you are a very clear writer

I wrote this paper proposal about mountaintop removal for Political Ecology. We had to post it on the "moodle" -which is akin to an academic facebook kind of thing. Then we have been assigned folks for whom we have to review their proposals (and folks in turn review ours) and post them to the public forum. The two people who reviewed my proposal both stated, "clearly written and I can see how you’re writing this with broader audiences in mind" and "what you were writing about, it was clear and accessible. Which i think is quite important if you are going to be writing as an activist in the future"... Is it weird to find that insulting? Granted, the second quote came from a gal for whom that was only redeeming quality she could find in my proposal, so maybe I am perceiving this as a backhanded compliment.

But there is a broader tension here. This really irritates me. Why is academia so insular? Unless you're Foucault and have your own "authentic" voice, why would one want to obscure their ideas in a bunch of mumbo jumbo? And why does it feel like an insult to be clear? It's as if being clear and being a complex thinker are mutually exclusive. And why does this feel insulting to the activist community? Activists are some of the smartest people I know. Really. And I'm in rooms full of smarty-pants all day long, many of whom wouldn't know how to tie their own shoes but could tell you all bout the intellectual trajectory of Kant, Hegel... yawn. And for my academic friends, this is not ubiquitously you. But, my goodness, sometimes I want to strangle the people who perpetuate the "ivory tower" insularity that I think plagues the left academic world. No wonder we're largely (but not totally) irrelevant.

Rant rant rant.