Tag: academia and scholars

The revolution will not be on PLANET

Lisa Schweitzer

I said my own piece a fair bit ago about why I left PLANET, which came down to: I got tired of getting yelled at via email for disagreeing with people. Disagreeing with people is this thing I do when, you know, people are wrong. People tell me I’m wrong all the time, and I have yet to die from it, but apparently others are more delicate.

Our latest blow-up on PLANET seems likely to be the death of the thing, if what people are forwarding me is any indicator of what’s going on.

This particular go around seems to be: A sexist joke gets posted (why? o why?), somebody says, hey, why is this on a professional, scholarly listserv, it bugs me that this stuff gets posted, and then the full-blown entitled-punish-the-woman internets: wuuuuuuuuh if you don’t like jokes about your gender on a professional listserv whynn’t ya jes leave then, ya party pooper meanies/oversensitive politically correct ninnies/feminazis. Because LIBERTY.

Habermas would be so proud.

WTH, people? Did I miss something about the American planning academy deciding to turn itself into 4chan while I was off reading a book or something? Huh? YOU KIDS DON’T MAKE ME TURN THIS CAR AROUND.

Rulez

There have been many public goodbyes to the list, including good citizens who are much less likely than I am to use their middle finger to explain things. I regret my public exit–I should have just left rather than upsetting people–but this time, it’s good for the “it’s our party, you shaddup” crowd to come face-to-face with the reality of the Thing, and the Thing is: it’s not your party anymore. You don’t get to set the terms of the discussion if you aren’t going to treat other scholars with respect. The rest of us really, truly, would rather respect each other, and you know, talk about planning research. And there are a lot of the rest of us.

A big bunch of us were not happy with the way the PAB tried to back-door dismantle the language around diversity in planning education standards because wow, apparently, diversity is controversial instead of what it is (aka, the very least planning should do in the justice realm). And now a big bunch of people seem to be saying that we’re done with the Old Skool term-setting on PLANET.

Haterz

Virtually all moderated listservs are boring, but I’m ready for content-oriented boring. The planning academy has, for too long, allowed itself to be an ad hoc field more centered on maintaining status hierarchies in the academy (and out) than helping young scholars–all of them, every single one of them, not just your little favorites who look just like you and talk just like you and defer to you, but all of ’em, even the ones that think you are wrong sometimes. We’re also supposed to be here for students to help them form and act on their visions to make cities better.

Being unwilling or unable to do those things in favor of status quo maintenance? That’s a sign of an intellectually moribund field.

Planners have got real work to do. The real problems in US cities are almost too terrifying for me to think about: our mass incarceration/public execution system that is killing Black Americans would be a good place to start any list of “things we should think about and work on” together. We got people trying to pass “no infill/no bike lanes” legislation. We don’t solve these problems by telling jokes that degrade each other or by bullying people when they try to tell you what’s wrong.

We solve them, I think, by creating a big, inclusive, powerful coalition of people who listen to each other, treat each other well, and who use our energies to do some good, at least, in a rotten world.

Gabriel Rossman explains how to review an academic journal article

Lisa Schweitzer

….and not be a jerk about it, making the manuscript worse. Go read it.

So many times, reviewers make papers worse. Yep. I know we’re all supposed to walk around and talk about how peer review improves the process, but I have had that happen only once or twice, and it wasn’t the time that one of my reviewers broke anonymity and discussed the process in a high profile piece in an APA platform. I understand why reviewers, like this guy, like to take credit for the contribution. Reviewing is a lot of work, but honestly, the paper did not really improve much: by “improvement” he meant (a) “after round after round of reviews, the paper focussed on an issue I wanted it to instead of what the author wanted to discuss” and (b) “I forced the author to use the method I wanted.” As it is (a) was fine–I published the other material elsewhere, but (b) sucked because I had to torture the data to use his method, and the results are much harder to interpret than if we’d just stuck with a simpler method that accomplished everything it needed to. Why run a multi-level regression to establish correlation? Gaaaah.

I gave in. Why? I needed a paper in JAPA, and it was clear that the reviewers–all of whom were obvious even before the one broke his anonymity—-were in love with their own ideas, had a stranglehold on the paper, and I was doing a hostage negotiation, not a revision.

