What sucks about grad school

All semester long, I've been pissed off, and today I get to vent. I have finished the Management of Information Organizations course at Florida State University (LIS5408). This morning I completed the course evaluation, in which I critiqued the textbook. For this blog I revised and added some material.

The course introduced me to the manager's point of view of workplaces, which was good. More interesting was that the course told a story of labor-management relations. Unfortunately, to detect the story I had to read between the lines...
The focus of our discussion shall be the textbook:...
The writing is plodding, mind-numbingly pedestrian and verbose. If those guys knew how to stay away from the passive voice, they could cut the length of the book by about 10 percent. The publisher could ship less bulk and get the same retail price, so it would be a win-win for everyone!

But seriously, the textbook is symptomatic of academic writing; if the pages of all the academic journals were cut out and laid out like slabs of parquet, the result would be a sprawling morass of tangled, tortured and flaccid phrasing. Like I said, I had to read between the lines.

Merle Haggard once sang,

``I've got no reason for living right/And there's no other way to forget/I know down deep inside me, I'm man enough to change/But I've got no reason to quit.''

Unfortunately, academia must live right (it must communicate), and it definitely has a reason to quit (the bad writing, that is). But is it man enough to change?

You may think that is ridiculous, and you certainly have a right to that opinion. In my opinion the library textbook publisher Neal-Schuman is a ridiculous, complacent, self-satisfied and self-important sick joke.
The purveyors of gas-baggery and in-group verbiage are trying to pretend that their shit doesn't stink. In fact it does, and in the middle of a 30-page chapter they foul a room so badly that I cannot discern the pumpkin bread baking in the next room. For example,

Each work program has a unit justification, which states that program's general objectives and its scope of activities. Once you know the budget allocation, an allotment system helps assure that the manager may redirect funds if the work programs change. (p. 432)

And how about,

...(S)ensitive topics, such as disagreements with a supervisor's actions, probably should be discussed orally (with considerable supporting detail). Distinguish clearly between fact and opinion, being neither subservient nor truculent. (p. 288)

Imagine that for 500 pages. Gack and double gack.
Maybe it's just me; maybe 11 years of journalism under hard-nosed editorial scrutiny left me with very high standards.
Nah.
Is this enough, however, to make me sympathize with the anti-intellectual stance of some right-wingers?
It doesn't come close.

The book is ``Management Basics for Information Professionals,'' second edition, by G. Edward Evans and Patricia Layzell Ward, published by Neal-Schuman