"For Ashe, race and HIV stand as significant threats to his view of the common good as a society built on twin and intertwining pillars of justice and morality; however, it is exactly his close relationship with these two impediments that allows him to lead by example, blazing a trail towards the common good."
- A nondescript bullshit essay by Rachel Templeton
When I read the title of the article, A Kind Word for Bullshit: The Problem of Academic Writing, my stomach dropped a little. I have always been a good student, especially in writing intensive classes, priding myself in knowing how to give each teacher exactly what he or she wants. In high school I viewed each paper as a complicated juggling game, the balls of teachers' expectations, vocabulary words I had to use, and the prototype of the "perfect five paragraph essay" rising and falling around me, my hands scrambling to keep them all spinning through the air. As is the case for many students, original or intelligent ideas and even my own voice would get lost in the cacophony of what I viewed as academia. And so I would turn out bullshit like the quote above on a fairly regular schedule, draping overly simple ideas in flowery words and covering up holes in my arguments with complicated sentence structures, creating an elaborate conjuring act solely to pull the hood over my teacher's eyes and even my own.
And so I expected Eubanks and Schaeffer to unveil me for the fraud I am, hence my hesitation. Yet their partial acceptance of a type of bullshit as "inevitable when people are attempting to write well" gave me hope. Their separation of academic bullshit into the bullshit of professors (nonprototypical) and that of students (prototypical) seemed to be a bit unfair, however. Though many students do bullshit papers in the sense of writing on books/subjects of which they have no or very little knowledge, I would categorize most students in the first category of "earnestness...earnest tedium". So often do students, like me, hide use academic writing as a shield to hide behind, to appear intelligent, and to impress professors. This does not differ from the academics of the Modern Language Association, who employ academic writing to "enhance the reputation, or ethos, of the writer" centered around the reward system of tenures and grants. The academic environment of students is similarly constructed, not around tenures, but grades. Bullshit exists and thrives in both arenas, and as Eubanks and Schaeffer adeptly argue, is a necessary staple of both arenas as well.