I’m excited to see how creating a dialogue around a manuscript might work. In a discussion-based format, I probably would have had another methodologist back me up to be able to say to this reviewer: “Hey, she’s right, she’s not doing a causal analysis, she’s just looking for a correlation.” (It was an exposure study; I don’t have to prove what’s causing the exposure, only that there ARE differing levels of exposure.)

George Washington and the unfinished room

Lisa Schweitzer

Last night, USC kicked off its first lecture in a series of lectures to promote its partnership to create the Fred W. Smith Library at Mount Vernon about President Washington. It was a delightful evening; Kevin Starr gave the first lecture, and while he admitted he is not a colonial specialist, he has such a rich, deep baritone that he could just read anything to me and I would be happy to listen. However, at one point during the conversation, one historian noted that Washington started to build an addition to Mount Vernon at the beginning of the war. He didn’t finish it for 10 years.

I feel somewhat less guilty about how long it’s taking me to renovate my bathroom.

(Ok, well, yes, he led a revolution, helped start a country, and had no power tools, but I’m kind of busy, too.)

Poster sessions annoy me….

Lisa Schweitzer

There is, as far as I am concerned, no bigger racket than academic conferences. You have no choice but to attend them when you are just starting the profession, as a graduate student and as an assistant professor, when you really don’t have the money to travel. Most universities, controlled by state governments where Republicans have decided that state workers should be able to live on $0.18 a day when they are not being flogged in the stocks in the public square for being a taker, give very little travel money–usually about $1000 a year.  Given that most conferences’ registration fees run between $400 and $1000, you wind up paying  for travel to conferences out of your own pocket–a pocket that doesn’t have any money in it at that stage of your career.

So my student emailed me this morning to tell me his abstract has been assigned to a poster session for the upcoming AESOP/ACSP conference. I get why they went that route for some of their sessions.  They get lots of abstracts, and if they turn people down, then that’s cash they don’t get.  So they just accept a bunch of abstracts and fill rooms with a herds of people, take their money, but  actually given them very little of the podium time/exposure that young academics pay to go to conferences for.  (We tell ourselves it’s to improve our work. I can count on one hand in 10 years of conference-going how many times I’ve had anybody say anything that furthers the research. )

Mostly, though, the reason posters suck is that they add considerably to the cost of conference attendance, which, as I pointed out, you’re already mostly paying for yourself anyway. Full-size posters cost you at least $200 to print, they are hard to take on the plane, and then when you get home you have great useless poster you don’t really want to throw away (because it cost $200!) but it really has little use for anything else.  It’s one thing if you are a consultant and go to conference after conference drumming up business.  But academics aren’t like that, and while posters are standard in many science fields (where it is possible to use the poster for more than one conference), with ACSP, this just winds up adding to the cost of the conference onto attendees while collecting full registrations from them.

TRB a few years ago started with the poster stuff, and they rather prove out what happens when an organization becomes entirely undisciplined about it. They have poster session after poster session, scraping in registration fees–and the conference is far less useful to young academics than it was when I was starting out.

Organizations less willing to screw over participants would give them a choice up-front when you submit:  a) I am or b) I am not willing to give a poster session, and then, if one is slotted into a poster session, you should get a break with a somewhat lower registration fee to deal with the extra costs.  The former would save them dealing with withdrawals like me–if they tell me they are putting me in a poster session, I just don’t go, and it would useful for organizations to know that up front.  I’d rather they just reject the abstract up front. (And before anybody screams at me, I can’t handle the social interaction of poster session due to anxiety related to my Asperger’s.  I’ve trained myself to deal with presentations. I’ve never been able to manage the parties and/poster sessions.)

But if taxpayers aren’t really paying much into public education, why do they get to have much say at all?

Lisa Schweitzer

There is much about this article in this Huffington Post article about Texas higher education that makes me question the current politics of public education. It’s the usual fare from the right: universities are too expensive, there’s too much time spent on research instead of teaching our kiddies to be engineers and business people, yada. Universities are anachronistic parasites, blah blah blah, and thus the university needs to cleaned up, made more efficient, and made more accountable to the taxpayer.

The point in that which makes me raise my eyebrow:

Thirty years ago, Texas taxpayers funded more than half the university budget. This year, the state contributes about 13 percent, or $295 million.

