Academics Anonymous: A Meditation on Anonymity, Power, and Powerlessness

Surely one of the most peculiar characteristics of academia is the practice of anonymous peer review. Within the other professions, evaluation comes over a signature: the corporate supervisor keeps or fires the employee, the judge rules on the more persuasive of the arguments made by two lawyers, the standards and ethics board decides whether the doctor may keep practicing. In many academic circumstances, though—including tenure and promotion reviews, evaluations of manuscripts for journals and presses, and screening of grant applications—the person being judged has a name, while the judges remain anonymous. Rarely, the dynamic is reversed, as in PMLA’s “blind submission” policy, ensuring that evaluators of articles submitted to the journal do not know the name, rank, or institution of the author. At the pinnacle of the academic star system, the late 1980s, blind submission raised the ire of Stanley Fish because (as he argued in his 1988 PMLA guest column, “No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission”) all utterances are situated and authority inheres in identity. His piece inspired half a dozen rejoinders in PMLA in 1989, but since that time, scholarly journals in literary and cultural studies have not had much to say on the topic of academic anonymity. The question of the value of academic anonymity still persists, though. What is at stake with academic anonymity is power: he or she who remains unnamed always has the upper hand.

Anonymity outside academia sometimes connotes not power, but powerlessness. I propose in this paper to consider the principle of anonymity as it is laid out in the discourse of twelve-step programs, particularly in the “Big Book” and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, with the purpose of analyzing the respective roles anonymity plays in the process of achieving and maintaining sobriety, on the one hand, and academic success on the other. In the context of A.A., anonymity, “the spiritual foundation” of the program, is associated with “sacrifice” and “humility” (Alcoholics Anonymous 1952, 180, 187). Namelessness is the vehicle for placing “principles before personalities” (184). Central to the fundamentally anarchic structure of twelve-step programs, anonymity reduces every program member’s identity to “. . . and I’m an alcoholic,” thereby attempting to blur distinctions of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationality, celebrity, and institutional authority in the interest of promoting a “group conscience” over anyone’s individual will or personal power (132).

Academia lives by a set of received narratives about merit, academic freedom, and authority. Anonymity plays a distinctive role in those stories. But what would happen if the narrative of academic success were remapped to prioritize “principles over personalities”? And how might the twelve-step erasure of identity categories be useful in thinking about the dynamics of institutional power in our post-identity-politics moment?

Anonymity in A.A.: The “Spiritual Foundation”

Alcoholics Anonymous is unusual for an institution of its size, in that it is so loosely organized. While a General Services Office in New York City functions to disseminate information, organize conferences, and produce publications for groups and members to use in common, no one in Alcoholics Anonymous is in charge. Not only are the individual groups officially nonhierarchical, they are practically anarchic. That is not to say they are necessarily chaotic, however, at least not if they follow the Twelve Traditions that come along with the Twelve Steps. As the saying goes, the steps are for “individual recovery,” while the traditions are for “group unity.” The traditions insist that a group conscience must guide the actions of each individual group, while each group functions autonomously from all others (146). The group conscience is usually determined in business meetings where decisions are made either by consensus or majority vote. Any alcoholic in recovery can be a member; no individual person has greater authority than any other person, and no one is supposed to make executive decisions for the group. Tradition Two puts it bluntly: “For our group purpose there is but one ultimate authority—a loving God as He may express Himself in our group conscience” (132). Some groups de-gender the...