At 11:50 AM 12/12/99 -1000, E.L. Lady wrote:
>Many of us remember that the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon
>once said, "90% of science fiction is crap.  But then 90% of anything is
>crap."  In the case of academic work, I think that that estimate is much
>too low.
 
Too low, probably.  But lay the stress on *everything*, modify it by the word
"contemporary", and you've got some real wisdom.  The only collections of
human creative output in which 90% is *not* crap are those whose practitioners
are pretty well all dead: Victorian novels, German Romantic symphonies,
Roman histories, 60s pop music.  Time weeds out the crap pretty effectively.
 
I don't observe that the poportion of dross to gold is higher in the output
of academics than in other areas of human endeavor. -Tim