It sounds to me like the university is not the anachronism here. What is actually anachronistic here is disproportionate taxpayer oversight of institutions for which they are marginal sources of capital. Under these circumstances, is it any wonder that taxpayer priorities for higher education mean little in the institutions’ calculus? I hate to be rude about this, but in a state like Texas, $295 million could be made up from endowments in very short time. Perhaps it is time for UT to go private to protect itself from being political fodder for weak politicians like Perry.

JAPA’s Problems and The Invisible Art of the Edit

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

We’re having a bit of a tussle in planning with our flagship journal. The current editor is my former advisor. I love the guy, and that’s all there is to it. He’s produced some very fine special issues of the journal, for all the criticism.

It comes up rather routinely in journals for all the durm and strang going on about JAPA at the moment; somebody who is a marvelous scholar in his or her own right takes over the editorship of a journal and winds up not necessarily suited to the role in various ways. That’s because editing isn’t a simple matter of being the best scholar in the room, or having good taste. It’s also a matter of organization and directness.

All that said, disorganized editors can hurt younger scholars. No, your promotion case shouldn’t come down to the one paper you are trying to place in one journal. But if that journal is important, there are consequences if the journal goes into disarray at the wrong time for you, as has happened for me here at JAPA. My senior colleagues with their close association with JAPA have convinced our Dean that JAPA is the premier journal in planning, at least for American scholars. It probably is. But now that USC is big into the prestige game, my promotion to full hinges on getting things into JAPA. Now, I haven’t even managed to get my stuff reviewed at JAPA after years waiting. I may have already damaged my chances at promotion by allowing my stuff to languish at JAPA. I know better than to do this, and yet I did it anyway simply because JAPA is so important to promotion here. And let’s face it: even when you are old and have been in the harness for awhile, you still hope your advisor approves of your work. At least I do. A weakness I should have outgrown, perhaps, but one of many I possess anyway.

I just finished Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker: The Invisible Art of the Edit by Ved Mehta, a memoir of Mehta’s time working as a staff writer under William Shawn. I suspect the book is most valued for the New Yorker gossip, but for me, the most interesting parts of the book came down just how extraordinary Mr. Shawn was as an editor: Uniquely supportive, attentive to detail, with a visionary eye for what types of long pieces would capture an audience and a republican interest in creating valuable content. He had a staff full of people to make it work; most scholarly editors do not.

In reading through the book, it occurred to me that JAPA’s previous editors, David Sawicki and Amy Helling from Georgia Tech, really were exemplary even if I could argue with David, in particular, about his attitudes towards certain types of qualitative work. I was a probationary faculty at the time, and David was infuriatingly direct, but quite nurturing in his own rough way. He said “This is not good, here’s why, send me something else” and “This doesn’t work for JAPA; it’s too technical/narrow/specialized for the audience” to me more times than I care to relive. Why? Well, because the material wasn’t good, and I was missing the audience, that’s why. Journals are where scholars keep learning after they finish their dissertation. Tom Daniels once referred to journals, rather dismissively, as “a training ground for junior faculty.” The phrase stuck with me at first because of the dismissiveness and now because of its insight. Journals are training grounds. David Sawicki, for all the “no” that I got from that guy, was teaching me how to write for the journal by showing me where I was missing in my attempts.

This nurturing represents an incredible generosity to the scholars that you edit.

Amy Helling, the managing editor, was even more wonderful. When I finally did get something past David and into the pipeline, Helling managed the process brilliantly, fact-checking and challenging points that didn’t make sense, catching typos and even–do you know how rare this is?–catching a typo in the regression tables. She kept things transparent and professional–a breath of fresh air in the academy where things are often neither.

I hope the kerfuffle around JAPA dies down soon and everybody gets their papers published somewhere.

Todd Pettigrew mansplains how women in the academy should choose their choice

Lisa Schweitzer

Attention conservation notice: Don’t lecture women on their choices based on cheap shots and self-aggrandizing stories about your own experiences.

Two of my brilliant students, Eli Glazer and Alejandro Sanchez-Lopez, tweeted this post to my attention. It’s by Todd Pettigrew, in Macleans Higher Ed. Why do people write these things? Since Eli and Alejandro are two of my favorites, I’ll dissect it, even though it’s so flimsy it does not deserve the attention. There, Dr. Pettigrew, are some clicks for you. Enjoy.

First of all, the issue: women on the tenure track balancing career and family.

