Jeffrey Williams, editor of the minnesota review, will be speaking here next week, and so I was poking around looking at both his work and the journal he edits. In doing so, I ran across his fairly recent essay in that publication, entitled, simply, "Smart".

In it, he argues that this term "smart" has become the marker of merit and disctinction in the profession, growing out of earlier terms like "sound," "intelligent," and "rigor," and parallel to "excellence" that empty term famously exposed by Bill Readings' The Unviersity in Ruins. These are all terms that are still in operation today, to be sure, but none with the ring of finality, authority, that being deemed "smart" currently holds--an argument can be rigorous, for example, but plodding, banal. But if it's smart, brilliant even, we can forgive a bit of sloppy scholarship here or there in deference to the gleaming kernel of smartness that can, in due course, or with sufficient revision, or a bit more research, could, in theory easily support.

For Williams, this is not merely the innate quality that we often like to think of ourselves as possessing, the one that distinguished us in grade school from both the lower performers who beat us up, or even the similarly high performers who were likely to put the brains to the service of something as crass as financial gain. It relies on a kind of "life of the mind" purity, and Williams notes (rightly, I think) the degree to which this sort of purity smacks of the same kind of class distinctions made by many pre-Marx writers.

"In short," Williams argues, "'smart' resides at the intersection of class and merit, or rather of merit and its dissolve into class." I recall a blogospheric discussion of academic class from not long ago, and this essay clearly dovetails with that discussion, one where I am always ambivalent in gauging the ways that my own conduct and aspirations place me.

But I am also interested in what other terms we might come to use as a standard of valuation (for it seems like we will always find use for one). I myself have found myself turning to ethics as a source of personal and professional valuation, although I cannot seem to abandon my attachment to my own perceived smartness, and my anxieties that I might not have enough of it, in comparison to my peers--an academic penis envy if I've ever heard of one. What other terms do you favor? What distinguishes a colleague or a student if not "smartness"?