if someone asks me what i’m doing in lab and i explain a little bit of maxwell’s vortex hypothesis, nobody expects to understand the whole thing. you have to have some foundational knowledge of calculus and electromagnetism, and you need to study faraday’s experimental data; without those, i can give you a summary of maxwell but i can’t possibly make you understand the whole thing. that’s not a failing on my part, your part, or maxwell’s. it’s just how it goes when someone produces a paper in a specialized field, and people generally accept that.

if someone asks me what i’m writing my annual essay on and i say it’s about spinoza’s conception of god as explicated through nature, suddenly i’ll get people who expect that either the entire thing needs to be stated in fifth-grade vocab terms, in which case they’ll shit on the entire field of philosophy for being easy, or i’m being inaccessible and elitist, in which case they’ll shit on the entire field of philosophy for being pretentious and esoteric. it’s striking, actually, the extent to which people have different expectations of subjects i’m in fact studying simultaneously in an interdisciplinary program.

there are plenty of academics who overuse jargon, whose writing is genuinely unintelligible and needlessly convoluted, and who i would like to punch in the face. but the solution to that problem is not to make blanket statements about how knowledge must always be accessible to people outside the field. and even when people do make those statements they never mean them. what they mean is that they think humanities are essentially lower and dumber than hard sciences and that the way students discuss them should reflect that.