I am often hard on my colleagues who are good demanding things for themselves because of caregiving concerns, but who never ever think that their demands should be made generally of the institution, for all people working there, from the janitors to the provost. If I hear one more comment on “Can female professors/other privileged occupations have it all?” I am going to barf/start smacking people upside the head. For one thing, it suggests that work and children are “all” and that women who don’t have both are lacking in one or the other, and why don’t we all just back up and let women and their partners and their families decide what “all” is for them and try to help them attain their goals? That strikes me as cool.

And second, nobody is asking the women cleaning toilets if they can have it all. I’m happy to worry about the problems of women on the tenure track, but only so far that I worry about the problem of uncompensated caregiving work and its distribution between genders in general. People caring for terminally ill spouses and aging parents have caregiving work, too, and it takes time and energy and money, too, and they tend to get fewer workplace accommodations than parents of either gender do.

So I’m not automatically inclined to take up the cause of extending caregiving time and childcare benefits to parents on the tenure track, but I am inclined to do so for people in general. Kids are important to us all, just like caring for the sick or aged matters to us all. Period. People who need care (i.e., all of us, at some point) are part of society. They are ours–not just some women’s problem to deal with. Ours.

But my students, who have to deal with me picking on their lapses in reasoning all semester, are waiting to see a response to Pettigrew, and I am happy to oblige. Please never write stuff like this piece. If you do get a public forum for your ideas, please show humility, reason, and care. That’s your job as somebody who is trying to influence policy.

The first set of problems: 1) Pettigrew appears to have no idea what it’s like being a woman in male-dominated field in the academy; 2) he appears no have idea what things are like in science departments; 3) he probably has no clue what things are like at major research universities because he never appears to have been at one, except as a grad student. His willingness to speak to ‘academic women’ as a ‘progressive man’ begins from a position of basic ignorance about many things salient to the discussion. That is your first sign as a writer and a reasoner: if you must write about a topic that is way outside of your experience, go with humility first. Tread carefully. It’s not about political correctness. It’s about intellectual humility and the spirit of exploration. And not sounding like a tool.

Let’s break down the argument, point by point.

Lousy/Borderline unethical argumentation alert #1: Distorting the original argument for your own ends.

A recent article in University Affairs, for instance, reports on a study by Shelley Adamo who argues that women are underrepresented as biologists because they tend to be seeking jobs when they “are in their late 20s and early 30s and more likely to have a partner and young children. ‘That sort of handicaps them,’” according to Dr. Adamo.

First, as a married man I resent the claim that a husband or other life partner inevitably “handicaps” the career of a female academic. If your special someone doesn’t think your career is important, then find someone who does. And what about the life partners who support their academic spouses by paying the bills while their partner is burning the midnight oil?

How did “…that sort of handicaps them” turn into a claim that it “inevitably handicaps” anything?

That distorted framing–which is a form of audience manipulation–starts from the headline onward. “Academic women should stop blaming their children” is designed, pure and simple, as click-bait. The women in the original study are talking about the issues that arise for them in their roles working between career and children. If they blame anything, it’s the academy’s inflexibility, childcare provision scarcity, and a broad misunderstanding/denigration of the time and energy that caregiving takes. Nobody’s blaming the innocent widdle kiddies, although it helps Dr. Pettigrew construct a moral highground–for the children I speak!–atop a straw man–or straw child in this case.

Lousy argumentation alert #2–Personalizing something not about you. “I resent the idea…”

We should all be worried that he resents the idea…. Of course, he is distorting the ideas specifically so that he can resent something, but we should all be concerned about his feelings about something that was never said or even seriously implied rather than waste our time worrying about the issues/arguments/ideas concerning caregiving work.

Lousy argumentation alert #3–The Facile Contradiction

Next up: the assertion about the supportive partners. Sure, we all know supportive partners exist; I’m even fortunate enough to have one. Isn’t that clever of me?

But that is cheap argumentation 101: find a contradiction to a claim and then act like that contradiction proves something. But without evidence, we can’t tell if the contradiction reflects the prevailing trend (i.e. most people have supportive spouses) or whether this is a man-bites-dog contradiction (it happens, but it is not particularly illustrative of social life).

The contradiction may prove nothing for all we really know, but it does superficially reassure us that if a guy takes out the trash or holds down a job, women don’t need childcare or extra help attaining career success. See what I did there? Woo! I, too, can distort arguments and imply they are wrong, deeply wrong by contradicting something that was never claimed in the first place.

