The humanities and social sciences are sinking into linguistic obscurity. This complaint is largely the province of conservatives, who relentlessly parade excerpts from current scholarly books and journals and ask, “Is this English?”

“Can an educated person ever hope to understand the author’s intent?” moans Roger Kimball of the New Criterion as he heaps contumely on the “jargon- laden opacity” infecting much of modern literary studies. Charles Sykes’s Profscam offers a virtual catalogue of prose tortured in the name of science. Jacques Barzun of Columbia University argues that much of contemporary historical analysis is unreadable. In political science, my own field, the norm of jargonistic incomprehensibility is so entrenched that graduate methodology seminars are informally described as training to decipher journal articles (“professional literacy”). The Ivory Tower and the Tower of Babel are becoming indistinguishable.