plays, poetry, illustrations, and as many other things. For example, classic works of cinema verite, such as Federick Wiseman’s "High School" or Robert Drew’s "Primary" are challenging and provocative. They are revealing visions of people in time and place. And though neither pretends to be scholarship, each has served as a starting point for genuine scholarly inquiry.

Perhaps the most lasting contribution of the more controversial new academic forms will be that they stimulate a renewed discussion of the nature of scholarship. My goal has been to contribute to that discussion by suggesting a set of identifiers broad enough to cover the widest range of our endeavors. . To me, this is a starting point:

References:

Crawford, L. (1996). Personal ethnography. Communication Monographs, 63, 158-170.

Edmundson, M. (1997, September). On the uses of liberal education: As lite entertainment for bored college students. Harper’s Magazine, pp. 39-49.

Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. (1996). Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Farrell, T.B. (1997, November 21). Personal communication.

Fortes, M. ([1953] 1970). Time and social structure and other essays. New York: Humanities Press.

Gallop, J. (1997). Feminist accused of sexual harassment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Garrod, H.W. (1946). Scholarship: Its meaning and value. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guillen, M. (1995). Five equations that changed the world: The power and poetry of mathematics. New York: Hyperion.

Jacobson, D. (1991). Reading ethnography. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Kundera, M. (1996). The book of laughter and forgetting. New York: HarperCollins.

Parks, M.R. (1995). Ideology in interpersonal communication: Beyond the couches, talkshows, and bunkers. In B.R. Burleson (Ed.), Communication Yearbook 18. Newbury Park, CA.: Sage.

Parks, M.R. (1982). Ideology in interpersonal communication: Off the couch and into the world. In M. Burgoon (Ed.), Communication Yearbook 5, (pp. 79-107). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Rowse, A.L. (1972). The scholar and responsibility to the public. In G. Smith (ed.), The professor and the public (pp. 43-72). (The Franklin Memorial Lectures). Detroit: Wayne State University.

Rushdie, S. (1997). Index on Censorship (Quoted in September, 1997 Harper’s Magazine, p. 22).

Schlesinger, A.M., Jr. (1992). The disuniting of America. New York: W.W. Norton.

Wildavsky, A. (1993). Craftways: On the organization of scholarly work. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.