Of course partners can play a supportive role; relationships are mix of give and take. But even supportive spouses can add complications to the highly specialized, and often narrow, chances for academic careers and fieldwork. When you have more people to accommodate in your career move, fieldwork, and schedule, the accommodations become more constraining. It’s hard to drop your family and go do fieldwork in Indonesia for 6 months; it’s probably even harder to take them with you. Certainly people do it, and certainly it affects parents and scholars of both genders. That’s why we should grapple with the concerns that caregivers have in general, not just lecture women (or anybody) about choices.

Oh, and just get yourself a partner that supports what you do, why doncha? It’s all so easy. Make your whole life fit the academic world, lest ye or anybody start questioning academia or the way academic institutions treat people. If some partner of yours doesn’t immediately fall in line with your career or has needs of their own, ditch ’em. Trade up.

Lousy argumentation alert #4: Remove the nuance from a set of ideas, then distort those ideas, for your own rhetorical convenience. This one is really a work of art.

As for children, there are, to some extent, biological realities that would put extra strain on any woman trying to get to the forefront of her field. Still, feminists have been hammering the point home for over a generation now: women control their own bodies and should be able to choose whether or not to have children. But if that’s the case, then women can’t blame children for lack of academic success. If it’s a choice, then women have the choice not to have children if they don’t like the implications for their careers.

Biological realities that would put extra strain? To some extent? I don’t know what he meant to convey by that, so let’s skip it. Then he goes on to hoisting feminists on their own petard of choice! Devastating!

Only, again–he’s taken a grossly unfair read of what many feminists have argued. Feminists in reality are a diverse bunch and hold a wide range of positions on the body and birth control, but since that doesn’t serve his argument, he just flattens out what those “feminists” say for his rhetorical convenience.

And talk abut distorting an argument for self-serving reasons. I’m pretty sure what those hammering (oh, rhymes with yammering) feminists did not mean that women need to be able to control their reproduction so that it suits institutions. Yes, by gum, those institutions are so darned swell, we should expect women to make their choices to fit those institutions–not expect those institutions to evolve in pro-social, pro-family ways that would help parents of both genders manage their work and family roles. THAT’S JUST CRAZY. Choose, women, choose. CHOOSE YOUR CHOICE, women; you may have only one role! Men, carry on as you do, not having to make these choices because there are no career implications for you. (Only there probably are if you aren’t a crap caregiver, no matter what your gender.) Aren’t men swell for not whining or blaming their children in this situation?

This, from “a progressive man”? Does his dictionary have a different meaning for the word “progressive” than mine? Is there an obscure definition where progressive means assuming that maintaining existing institutional practices and cultures matter more than social inclusion?

Lousy Argumentation alert #5: The just-so story about oneself used as evidence, with straight-up misogyny mixed in

But what gets me is the way Fullick slips children into the mix of things that just happen to unsuspecting candidates: “Personal events can intervene, such as the birth of a child.” By the time a woman reaches graduate school, I expect that she understands the various mechanisms around pregnancy. Forgive me, then, but the birth of a child does not intervene. If you choose to have a baby while a graduate student, that’s your choice.

First, the misogyny. Note how he implies single responsibility for pregnancy to women: “by the time a woman reaches graduate school, I expect that she understands the various mechanisms…” Women, this is all on you. Having a child is not a family thing, a decision made in family and social contexts. It’s you and you alone. Those of us who advocate for women’s rights to choose also understand that partners and families have a stake in those choices, btw. What entitlements that stake grants is contested, fine, but women are not baby factories with on and off switches just because they have choices.

He does have a point about the passive language in the original text, but he once again overblows the passivity and amplifies for his own self-interested ends to score some cheap points rather than actually making an argument.

Yes, graduate students of both genders do know where babies come from, but what does that prove, again? Just because you know where babies come from, and you can use birth control to set the timing does not mean you are free to dictate the exact, proper, conditions for when childbearing come together in your life. Waiting for a “good time to have children” strikes me as a luxury–some people have it, other people do not. I suspect parents try to do the best they can. I worked a demanding job before graduate school that precluded kids: if I had said “no kids until tenure” we would have started trying when I was 39. Risks for maternal and child health go up by a lot by that age; check the numbers. So then….that’s my choice had I wanted children in Pettigrew’s framing? All so no university ever has to be bothered with coming up with ideas and practices that help out workers who have children?

So that we can understand how the pros do the baby factory on/baby factory off, Dr. Pettigrew does give us an instructional, just-so story about his own prudence:

When I was a graduate student, my partner and I discussed it seriously and decided against it. No child intervened. And we didn’t get lucky. We decided.

Never mistake your preferences or your experiences for evidence in argumentation. Dr. Pettigrew does both here.

How is HIS personal experience illustrative of anything other than a willingness to argue from an N of 1? Good job making the choice that worked for you. We’re all so glad for you. I guess this means you’re absolved from accommodating people who make different choices than you? How does that work in a cosmopolitan community amongst ‘progressives’?

Finally, it’s clear from Dr. Pettigrew’s tone and his cv that he has no idea what the work expectations are for women in science or at major research universities. Resources for parents and kids are likely to vary substantially by university context, along with work expectations.

Pettigrew is an associate professor at Cape Breton University in Nova Scotia. He has no idea what a young parent starting out in biology or any other science at a place like USC or Columbia is up against. I’m sure he had high teaching expectations placed on him–but I have no way of judging whether that’s easier or harder than what we had to go through to get tenure at USC.

And neither does he. He’s just willing to presume he does my know my life, and the lives of women in the academy more generally. That’s the art of the mansplain.

Bits of fluff in the ear and everything else you should know about college teaching from Pooh

Lisa Schweitzer

I chanced upon this lovely piece of writing this morning from Book Riot by their contributor, dr b.: Everything I Needed to Know About Teaching, I Learned From Winne-the-Pooh. It is a lovely essay, with advice from a precocious instructor. She’s only two years in! It took me years and years to even even remotely begin to show this level of insight about teaching.

My favorites:

If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.

I feel it’s my job to pick out the very best, most interesting, and most useful things to do in a given topic during a given semester. But some students just have things they would rather do than my class. It happens.

There is also lovely writing advice:


When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

Like many students, I have ruined a lot of really good ideas by trying to write them down.

Sherlock Holmes, Irene Adler and what they teach us about judging your own work

Lisa Schweitzer2 Comments

One of the mentors I try to emulate is Lois Takahashi, without whom I would not have succeeded in getting my PhD at UCLA. Lois is one of those immensely gifted mentors who never misled you, but she was always, always on your side, trying to help you. It is an uncommonly generous thing to do, as PhD students can take up a great deal of time.

Of the many brilliant things she said to me (one of many brilliant things): “We are never the best judges of our own work.” It made sense at the time, and it’s one of those bits of advice you get that you never forget, and it makes more and more sense as time goes on. The review process makes a lot more sense when you look at it that way, combined with a gladiatorial commitment to getting your stuff out there.

For fun I have been reading Michael Dirda’s, On Conan Doyle, a lovely book that discusses Conan Doyle’s entire corpus. Neil Gaiman’s blurb says it so well: “Imagine having an unbelievably well-read friend, who likes the same stuff that you do but is able to articulate why he loves it so much better than you can.” Spot on. It’s been a delightful read.

But, sure enough, Dirda reports that Conan Doyle’s favorite novel of his own was the deservedly obscure The White Company, a tedious book that I gave up on years ago. Like many of his Victorian contemporaries, he believed that that moral instruction could build society for the better–a necessity for the republic. In The White Company, his intention is good, but he doesn’t have Joseph Conrad’s gifts that allow for the making of A Heart of Darkness. His Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, Conan Doyle thought, were mere pastimes.

They are nothing of the sort. Many crime novels have a strong moral core of wrongdoing and justice, obviously, but in Holmes and Watson both you can see the embodiment of the Victorian virtues of manliness (Watson–service to country, loyalty, physical dynamism) and modern Enlightenment thought (Holmes–rationality, scientific observation, deductive reasoning). In A Scandal in Bohemia–which Dirda rightly calls a masterpiece–Holmes shows us, like Dickens, the corruption of the aristocracy in the thoughtless, self-deceiving privilege demonstrated by the King of Bohemia in believing the magnificent Irene Adler is beneath him.

It’s apparent that Conan Doyle was such an essential story-teller at his core that his sense of moral order and decency came through even when he thought he was simply entertaining. Intention perhaps matters less than just doing the work; your essential vision shows through in the work.